Sure glad this morning I don’t work for the CBC! But how tragic that the national broadcaster is such a toxic place for people who try to work seriously in the arts and the culture.
CBC has announced it has withdrawn its support for Prairie Giant, the Tommy Douglas movie of last spring. The family of Douglas’s rival Jimmy Gardiner doesn’t like the way he was portrayed. So pow, in about 30 seconds the bureaucrats cut and run and leave the film-makers swinging in the wind.
It’s a movie, damnit. It’s fiction. In fiction they make things up. If the CBC doesn’t understand that, it should not be in the business of broadcasting drama.
Of course the Jimmy Gardiner of Prairie Giant ain’t much like the Jimmy Gardiner of history. So what? As a hilarious series of letters in the New Yorker recently showed, its editor William Shawn was nothing like the movie character of the same name in the film Capote. Neither was Harper Lee, or for that matter Truman Capote. But they have not pulled the movie. It’s not, shall we say, a hanging matter. It’s a drama, a drama about making things up, and Prairie Giant is a drama about heroes and villains. Jeez, Opus Dei may be pretty weird, but if you don't realize it ain’t the Opus Dei of The Da Vinci Code, you are too naive to be allowed into the theatre.
Fiction’s only duty is to tell stories that feel true. Whether something is true or not, that’s non-fiction’s domain. If the people at the CBC can’t understand this long enough to stand behind a movie they have just run, they should resign. They should resign.
Where’s Mark Starowicz, Mr History at the CBC, on this?
Is there a right way to handle this kind of controversy? Sure. First, if the CBC wanted more historical verisimitude, it should have looked for it during the filming, not under pressure afterwards.
But more to the point: the answer to stories we don't like is alternate stories we like better. If we had a History Television channel worthy of the name in Canada, it would be running an instant doc tonight: Who was the real Jimmy Gardiner behind the CBC's movie villain? Fat chance.
