Nanaimo Girl by Prudence Emery

Author:Prudence Emery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography and Autobiography
Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc.
Published: 2020-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

A Career Change

Nanaimo Girl Goes to the Movies

FORLTUNATELY FOR ME, I never did take a permanent job again, as the feature film industry in the country began to boom — more in Montreal than in Toronto at that time. A beneficial tax deduction brought Canadian producers, who’d never worked in film before, out of the woodwork. Over the next thirty years I worked on 120 pictures that took me around the world: Canada, the U.S., Israel, Hungary, France, China, Mexico, Germany, Morocco, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

In 1975, I worked on my second film, Breaking Point, starring Bo Svenson, Robert Culp, and John Colicos. It was directed by Bob Clark and produced by Montrealer Claude Heroux.

The film gave me a taste of night shoots. On one occasion, I sat for four hours in Claude’s car off Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway waiting for a car to dive over a cliff — my first time witnessing a major stunt. I was so excited. But the reality didn’t match the excitement: the car flopped to the ground with a thunk at 3:00 a.m., and that was that!

These long night shoots eventually inspired me to coin the phrase “set lag,” the effects of which one would feel the next day.

I next worked with Claude’s brother, Denis Heroux, who directed The Uncanny in Montreal, starring the horror-film troupers Peter Cushing and Ray Milland along with Donald Pleasence, Samantha Eggar, and John Vernon. My path was to cross and criss-cross with some of the same actors over the years.

My breakthrough film is not one that is well known, but it had a major impact on my life. It was a film called Angela, which, in later years, would air on television stations at two in the morning when most people were asleep.

Landing the job on Angela was no easy feat, and I had my mother to thank for it. When I was visiting my parents in Victoria in 1976, my mum read in the local paper that Sophia Loren was going to be starring in a film shooting in British Columbia. I tracked down the global marketing and PR firm Rogers & Cowan, who were handling the film. I knew them from my Savoy days; they had a branch office in London. I phoned their Los Angeles office to talk to Dale Olson, who was handling the film, and made an appointment to meet him, which meant driving to California.

The 4,104-kilometre return road trip was worth it. Dale offered me the film.

Exhilarated at the thought of working with the world-famous Sophia Loren, I drove back to Victoria, where, a few days later, I was informed by the production manager that the shooting had been transferred to Montreal, 4,903 kilometres away. So, I hopped in my car again and set out.

When I arrived in Montreal to work on Angela, I discovered that the script, which previously had been a nineteenth-century period piece with an Oedipus Rex theme, was being updated to a contemporary time period.

Feature films are ponderous

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