This past year has seen a screening of my first feature film, “Skip Tracer”, made in 1976. I’ve just been reminded of my work on the Saskatchewan Pavilion for Expo86, with Michael Walsh marking the 30 year anniversary of that great party. I’ve been to Cremona, Italy, to reclaim my beloved violin a full decade after it was destroyed in China and three years after it was returned to Maurizio Tadioli, its maker, for repairs. And now I’ve reconnected with Brian R.R. Hebb. Coming full circle.
Brian R.R. Hebb and I met when we were both office juniors working for CBC in Toronto. An office junior in the distribution department put the films into boxes and sent them out to stations. After two months I got a promotion – to Film Assistant 2. That meant my job was to rewind the film through my fingers to feel for broken sprocket holes, repair them using a hot splicer, clean the film and put it into a can, so that the office junior could put the can into a box and send it out to the station. The ladder to where I wanted to go seemed impossibly long. Not only that, I was on the wrong side of the organization. I wanted to be on set, making movies. But I was on the distribution side, and promotions would take me up the ladder to programming. I wanted to be a director.
Brian wanted to be a cameraman. He was also on the wrong side of the organization to get where he wanted to go. But we had initiative. We rented a camera, bought a few hundred foot rolls of 16mm reversal film. Brian did the camera work while I called the shots and we made a short film, a filler, about street cars. I cut the film on CBC editing equipment after hours, added music from the cleared music library, and we sold the finished film to CBC for a couple of hundred dollars, which was enough to clear our costs with maybe a bit extra. I was earning $49/week as a Film Assistant 2. Every little bit helped.
After a few months at CBC, I got a call from Richard Leiterman asking if I wanted to jump ship and work for Allan King as an assistant editor to Arla Saare. The salary would be a hundred and fifty dollars a week, three times what I was getting at CBC. I jumped. I still feel guilty about this, because I had promised the man who hired me at CBC that I would stay for at least a year. Sorry.
Outside of the CBC, my career path was spotty in the extreme, going from assistant editor to editor, buying a Nagra IV and becoming a sound man, all the time writing scripts and looking for a break and finally to director. That was over the course of six years. I heard that Brian also achieved his ambition, becoming one of the CBC staff cameramen, an amazing achievement. Then I heard that he had left the CBC and become a freelance director of photography. I remember thinking he had made a mistake. Having made it within the mother corp, he was now jumping into my world. I assumed he would find it as tough as I found it.
A lot of water went under the bridge. A couple of decades of ups and downs, employment and searching for work. Surviving.
In 1990 when NBC hired me to direct my second Movie for TV, “On Thin Ice, the Tai Babalonia Story.” they wanted me to hire their choice of DOP (Director of Photography), some guy named Brian Hebb. So there was a circle closing. One of the scenes in the TV movie called for playback of something on a television set in a motel room. I managed to get a video transfer of the short film we had made together twenty years earlier, and we used that on the TV in the scene.
Very recently I’ve reconnected with Brian. He now lives in Victoria, a mere two hours by car from our home in Nanaimo. Another circle closing.