Search for a great screenplay
Producer started career as a teacher, now makes award-winning films.
JWWETTE EDMONDS SPECIAL TO THE JEV/ISH BULLETIN
Local filmmaker Deboragh Gabler is not above aspiring to one or more Oscars, but for now she is thrilled to make do with her Emmys and Peabody Award.
The 40-something ("women don't talk about their age") member of West Vancouver's Har-EI community took home an impressive four Emmys last year for her film Bang, Bang You're Dead, a fast-paced treatment of violence in high schools. The film also won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, an honor that recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious service.
Gabler is happy to report that the film is now being used in education s>-stems, by students and parents alike, to spark discussions about rage and violence in the schools.
"I like doing family drama," said Gabler. "This was a post-Columbine film which came out when there were very few teaching tools to help people imder-stand where this rage was coming from, so I am very glad the movie is helping in this way."
Gabler and the production company she started seven years ago. Legacy Filmworks, have several projects on the go—a disaster movie, a teen thriller ("sort of a ghost story for teens"), a sitcom pilot and a made-for-televi-sion movie. Her office in North Vancouver's Lions Gate Studios has one wall lined with scripts for possible projects. With her constantly moving energy and enthusiasm, she projects 5ie image of someone with a lot of balls in the air. "As many as we can," she laughed.
Not bad for a Torontonian who started out as a school teacher. As a student, she got a part-time job with a neighbor cutting negatives, doing assistant editing and "all the post production things one docs as a junior in this business."
"Even as I was studying to be a sdiool teacher, I fell in love with the movie business, documentaries and commercials and being part of a team, and I got bitten by the bug and was obviously unable to recover from it.
"In those days, one did not choose film as a career path. It was not as developed as it is today. There were not that many schools that taught film and filmmaking," she said. "But I always loved theatre, the arts and stories. Story was my first love."
Soon, Gabler was working as a researcher and writer. She did
documentaries and then the company she worked for after giving up her three-year teaching career, got into drama. She was a script supervisor, then a director, then a production manager and then she just never looked back - film was her life.
Gabler was asked in the early 1990s to come out to Vancouver and start a trade union for film technicians, "which is still doing well to this day."
"When 1 came out here in the early '90s, the film industry was just really starting to get going. And the reason I was asked to come out was that productions were being turned away from Vancouver because there was a lack of qualified labor. So I was asked to come out and form a film technicians union. That was a kind of deviation firom my producing career, but it allowed me to go to LA., do the rounds, do cold calls and bring back business to Vancouver," she said.
"When I left the union, we had serviced four to five hundred million dollars in business, had 3,000 members and money in the bank. So when I left it in 1995,1 felt I had done a good job. But really, I just wanted to go back and make movies."
She decided to stay in Vancouver and started Legacy Film-works.
"I love Vancouver," she said. "I am in love with the Har-El community and I spend a fair amoumt of time in LA, which is close. I do the business of film there and come back here to make the movies. It seems to be a very good formula, to have one foot in LA- and the other here."
The business of making movies, she has foimd, has a lot to do with finding the money to make them. "My folks always said don't be a secretaiy and don't be a salesperson. So now I find myself in my life having to sell. I sell myself to the bank, I sell the package to investors, I sell the project to get a director involved. I never realized how much that finding money is part of the producer's job," she laughed. "If s not just finding the great script and getting the director and the actors, but finding a way to finance it all. Ninety per cent of the job is finding the money!"
Deboragh Gabler
Gabler pointed at the shelves and shelves of scripts and lamented that the hardest part is finding a good one. "Somewhere, we have to find a kernel of gold in a whole haystack of paper. Part of my greatest fiiistra-tion in life is finding a great screenplay."
She looks for a work that makes her come away both laughing and crying, something that has a timelessness to it and which can "touch you intuitively, not just with fear or emotion but on a deeper level." She said that is why Bang, Bang did so well, it touched a deeper chord.
As for her future, she just wants to make great stories come to life. "I am not afirud of aspiring to an Oscar or two, but I tWnk greatness comes from trying to create a vision of something that is going to make a change or do someiMng good, inspire someone. That is what we do here. We come up wdth ideas and make them come to life."
In the meantime, Gabler is enjoying life in West Vancouver and is active on the board of Har-El, developing a membership guide for them. Stic will continue to jug-^c projects—and questions about her age.
"It is terrible that experience holds no water and all that is important is how hip, how young, [how] fresh you are," she said about the film industry. "It's the beauty and youth syndrome."
Never mind, with all her energy and enthusiasm, she doesn't seem a day over 30. She laughed as she ran off to take yet another phone call. Can Oscar be far behind? □
Israeli docs recognized
Checkpoint, No. /Zand/4r/7a^OTto are winners.
Among the awards given for the 2004 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, several Israeli films received honors. Cameron Bailey, one of Canada's leading film critics, hosted the April 30 awards presentation at Toronto's Isabel Bader Theatre.
Capturing the award for best feature-length Canadian documentary was director Sarah Goodman's Army of One, a look at three young people who join the U.S. army and discover that conforming to militaiy values demands a high price. Along with the award, Goodman was presented with a cash prize of $5,000 courtesy of the Documentary Organization of Canada.
Israeli director Yoav Shamir picked up the award for best international documentary feature with Checkpoint, about the often-charged interactions of Israeli soldiers with Palestinians. The jury also acknowledged two especially strong films: Danish director Anders Hogsbro Ostcrgaard's Tintin and I and Israeli directors David Ofek and Ron Rotem's No. 17.
The FIPRESCI Award for best first documentaiy feature was given to Attui's Children by Juliano Mer Khamis and Dannicl Danniel. Ama is an Israeli woman who runs a small theatre group for Palestinian children. Director Khamis, her son, returns to Jenin years later and learns that many of Ama's "children" have joined the struggle for Palestinian independence.
In a separate event, the 2004 Audience Award was given to Death in Gaza, the story of a group of Palestinian yoimgsters maturing in a world where the greatest glory is to die a martyr - it is a story that filmmaker James Miller gave his life to tell. In May 2003, Miller travelled with reporter Saira Shah to track the lives of these kids. During the filming. Miller was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. Other winners in the audience favorite category included Ania's Children.
The Hot Docs Audience Award is compiled from ballots assembled at all festival screenings. Audience members are invited to vote for the films they have screened on a scale of one to five, the votes are then averaged to come to a vote for the film most widely enjoyed by its viewers.
Hot Docs includes CTV, History Television, Telefilm Canada, Rogers and the Documentaiy Charmel as presenting partners. Next year's festival nms from April 22 to May 1,2005. For more information, visit www.hotdocs.ca. □
- Courtesy of Hot Docs documentary festival
MyAtchitect opening
Nathaniel Kahn tries to discover who his father was.
Anominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature. My Architect follows vnriter/director Nathaniel Kahn -the illegitimate son of a legendary architect - in his five-year quest to understand his long-dead father. The film opens in Vancouver theatres May 28.
Many historians consider Louis (Lou) Kahn to be the most influential architect of his generation but, in 1974, when he died in New York's Penn Station, he was greatly in debt, and his body lay imidentified for three days. His obituary named a wife and daughter. It turned out he also had a daughter and son, with two mistresses. Although all three families hved in Philadelphia, their lives crossed for the first time at his fimeral. His son, Nathaniel Kahn, who was 11 at the time, set out some 25 years later to make a documentary.
Lou Kahn was a Jewish immigrant who grew up poor in Philadelphia. He was left facially disfigured by a childhood accident. Nathaniel Kahn finds out more through interviews with his father's peers (celebrated architects like I.M. Pei, Frank Gchiy and PhiUp Johnson), his mistresses, his daughters, his relatives and even local cabbies. But perhaps it is thraugh tbe buildings that he really begins to understand his father.
Lou Kahn created a handful of masterpieces - among them the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Tex,; the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.; and the capital building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
My Architect is the first fcature-lengSi film by Nathaniel Kahn. It is being released in Canada by Mongrel Media.