Producer's Notes - Dave and Me
January, 2008
Our paths crossed often but somehow never met.
Montreal is a small city, English Montreal even smaller, a village sort of. The first time we were introduced was an early spring morning, when Alec Macleod drove us to Quebec City. We were working on an NFB film on early famine-Irish immigration. Dave shamefully laughed, "Hey, I'm working for the government" - Quebec City, five days at Grosse Ile, over to Shannon, then down to Champlain Street. Since then, we both have spent time trying to figure out why we hadn't met at the places we both knew well - the Verdun Natatorium, the Centaur, or Logos, my old paper, where Dave was one of the few honest street-sellers (I was reminded that he actually brought money back at the end of the day) or even at Radio Centreville, where I seemed to have interviewed everyone, but never him.
Dave brought his typewriter to Quebec City (he has just recently embraced the computer) and preferred spending his evenings writing rather than eating at restaurants. He was annoyed when he was recognized as the talented writer he is, always feigning embarrassment when he would swear on camera. He traipsed over the burial ground on Grosse Ile and wandered through its quarantine infirmary, notebook and pen in hand, looking for detail. Were the Irish buried in coffins or were they just dumped in quicklime pits? Did the dedicated Dr. Douglas commit suicide? His son, the only person born on the island, went off to World War One, didn't he? This was the first time I heard him talk about the Great War.
Patrick Barnard mentioned that Dave's first book, Without a Parachute, had a WW1 scene on the back cover and Sally Nelson said that Dave had told her it was important to him because his grandfather was a vet, a victim of that war. I knew little about the war… something about some Archduke Ferdinand and trenches and gas, but not much else.
Alec and I went over to see Dave, a while back, to introduce him to the story of Reginald Fessenden, the great Canadian who invented radio. He got screwed by the system, went on to do a million other things, but finally got even though never recognized -- an oft-repeated Canadian story. Dave, like most others, had never heard of him, but he immediately devoured all the information we brought him and whatever else he could find. He read Fessenden's books, his wife's book, his invention patents, his bios, even scholarly theses on the works of this invisible inventor. He wrote Fessenden's Follies, a fanciful history of what he figured probably happened. He took the play to the Eastern Townships, to a theatre close to the place where Fessenden was born and he staged a benefit reading to promote a waning local community radio project. As Dave wrote in one of his many versions of the play: It was about "a guy I never heard of for an occasion that's never going to happen…" (Click here to download the program)
A few months later, we three decided this play needed to be presented again; this time in Montreal, for radio broadcast, on the 100th birthday of Fessenden's first program of December 24, 1906, Dave gathered the actors, rewrote the play for the umpteenth time and a Radio Centreville volunteer secured the oldest studio in Canada for the broadcast, the old RCA Victor facility in St. Henri. Patrick joined the cast as the host Announcer, a role he had honed for years at the CBC, and the package was complete. The broadcast was carried on some 50 community FM stations across Canada, the US and Scotland and countless streaming Internet sites, all on the anniversary. It was too good to be a coincidence… RCA was Fessenden's foe, community radio was what it was all about, and the only business donation came from the biggest commercial AM station in Montreal, a station that though they had, on occasion, interviewed David, made it clear to us that they had no interest in broadcasting the play.
Fessenden's Follies was a play with two main themes: the first was the invention of radio, and the other was about Fessenden's son getting fogged in WW1. Alec and Patrick wanted to make it into a movie, but that project is yet to come. We still need more material, more money, and a clearer story line.
In between, Dave was presenting Condoville (a very updated Balconville)
to Centaur audiences, and was again filling every seat. Shortly after
it closed, he told us that he was reading a new play he had just finished
at a gathering at his home, another play about WW1. We decided to film
it… but this new work was Dave at his best. It was compelling in
a far different way - it was a one-man show and it was all Dave's show.
We knew at that performance that Fessenden would have to wait for another
day because… it was time for Bolsheviki.