Courtesy of Hollywood Suite
When the British actor Richard E. Grant snagged an Oscar nomination for his role as a dissolute gay hustler in the comedy-drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? last month, he and the film’s producers weren’t the only ones celebrating. In the tidy offices of the Canadian cable-TV service Hollywood Suite, programmers quietly patted themselves on the back, years of effort finally bearing fruit.
That’s because, a short time earlier, they had scored the rights to broadcast Withnail & I, the 1987 art-house hit that gave Grant his big break, as a would-be actor living in a cold-water Camden Town flat at the end of the 1960s who flees with his roommate for a comically disastrous weekend in the country. Although the film is a cult favourite, it’s not widely available – you can’t find it on iTunes in Canada or any of the popular streaming services – which made it a perfect pick-up for Hollywood Suite.
Launched in 2011, the service programs four channels of movies, focused on the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. (It also features some films made earlier – such as Gone with the Wind – and later, such as Moonlight.)
After the Oscar nominations came through, Hollywood Suite’s president, David Kines, and Ellen Baine, his vice-president of programming, scrambled the schedule of their eighties channel in order to capitalize on Grant’s moment in the sun. Withnail will now air Feb. 20 at 10:30 p.m. (ET). It will also be available via the service’s on-demand platforms as of Monday, Feb. 18. And, on the day before the Oscars, Grant will appear as a nominee on the Independent Spirit Awards, airing on the Hollywood Suite channel devoted to movies from the 2000s.
With thousands of hours of movie content available at our fingertips, how does a service such as Hollywood Suite – which subscribers choose on an á la carte basis and order from their cable companies for $5-$7 a month – survive? (Thrive, even: Kines says the service is profitable, with subscribers numbering “in the mid-six-figures.” The Globe and Mail could not independently confirm the figures.)
Sitting in a boardroom in the Hollywood Suite offices, in a converted house on the northern lip of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, Kines and Baine suggest that their service is aimed at viewers who may find the endless scroll of Netflix enervating.
“It’s the paradox of choice: When you’re faced with too much choice, you don’t make any choice,” Kines says. “Whereas, here, it’s just four channels. Pick one, you’re probably going to find something good.”
Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann in Withnail & I (1987).Courtesy of Hollywood Suite
Baine, who served for decades as the programming chief at Toronto’s Citytv, says that when Netflix offers up recommendations, “my feeling is, the algorithm picked these movies, or these series, for me – not that a person did. And, to me, that shows through. I don’t feel there’s somebody going, ‘Wow, this will be really great.’ Because a lot of it isn’t really great.”
Finding movies that are legally available for the service can take years, though.
“Film rights are carved up by platform and territory, and it can get very complicated,” Kines says, explaining that, as part of a tribute B-movie director George Romero, he and Baine have been trying to track down who owns the Canadian broadcast rights to his 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead.
“You would think it would be easy, but it isn’t,” Kines says. “We think we’ve found it with a company in Paris.”
A search for Sophie’s Choice and On Golden Pond, programmed for this spring, began with Universal Pictures, which had distributed the films to theatres in North America. After going down a series of rabbit holes, Baine says they found the rights belonged to the British film and TV studio ITV. “I don’t know why they had the rights to it, but they do.”
She adds that, some years ago, when MGM was short on cash, it sold off a number of its most renowned films to Warner Bros. “So, Warner Bros actually distributes Gone with the Wind – which is an MGM movie if there ever was one! Sometimes Warners doesn’t know that they have it, and MGM thinks that they have it, but they don’t.”
At least those Hollywood movies can be shown once they’re located. But too many Canadian films aren’t even available in an acceptable format for broadcast.
Baine says she recently tried to buy some films of Allan King, the late Canadian director behind such landmarks as Who Has Seen the Wind and the documentary Warrendale. “They’re owned by his estate, but none of them have been restored,” she said.
“If the film was on television, up until about five years ago, it was probably an SD pan-and-scan,” Kines says, referring to a standard definition transfer, formatted for an old-fashioned square-shaped TV screen. “To properly restore a film is $30,000 to $50,000” – far beyond the means of any Canadian rights-holder.
Lately, Kines says, a subscriber request started him on a hunt for The Grey Fox, Philip Borsos’s 1982 historical drama starring Richard Farnsworth as a U.S. train robber who shifts his trade to Canada. “Apparently, the film is sitting in the producer’s living room. He or she is waiting for a big offer. That’s what we hear.” He shrugs: In this business, who knows?
Simon Houpt