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Wide Angle 21.2 (1999) 49-59


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O, Canada!
George Stoney's Challenge

Deirdre Boyle

[Figure]   [Figure]   [Figure 1]   [Figure 2]

In a career that has spanned continents and centuries, George Stoney has become a legend. Having researched his life to write a broad-strokes profile of him for The Independent in 1997 (see pp.10-18), I was curious to know more, especially about his two-year stint as executive producer of the Challenge for Change (CC) program at the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC). On his return to the States in 1970, Stoney went to New York University, where he co-founded the Alternate Media Center, launching a national public access movement in cable television that continues to this day, arguably his greatest professional accomplishment. How had those two years in Canada contributed to Stoney's vision of community-made media? With several assumptions and lots of questions, I went in search of answers from the man himself and several of his closest NFBC colleagues.

In 1968, Stoney was invited to be executive producer of Challenge for Change by Frank Spiller, then head of the English program at the NFBC. Challenge for Change was created "to help eradicate the causes for poverty by provoking basic social change." Focusing on issues of powerlessness, the lack of control that citizens had over their lives, the CC proposed to use film and other media as a tool in social change. The CC enlisted filmmakers as technicians rather than auteurs, facilitating community projects that enabled ordinary people to explore their own problems and arrive at their own solutions. Stoney would replace John Kemeny, who had helped start CC with Colin Low, Fernand Dansereau, and Robert Forget. Kemeny could deal with the filmmakers, [End Page 49] according to Stoney, but he could not handle those "cantankerous" communityorganizers. The solution was hiring an outsider who could come in, make tough decisions, and take the lumps for a couple of years. Stoney agreed to be that outsider.

On his return from an around-the-world tour with the International School of America, Stoney realized he wouldn't prosper back at Stanford University because they wanted him to raise money, and he didn't believe in having studentsdragooned into doing things for money. Instead, he decided to finish some films in New York where Spiller found him. No one can recall how Spiller spotted Stoney, but Stoney's former Stanford student, Bonnie Sherr Klein, who was then working at the NFBC, was one of those who recommended him. Stoney went up to Montreal and encountered contention before he even arrivedat the office: two staffers who met him at the airport drove while discoursing on who he'd have to fire. Stoney knew if he took the job "those are the two I have to get rid of first." He agreed to come for two years--no more, no less--because he was not a very good expatriate, but people should know they were stuck with him. It proved rougher than he expected.

Conflicts between the French and English units were on the rise. The French unit worked under the banner "Societé Nouvelle" and the English unit, "Challenge for Change." Eight departments of the Canadian government put up $100,000 each and the NFBC matched that, so Stoney had a budget of $1,600,000that had to be divided between both units. He was answerable to a board composed mainly of representatives from these departments, and the board had final say on how to allocate the budget. The French unit sized Stoney up and decided they no longer wanted to get one-third of the budget, they wanted half because they had endured three centuries of abuse and the like. Stoney replied, "B-- s--! You have less than one-third of the population all in one province, you should get only one-fourth of the budget because you don't need to spend money on travel." No one had ever dared be that confrontational before. It was not the Canadian way. The French budget stayed at one-third.

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