Hard Core Road-Show: A Screenwriter's Diary by Noel S. Baker (review)

HUMANITIES 593 (As it happens, though, there is more than one kind of body in this book.) The other feature of the book is the number of long conceptual expositions -on Kant, Artaud and Gnosticism-Kabbala, and (oddly) Leonard Cohen. Whlle these are solid, erudite, and informative, and one can eventually see their point, they are not rhetorically integrated with the film analyses fluidly- the great virtue of Image and Identity (which brought Canadian philosophy so alive in its film analyses). The final effect is that The Body of Vision feels like loosely joined essays rather than a fully realized book. But each of the book's principal parts is exemplary of the kind of criticism film studies needs and should have a great deal more of. (BART TESTA) NoelS. Baker. Hard Core Road-Show: A Screenwriter's Dian} Anansi. x, 246. $19.95 Director Bruce McDonald's 1996 film, Hard Core Logo, is a hard-drinking foul-mouthed tale of the last months of a.rock 'n' roll band as it wends its noisy, chaotic way through the Canadian west. Though a 'fiction' film, it unreels in the surprising form of a cinema-verite documentary covering the reunion tour of the four-man Hard Core Logo band. Film audiences are aware that McDonald is filming the members of the band performing in front of authentic crowds, occasionally spitting in each other's faces or mouths as the urge hits them. McDonald even appears briefly before the carn.era as the creator of the ;documentary' we are watching on screen, and the musicians address the carn.era (McDonald himself) from time to time, sometimes in less than flattering terms. Every word of dialogue comes across with unadulterated spontaneity. There see:ms to have been no need, then, for a 'writer' on this free-flowing filmed slice of unbridled twentiethcentury picaresque life. Could it be anything but improvised? After a Free Frid.ay Film screening at Innis College in January 1998, the appreciative audience learned from the (unexpectedly) well-spoken Noel S. Baker, the film's scenarist, that indeed 8o per cent of the film was scripted. While the actors playing the members of this fictitious band had altered some details of dialogue to suit their personal characterizations, they were doing so from an oft-revised screenplay. Fascinated at the process of bringing a feature film to fruition, Baker kept a diary covering the period from the day he was providentially led to the project (21 July 1994) to the film's screenings at major film festivals and reaping of awards at the end of 1996. Hard Core Road Show is Baker's published diary. Its companion is another real documentary film that Dandy Salerno was simultaneously making about the making of Hard Core Logo and that Baker covers as well in his book. Baker 's diary form picks up well the day-to-day suspense of the unfolding story. Early on, he expresses his relieved delight in the assignment to write the script, his admiration for the Michael Turner postmodem 594 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 novel/prose-poem which was the source of the film, and his feelings about his collaborators on the film such as McDonald and the film's 'stars.' (Of these, only Callum Keith Rennie is readily recognizable to most current Logo viewers thanks to his role on 'Due South.') The book's suspenseful rhythm is conditioned by the slowly recurring reports from funding agencies like the Ontario Film Development Corporation and Telefilm, by the agonizingly intense rewrites, by casting sessions in Toronto and Vancouver, and, on a still more personal note, by Baker's confrontation with expectant parenthood. In the later pages, Baker at intervals enticingly hints at the shocking nature of the new ending of the film proposed by the lead actor, the outrageous Hugh Dillon. Of course, Baker's book delivers a profile of a screenwriter in full creative angst. Just as he increasingly finds himself departing from the original Michael Turner material, so he must observe others try to modify his own ideas through the Toronto writing, the Vancouver filming, and the eventual editingstages. Thathe and Turner accept these modifications with both gratitude...