How Bruno the Greek rewrote TV The Beachcombers broke Toronto's grip on TV drama and lay the foundation for a TV and film industry in B.C.,

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Molly's Reach, the TV diner from The Beachcombers that has become a landmark in the pristine town of Gibsons, B.C. Tourists still flock to the Sunshine Coast community to have their pictures taken in front of the restaurant, just as the cast of the show did in the early years.

Bruno Gerussi, already well-known for his acting and radio work, was deemed the ideal candidate to play the swarthy log salvager who would come to be a familiar face on Sunday nights in Canada.

It's not far as the raven flies from the studios of Vancouver's film and TV industry to the pastoral community of Gibsons, clinging to the verdant slopes across Howe Sound. Yet the two -- one frenetic, the other serene -- seem light years apart. It's odd to think the idyll is the mother of the industry.

One grey day last spring, four luminaries from Vancouver's swaggering celluloid empire -- the producer of Stargate SG-1, the co-creator of Cold Squad, the line producer who kept Clint Eastwood on budget in The Unforgiven and the designer who decided what must be dyed in Romeo Must Die -- came to the town to loiter beside a garish clapboard building above the town's wharf. The building, originally the town's general store, is a restaurant now, but it wasn't the menu that attracted the filmmakers.

Nor were coffee and pie the attraction for a few knots of tourists who, on this off-season day, braved the elements on the Sunshine Coast to pose for snapshots with the building, as if it were an old friend.

They were all led here by a rare commodity: Canadian television nostalgia.

For 19 seasons -- just a season shy of Hollywood's longest-running drama series, Gunsmoke -- the building was known as Molly's Reach, a cafe run by the warm-hearted Molly Carmody and patronized by Nick Adonidas, his rag-tag coterie, and some 1.5 million CBC viewers weekly.

The film and TV professionals in Gibsons that day were not mere fans. They had been brought by a documentary film crew. The Stargate SG-1 producer, you see, was John Smith, the local kid who wrangled the boats for The Beachcombers way back when, and The Unforgiven's line producer was Bob Gray, the CBC production manager who negotiated to rent the building before which they congregated.

The big-shot designer was Mike Bolton, the show's first make-up artist. They are among a vast army of B.C. filmmakers who honed their craft on The Beachcombers.

As for the man from Cold Squad, Phil Keatley, he is Ground Zero: He's the producer who, more than 30 years ago, conspired to break Toronto's grip on Canadian TV drama.

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In the 1950s, the CBC was producing more drama than it ever would again, almost all of it from Toronto.

When Keatley joined CBC Vancouver in 1957, the station's facility for drama were a converted Packard showroom with a lighting grid barely three metres off the floor. Even so, Keatley and his colleagues managed to shoot 22 half-hour episodes of Cariboo Country, a drama about modern ranch families set on B.C.'s high plateau. Cariboo Country got some network exposure, but not enough for anyone to take much notice. Keatley dearly wanted a show that could be more than just a part-time hobby for the Vancouver station.

In the late '60s, he and program director Ray Whitehouse sat down to find a spot on the CBC schedule that they could pry away from Toronto for a full season. "In those days, that was 26 to 39 episodes," says Keatley. "That would employ full-time writers, actors, directors and designers." They found an unassuming half-hour -- Sunday at 7 p.m. -- and Keatley sent out word to the Vancouver arts community that the CBC was interested in a family drama set and shot in B.C.

He was inundated with proposals -- shows about loggers, about fishermen, about tugboat operators and ranchers. Nothing seemed to click until Marc Strange turned up at his office door.

Strange was a Vancouver actor Keatley had repatriated from Hollywood a couple of years earlier to star in another short-lived series, The Manipulators. Strange and his then-wife, Lynn Susan Strange (or L.S., as her credits would read), had an idea for a series called Orphan Island. Set in the Depression, it told of an old salt who provides shelter on his small island for the orphaned street children of Vancouver.

Keatley says he was charmed by the idea, but the head of entertainment programming, Thom Benson, "had grown up in the Depression and couldn't think of it as warm and friendly."

Keatley and Strange decided to develop a concept in a contemporary setting. "We'd already decided on a diner, and a single woman with kids," says Strange. "What we needed was a father figure, but we wanted something a little special."

It came out of the blue while the Stranges were strolling on the beach in the spring of 1972. L.S. stopped and said, "Zorba the Greek."

What she meant was a character who, like Anthony's Quinn's Zorba in the 1964 movie, was his own man, charming but earthy, with the soul of an artist and hands that knew hard labour. He would be a freelance log-salvager, a beachcomber.

Keatley leaped on the notion. They invented a name, Nick Adonidas, and knew almost immediately who they wanted to play him. They also knew they couldn't possibly get who they wanted.

The man was a volatile, charming, ego-driven classical actor of some stature. He had played Romeo to Julie Harris's Juliet at Stratford, brought Louis Riel back to life for CBC, and played Peer Gynt in a CBC-Stratford co-production.

And if that wasn't enough to deter Keatley from offering Bruno Gerussi an uncertain gig as the surrogate father in a low-budget family series, there was the fact he was already booked by the CBC. For two years, Gerussi had been the beloved host of a daily radio show, Gerussi: Words and Music, the forerunner to Peter Gzowski's Morningside.

Keatley flew to Toronto with the pitch. Programming executives loved it, especially the notion of Gerussi as the star, though they couldn't imagine stealing him away from radio. "What I didn't know," says Keatley, "was that Bruno was looking for something else, because he was finding the hosting job on radio more and more all-consuming."

Keatley told Gerussi he could schedule the shooting so the actor would be back in Toronto for the theatre season. But he wanted a commitment: Though the series had been approved for only six episodes, if it was picked up there was no telling how long it would go on. Gerussi didn't flinch: A CBC drama series had never lasted more than two seasons. He could not have known that he was signing on for a role that would overshadow his entire career.

If the creators of The Family at Molly's Reach, as the concept was called, were tickled by the turn of events, so was the network, which began talking about selling the series worldwide. Keatley knew Gibsons would be perfect for the series. It had breathtaking geography and was close to Vancouver, and there was even a long-vacant store above the wharf that would be perfect for the diner.

But Harry Smith, the local entrepreneur who owned the store, wasn't interested in renting, Keatley was told. Besides, there was a steady stream of heavy truck traffic behind the building. Shooting would be impossible.

Production manager Bob Gray persisted, and Smith relented. In fact, he became the series' greatest asset. He helped rally the town to support road closures during filming. He was the harbourmaster from whom Keatley needed permission to film on the town's wharf. And when Keatley pointed to a moored boat that could be the model for what he had in mind for Nick, it belonged to Smith.

"There's no way we could have got three quarters of this stuff if we had to buy it or build it," Keatley says. "We simply didn't have the budgets to create our own little boat, or anything like that."

Smith also supplied his son, John, fresh out of high school, as a likely candidate to handle the series' watercraft. Soon the resourceful teenager was the chief technical consultant, and on his way to a lifelong career in TV production.

Meanwhile, the casting process had hit a snag. Since this was a family show, and since Nick would be renting a room at the back of Molly's Reach, the network didn't want to risk even an implication of sexual tension, says Strange. Molly was supposed to be a relatively young widowed mother, but, says Keatley, "we found it hard to cast a woman of that age who was not attractive sexually, as well as all other ways."

Keatley turned to Rae Brown, an actress he had worked with on Cariboo Country. "She was about 10 years older than Bruno, but had enormous energy, a wonderful tough edge and was a good comedian." Molly was recreated as the grandmother of the series' children, Hughie and Margaret (Bob Park and Nancy Chapple).

The part of Nick's nemesis, a no-account rival beachcomber, also changed in the casting. Keatley explains that in its original form, The Beachcombers was to have been more like a live-action cartoon than a comic drama. The villain was conceived as someone like Popeye's Bluto, "a big lumbering jerk."

But young John Smith drew Keatley's attention to a real-life beachcomber wrangling stray logs in Howe Sound, a guy who owned a new-fangled jet-boat, dressed in black and sported oversized ear protectors. "The character of Relic was a piece of absolute God-given luck," says Keatley, who cast Vancouver actor Robert Clothier to mimic the real-life beachcomber-in-black.

The series' concept also featured a young native character, Jesse Jim, a teen who would wander into Gibsons on his way to Tierra de Fuego and never leave. Taking a risk on untried native actors had been Keatley's signature since Cariboo Country, when his cast included a Salish hereditary chief and former longshoreman named Dan George.

Keatley auditioned local high school students, among them a kid from the Sechelt reserve just up the coast. Pat John performed a long monologue from Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, and Keatley was sold. "He was good. He wasn't perfect -- he was a teenager trying to do Pinter -- but he was an actor."

John was 18 when he began working on The Beachcombers. He would be 37 when it was cancelled, having never worked at anything else.

"It created terrible social problems for him later," says Keatley, "because all of a sudden being a movie actor in a place as small as Gibsons ... it resulted in a huge amount of notice and an awful lot of people asking him for money and favours."

As these preparations were going on, the series co-creator, Strange, was becoming disgruntled. According to Keatley, the writer was upset by all the second-guessing of his storylines by CBC executives in Toronto. But Strange says the source of his dissatisfaction was more pointed. He hadn't been hired as The Beachcomber's story editor. Though the CBC was willing to give him a creator's credit and buy scripts from him, it wouldn't put him on contract. Strange bailed out, and refused to let his name be associated with the show in its first season.

"(We) went off to live on Gabriola and independently produced a small pilot for Orphans' Island, which ran out of money," says Strange. The couple returned to The Beachcombers the following year after the birth of their daughter Sarah -- who is now a regular on Da Vinci's Inquest.

"We went back to work for the series almost full time from '74 until the end in 1990," says Strange. "I wrote, with L.S., and alone, over 50 episodes, directed about 15. We eventually did get the story editor's job in 1982. We hated it."

Strange's departure left Keatley high and dry when the network brass suddenly rejected the script for the pilot episode because its didn't feature a confrontation between Nick and Relic. Keatley had to scramble to find a replacement, commissioning a new opener from a young writer who would later gain notoriety as an acerbic newspaper columnist, Gary Dunford.

Gibsons embraced the production. Even before it went to air, town council had proclaimed the cast and crew honorary Gibsonites. "They loved having us," says Keatley. "They thought it was a gas. They would allow us to close down their highway five and 10 times a day." In its first season, The Beachcombers was not so popular outside Gibsons, but the network renewed it anyway. By the second season it was a hit, and it would remain one of the CBC's highest rated shows for another 15 years, occasionally reaching as many as three million viewers a week. Regular viewers came to love the cast, and even to accept that the show was never quite one thing or another. It was a comic drama with hints of social commentary and even fantasy.

"I've never believed in series that stick to one genre," says Keatley, who oversaw most of the first 10 years before he was called to an executive post in Toronto.

Strange says the secret of The Beachcombers' longevity is hard to pin down. "There were so many factors -- Nick and Relic, the scenery, the town, the diner," he says. "It became one of those communities, like Coronation Street, that people liked to visit ... It was familiar and exotic. It gave B.C. to the rest of the country."

It was also blessed by a relatively low profile. It was not costly to make and the network did not think of it as a flagship show. It was easy to sell abroad (eventually seen in more than 40 countries), and proved to be an amazing training ground.

"Half the directors in the country got their start there," says Nick Orchard, a onetime Beachcombers production manager who went on to produce the teen soap Northwood and the satire series Double Exposure. "The list of producers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, you name it, is huge. That was part of Keatley's mandate as he saw it. New people had to be tried out every season."

Among those to whom The Beachcombers provided some early TV experience are actors Helen Shaver and Bruce Greenwood, improviser extraordinaire Ryan Stiles, and William B. Davis, The X-Files' cigarette-smoking man.

As The Beachcombers aged, however, and the spread of cable offered Canadians wider access to slick, urban U.S. programming, the series came under scrutiny at the network's Toronto headquarters.

By its 18th season, the CBC's schedule was in the hands of a hot-shot young programmer who would turn the network upside down as he climbed its executive ranks. Ivan Fecan had other plans for The Beachcombers' comfortable slot behind The Magical World of Disney. Fecan wanted to create a high-profile berth for shows like Road To Avonlea. The Beachcombers (or Beachcombers as Fecan had renamed it), was moved to mid-week, where its audience, already slipping, went into free-fall. The following spring, Fecan announced that Beachcombers would cease production after the summer. The news struck the show's cast and crew like a blow. Already embittered by what they perceived as network neglect, they lashed out at Fecan.

"The show was abandoned," Gerussi told a reporter. "Sure, I think it needed updating and improving, but it was never given a chance. I'm sad to say we're all leaving it with a bad taste in our mouths."

In his gossipy backstage history of the CBC, Cue the Elephant!, former anchor Knowlton Nash records that a wary Fecan accepted an invitation to attend a farewell dinner for the Beachcombers' cast and crew hosted by the town of Gibsons -- on the proviso that an executive "getaway boat" was standing by in case things got tense. Nothing untoward was recorded, but Fecan and his network colleagues left the party early anyway.

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More than 11 years after the tears and hugs of that night, and after the deaths of Bruno Gerussi and Robert Clothier, Jackson Davies -- who played gawky Const. John Constable -- walked into the office of producer Nick Orchard.

Davies told Orchard he wanted to make a retrospective documentary to mark the show's 30th anniversary, a milestone he suspected the network might otherwise overlook.

Orchard did him one better. Let's revive the series, he said, as The New Beachcombers: Gibsons 10 years later, with new young stars. It might just make up for the fact that CBC hadn't produced a reunion movie for its most successful series.

Monday, Orchard's flight of fancy came to fruition in a two-hour series pilot. It has a lot of hurdles to jump before it can become a series, but don't count it out. The Beachcombers, a show born of west coast connivance, prospered mightily despite all odds and had to be killed with a stick. In fact, it may have never really died at all.

© Copyright 2002 The Ottawa Citizen