BOOTLEG FILES 587: “A Place to Stand” (Academy Award-winning 1967 short).
LAST SEEN: It is on YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: No perceived U.S. commercial value.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely.
Fifty years ago, Montreal became the center of international attention with Expo 67, a World’s Fair that attracted more than 50 million visitors. And one of the most popular attractions at that event was a short film exhibited at the Ontario Pavilion called “A Place to Stand.” While mostly forgotten today, “A Place to Stand” was briefly influential in changing the visual style of late 1960s and 1970s film and television productions – and it even won an Academy Award.
“A Place to Stand” was the creation of Christopher Chapman, a one-time designer for the Ford Motor Company who drifted into filmmaking after buying a camera and teaching himself how to use it. He created a series of documentary shorts that won awards and critical praise within Canada, but his work was unknown to the wider world.
When Ontario’s provincial government began planning its Expo 67 pavilion, Chapman pitched the idea of a widescreen documentary highlighting the local industries, landscapes and people. The idea was initially rejected, but that decision was reversed when the pavilion’s planners realized that their venue needed a cinematic presentation that would attract audiences. Chapman was given an 18-month period to shoot his film.
But there was something of a problem. Rather than offer a conventional documentary, Chapman sought to create a new visual dynamic. The resulting effort was dubbed “multi-dynamic image technique” and it involved multiple moving panes featuring moving images that shared a single screen. This was not something that Chapman invented – there were previous attempts at this technique going far back into the silent movie era – but the expansive widescreen technology of the 1960s made it possible to accommodate a larger number of moving panes on a single screen.
Working without a script, Chapman journeyed across Canada and shot more than 160,000 feet of 35mm film. His camera captured Ontario through the different seasons and ventured into a variety of factories, farms, villages, sporting events and special festivities. After keeping track of the footage in an editing book that eventually totaled 350 pages, Chapman then had to devise the game plan to determine what footage would be incorporated into which corner of the screen and for how long. Film historian Aimée Mitchell later noted that Chapman “laid out on the gridded pages … the positions of numbered images, the timing of their appearance and disappearance from view, and their movement within and across the frame. Each page is accompanied by notes and instructions.”
Due to the complexity of the project, Chapman could not process his footage at a Canadian studio. He traveled to the Todd-AO studios in Hollywood for “A Place to Stand” to be assembled for projection in a 70mm format. Even in a jaded industry town like Hollywood, the audacity of having up to 15 different images on a single screen created awe and excitement. At one test screening, Chapman was stopped and congratulated by Steve McQueen – and the celebrated star was so impressed with Chapman’s work that he arranged for the multi-dynamic image technique to be used in his next film, “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
In creating “A Place to Stand” in a beat-the-clock environment, Chapman left the music score to be completed last. But with only two weeks before its Expo 67 premiere, the score to “A Place to Stand” was incomplete. This could have been disastrous – the film had no dialogue and relied solely on music and sound effects for its audio power. Mercifully, songwriters Doris Claman and Richard Morris created a bouncy anthem that was quickly recorded by a 45-piece orchestra and a 15-person choir. The song, also called “A Place to Stand,” became a popular hit in Canada during 1967.
By contemporary standards, “A Place to Stand” is a somewhat boring travelogue. It ping-pongs across Ontario with no particular historic, cultural, economic or geographic pattern – sequences on quarry construction, lumber work and mining are followed by a spot of ice fishing, then the parade for the opening of the Parliament in Ottawa, then flowers in the fields, then freight trains, and so forth. There are glimpses of glass blowing, old cars being squashed into scrap metal, airplanes used to put out forest fires, an ice hockey game, shoppers in a flea market and so forth. Every now and then, the song “A Place to Stand” comes careening across the soundtrack and then abruptly disappears. (And since this was 1967 Canada and not today’ Justin Trudeau environment, everyone on the screen was a rather pale shade of white.)
Of course, it doesn’t help when one views the film in the only channel where it is now available: as an unauthorized two-part video uploaded to YouTube from a badly faded 16mm print. “A Place to Stand” was designed to be viewed in crisp color on a 66-by-30-foot screen with stereophonic sound. Clearly, its visual majesty would be better served in its theatrical setting rather than as a crummy online video.
Columbia Pictures released “A Place to Stand” in U.S. theaters, and it snagged Oscar nominations for Best Documentary Short and Best Live Action Short, winning the latter. Reportedly, every Hollywood studio purchased prints of the film to determine how they could use Chapman’s multi-dynamic image technique for their film and television productions. This technique is best known today as the beloved tic-tac-toe board title opening of “The Brady Bunch.”
Despite offers to work in the U.S. film industry, Chapman opted to stay in Canada and work on locally produced documentaries shot in the widescreen IMAX format. In his later years, he served as president of the Directors Guild of Canada and he received the Order of Canada from his nation’s government in 1987. Chapman died in 2015 of complications related to dementia.
“A Place to Stand” is regarded as a milestone achievement within Canadian cinema history; in the U.S., it is mostly a footnote that is recalled for its Academy Award. There has never been a U.S. DVD release and there seems little incentive for any American label to make this available domestically. And while the YouTube posting is not the best way to experience this work, at least it can give us an idea on what the fuss was all about a half-century ago.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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