South Pacific, 1942

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Actually, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the South Pacific ‘Rogers and Hammerstein’ musical. I wouldn’t rule out some sort of inspiration, but it seems to have been a more mainstream, black comedy, war flick.

The following is a cut and paste from my never to be published LEXX book. Basically, I just got lazy, and this is one of those topics that will allow a cut and paste…..

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Certainly this seems reflective of Donovan’s early work. South Pacific, 1942 was shot on a submarine set inside an oil drum, Siege takes place largely in a rooming house, Defcon 4 was built around three principal sets.

Donovan graduated from the London Film School in 1978, and returned home to hook up with his equally rootless and brother Michael Donovan, who was discovering that after making his way through law school by selling cadavers to medical students, he didn’t want to be a lawyer. Instead, they decided to make a film together.

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SOUTH PACIFIC, 1942
Their first film was South Pacific 1942. The story is about a Canadian submarine in the pacific in World War Two. The submariners are completely untrained, the radio operator doesn’t even know morse code, so they wind up sinking a cruise ship.. Picking up the survivors, they wind up having to flee the Japanese navy, before being sunk and rescued by American sailors. South Pacific also introduced us to a few familiar faces who would pass through LEXX.
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South Pacific 1942 is pretty hard to find nowadays. It seems a remarkably ambitious effort for a first time film maker with a shoestring budget of only half a million dollars.

It seems amazing that anyone would give two first time film makers a half million dollars to go out and make a flick, and a lot is made of the mixture of earnestness and passion with which they charmed people.

According to one story, an investment broker once told them he couldn’t, in good
conscience, give them his clients money. But he gave them ten thousand dollars of his own. Bit by bit, from dentists and doctors and lawyers, professionals and small investors, they put it all together.

The truth is that it’s all about timing. In the late 1970’s, the Canadian Government decided that what the country needed was a film industry of its own. An original attempt, to simply give money to film makers hadn’t worked. So between 1977 and 1979, the Canadian government gave a tax credit to film investors. This began the great Canadian tax shelter boom. Canadian film production skyrocketed from a small handful to dozens of features and hundreds of shorts. The sheer volume of Canadian film production almost rivaled Hollywood. In one year, there were 66 Canadian feature films in production, compared to 80 in the United States.

Many of these films fell apart or were never finished, and a great many of the ones that did get made were just awful. The films had been commissioned as tax shelters, convenient and exciting places for middle class investors to hide a few dollars, and it showed in the quality. The technical infrastructure to make good films simply didn’t exist.

“They were looking for cameramen,” Les Krizsan laughs, “they were pulling them out of Ryerson, after the first year. If they could look through a viewfinder, they were cameramen. They didn’t care about the film. Some of them were pretty bad.”

As it became clear that most of these films were simply unwatchable, the money began to dry up. The government became embarrassed at the nation’s developing reputation for crap, and began to look for other ways to get things going.

Of course, most of this was going on in Canada’s urban centres, particularly Toronto and Montreal. Out in the Maritimes, the Donovan brothers pretty much had the field to themselves. They were far enough from the center that they didn’t really have to compete with anyone and they could present themselves as fresh and unique.

South Pacific, 1942 was shot in four weeks. “We used an old brewery,” Les Krizsan, DOP, remembers. “Keith brewery, on water street. It’s been renovated since then, turned into a market area. It was just huge cavern back then, and it had a big drain in the floor so we could flood the area, because eventually in the film, the submarine sinks and explodes. The submarine, they took a huge oil tank and cut it in half, separated the two sections, and it became the hull of the submarine. We put all kinds of equipment in, cabins, radio parts, and whatnot and dressed it up like a real sub would be. People were amazed when they walked inside. It was like a real submarine. It was the first time people in Halifax had seen a movie set.”

They watched the rushes in an actual movie theater because they didn’t have a screening room, in fact, the Donovan brothers didn’t actually have an office, they didn’t even have a car. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see one of them riding around on a bicycle.

Toronto actor Jeff Pustil was also in the cast. “It was a no budget non union film,” he says. “The major problem was they built sets, a mock set, without thinking of putting a camera in there. They built it to reality, in terms of the smallness of a submarine. They didn’t design it with a view towards how you’d move a camera around freely. Then we got cramped with shooting. You couldn’t put the camera in certain areas, you had to compromise a lot. We improvised a lot.”

“For the exteriors we shot in Belize,” notes Krizsan. Donovan’s first film featured location work. “We did all the surface shots, the rescue operation down there. Basically the lead actors survived. They pull them into the boat and that’s the end of that.”

“South Pacific got distributed fairly well in Europe,” Krizsan notes. “It was shown in Holland in six theatres,, sold to other countries. The investors did get most of their money back, Paul and Wolfram (Tichy) go back to the days of ‘South Pacific, 1942.’ Wolfram had a small distribution company in Germany, and a few theatres, and he actually bought ‘South Pacific, 1942.’”

I checked this with Wolfram, by the way, and he didn’t remember it. For him, his business association with Donovan effectively begins back in 1993 when he was visiting Halifax.

Here in North America the film generally seems to have been regarded as a flop. It’s very hard to find, even people close to Donovan, like Bill Fleming haven’t seen it, so it’s difficult to assess the merits of the work. But, they’d managed to pull together the money and more amazingly, they’d managed to get it finished and released, which is an accomplishment. Emboldened, the brothers decided to try again.