The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 40

CBC to film Tom King novel LETHBRIDGE. Alta. Harlen Bigbear, a likeable busybody in Tom King's novel Medicine River, may soon come to life on the silver screen. The CBC and two production companies have purchased the film rights to King's first novel and the former University of Lethbridge professor has been signed to write the screenplay. King hopes much of the film will be shot in southern Alberta, his setting for the fictitious Blackfoot community of Medicine River.

The son of a Cherokee father and a Greek mother, King says he wrote Medicine River especially for natives. Geminis get over 1,750 entries TORONTO More than 1,750 entries have been submitted for the 1990 Gemini Awards. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television said that figure represents a 20-per-cent increase in entries over last year. Geminis are given for outstanding achievement in more than 50 award categories. They will be presented Dec.

3 and 4 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The closing ceremony will be televised on CBC. Nominees in the different categories will be announced Oct. 23. Air crash (ills Stevie Bay Vaughan GAZETTE NEWS SERVICES EAST TROY, Wis.

Grammy-winning blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan was among five people killed early yesterday when their helicopter slammed into a hill in dense fog after leaving a concert, authorities said. The other victims were three members of rock star Eric Clapton's entourage and a pilot. Clapton, who played with Vaughan at the concert Sunday night, landed safely in Chicago on another helicopter. His publicist, Ronnie Lippin, announced Vaughan's death. Clapton said the victims, who included his agent, bodyguard, and tour manager, "were my companions, my associates, and my friends.

This is a tragic loss of some very special people." The rented helicopter crashed into a field shortly after leaving the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, an open-air stage and ski resort near East Troy, about 50 kilometres southwest of Milwaukee. Wreckage and bodies were scattered over 60 metres, authorities said. Clapton's manager, Roger Forrester, told Britain's Sky News: "We had four helicopters and Eric and I were in one directly behind it when it suddenly disappeared from vision." "When daybreak broke they discovered it on a ski slope directly behind the building in which we had just performed. Among the victims was Bobby Brooks, 34, Clapton's agent at Creative Artists Agency, whose clients also included Crosby, Stills and Nash; Whoopi Goldberg; Pat Benatar; Jackson Browne and Dolly Parton. Vaughan, 35, who overcame a 1986 drug problem to win two Grammy awards, gained popularity in the mid-1 980s with his guitar jamming and blues sound, which borrowed much from music legends B.B.

King, Muddy Waters and Albert King. B.B. King said he was "saddened beyond words" on learning of Vaughan's death. "Stevie Ray Vaughan was like one of my children, and I felt a great loss when I heard the news," King said. "He was just beginning to be appreciated and develop his potential." Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy, a longtime friend of Vaughan who took part in Sunday night's concert, choked back tears after learning about the crash.

"He was one of the greatest I ever met," Guy said. "My head ain't right yet." Vaughan played Montreal frequently," most recently on a bill with veteran belter Joe Cocker at the Forum in July. While every performance was distinguished by Vaughan's devotion to the stage, the guitarist's most poignant moment on a Montreal stage came during the Miller Musicfest in August 1986: The days leading up to that Friday concert were shadowed with tragedy. On the Wednesday, Vaughan's father' Jimmie Lee Jones died of a heart attack in Dallas. The next day, $20,000 worth of the musician's equipment, including guitars once owned by Vaughan hero, Jimi Hendrix, was stolen in N.Y.

Vaughan attended his father's funeral in Texas, paid for his own flight, and made the Montreal gig, when he could easily have pulled out. ASSOCIATED PRESS. GAZETTE REPORTER MARK LEPAGE 4 4 6 if Of- lr Author, film-maker Edmonds dies EVANSTON, III. Robert Edmonds, a film-maker, author and teacher, has died at age 76. A native of Toronto, Edmonds was a radio reporter for the CBC and began film-making for the National Film Board.

He was the author of four textbooks and became associated in 1972 with Columbia College in Chicago. In 1981, he was selected as a Fulbright Senior Scholar and taught in Israel, Yugoslavia and Belgium. His books are Writing It Right, Script Writing tor Audio Visual Media, Sights and Sounds and Cinema and Anthropology on Film. He also made various training and educational films. Edmonds helped organize the Directors Guild of America and was chairman of its Midwest chapter.

He died Saturday of complications from pneumonia at St. Francis Hospital. GAZETTE. MIKE DUGAS Vaughan during 1983 Spectrum gig. Blockbuster gets gala premiere TP? Even in Jays uniform Cosby bombs in TO BILL ANDERSON CANADIAN PRESS 4 VV.

JOHN GRIFFIN TORONTO It was billed as Jokes Jazz, but there was precious little of either Sunday night when comedian Bill Cosby and guitarist George Benson played the CNE Grandstand. There also weren't many people perhaps 8,000 in a facility that can hold 20,000 or more. Cosby, clad in white yachting trousers and a Blue Jays basebail jersey, noted that "The crowd is small because you are the only people left with money." Family-life theme That's easy for him to say. As a one-man entertain It's unusual to see a crowd of full-grown adults straining at the barriers of a cinema complex at 8:30 a.m. It's more unusual to see their ranks swollen by the city's bleary-eyed press corps, noses pressed to glass doors that will stay closed for another quarter-hour.

And it's a downright freak of nature that this mass of humanity has gathered for the premiere of a Canadian film. But then Bethune: the Making of a Hero isn't just any Canadian film. And this isn't just another festival premiere. Five years in the making, with a final budget of $18 million and creative skirmishes worthy of the 1938 Sino-Jap-anese conflict it covers, Bethune occupied a unique place in Canadian cinematic history long before the first tickets were sold to yesterday's two packed screenings. Larger than life Everything, it seemed, had conspired against writer Ted Allen's desire to tell the story of the brilliant Canadian surgeon he calls "larger than life." Addressing the audience at the early public screening before last night's gala world premiere, an elated Allen said, "I've spent 48 years working on this movie.

It's about time." In its early script incarnations, the story of a Montreal doctor who aban A -f i ment juggernaut TV, books, records he is prob ably the most recession-proof man on earth. Cosby's hour-long standup routine revolves around the same themes as his TV shows the heart-warming nature of parenthood and family life, and the fun of going to college. Cosby is so concerned with these topics that he gets downright preachy. In fact, he delivers his routine rather like a minister who knows that a little humor makes the message go down easier. And just a little humor it was.

Long stretches of time passed while Cosby spun a yarn about getting his old est daughter through college, then another dusty pas sage about a second daughter who, it turns out, wasn't such a good student, ha ha. i Later, Cosby moved into a more successful running gag that played on the idea that romance fades in MONTREAL marriage as physical intimacies become more coarse, One small profanity WORLD doned a lucrative career to fight fascism through medicine in Spain and China faced skittish American studios and the spectre of the Cold War. But the Cold War was a slight chill FILM Only one small profanity was heard during the performance, but Cosby did make great hay with that old corned ic warhorse flatulence. FESTIVAL Cosby also got a lot of yuks walking through an old visit-to-the-dentist routine in which a frantic patient Speaks in gibberish as his mouth becomes a pit of smoke and ashes. Guitarist Benson was a late addition to the bill, presumably because tickets were not selling well, but it Donald Sutherland in the role he was born to play: Norman Bethune in China.

Movie presents heroic doctor as complex, fatally flawed man thing concerning the script. "But we invested too much effort and energy to let it go, so we kept on fighting." "The film had started with a $10-mil-lion Canadian budget, which is nothing for a feature film and a four-hour television mini-series. And we almost pulled it off. "But we encountered some tremendous problems in China technical problems and logistics and we came out of there $4 million over budget." There followed an 18-month hiatus, while wounds were healed, money secured and new battle lines drawn. It's no secret the final product is a radically different animal from that envisaged by Borsos and Sutherland.

As expected, Borsos did not attend his own premiere. But Sutherland did drive in from his Eastern Townships home in George ville for last night's post-gala party. Clermont says Borsos's funk is understandable. "If I was in his shoes I wouldn't be too happy, either. But this situation is hardly unique in the film industry.

"When a producer hires a director, he hires him for a certain vision. No matter how talented that director is, sometimes the finished product does not always correspond to what we expected. "Donald's fantastic" "I think Phillip has tremendous talent in certain areas, and it's all there on the screen. He's great with actors Donald's fantastic in the movie, and that's all Phillip's work. But in post-production he had some problems." That may be an understatement.

Borsos's cut was unacceptable to either of the parties that would buy Bethune, and the producers took it out of his hands and went back to the editing room themselves. "He told a very linear story, in about 1 50 minutes," says Clermont. "We had to go with a shorter version, more concise and precise, with a different rhythm. So we used flashbacks." The new, presumably improved Bethune is 1 16 minutes long. Creatively, the jury decision remains out for as long no one sees the director's original cut.

Commercially, Clermont and Kroonenburg's snips seem to have done the trick. "We've sold some of the major territories in the foreign countries Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, the U.K. In many of those countries the film is opening this fall." If Bethune performs the way they hope in the U.S., and the four-hour TV mini-series sells well, there's a good chance the producers will get the last laugh, and their money back. Regardless of the final outcome, the controversy surrounding Bethune: the Making of a Hero has already accomplished what no Canadian film has done before: it has made other Canadians sit up and take notice. was an ill-fated match.

Cosby never got the adoring response he gets in Las Vegas, and Benson had to contend with an audience that got steadily smaller as Cosby fans decided that ultra-light pop jazz was not their stun. Benson, to his credit, was a real professional, and played a full 90-minute concert. By the end, he had the faithful clapping along to hits like On Broadway and Give Me the Night. compared with other problems that plagued this Canada-China-France co-production. There were monstrous technical difficulties filming in China, financial overruns, cash-flow problems, script changes, and creative conflicts that ultimately pitted Montreal producers Nicolas Clermont and Pieter Kroonenburg against director Phillip Borsos and star Donald Sutherland.

Last summer's political crackdown in China did nothing to sweeten commercial prospects for the final product, assuming a final product was forthcoming. Until this spring, rumors were rife that Bethune would remain the biggest boondoggle never to be seen by its ultimate investors, the Canadian people. Film had its problems Given the circumstances, it's remarkable the film has surfaced in time for this festival, and for its appearance at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto Sept. 6 to 15. "Sometimes when you hit rock bottom, you can't go any lower," Clermont explained this week.

"You can only go up from that point on. This film is definitely on its way up." "It had its share of problems. It was a challenge. Nobody believed in it. And those people were happy to see those difficult moments.

"That it has finally come out is a vindication of everything we had to go through." Clermont's darkest moments came in 1987, after shooting in China, "when everything came to a total, total standstill. "We weren't able to agree on any- There was only one question directed at people coming out of Bethune: the Making of a Hero yesterday. "So, what was it like?" The most expensive and controversial movie in Canadian history isn't a great film, but it's a good film. Considering we'd been braced for a creative disaster of Heaven's Gate-like proportions, it's very averageness seems miraculous. There are problems with continuity in the film, about a gifted Montreal doctor who abandons wife and friends to practice medicine and fight fascism in Spain and China during the 1 930s.

That's partly caused by the scope of this project. Set over several decades on three continents, and told in three languages, there is simply a lot of story to tell, and no easy way to tell it. The shortened, producers' version we're seeing now employs multiple narrators and a sophisticated, whiplash series of flashbacks that propel the plot from Mount Royal to China's Yellow River, to Madrid, the TB ward where Bethune cures himself, and back again with neck-snapping speed. It's initially baffling, very distracting and never satisfactory, but the sheer thrust of the saga, coupled with some ravishingly rugged Chinese landscapes and the role Sutherland was born to play, dwarf technical complications. Far from being the high-school ethics-education clip some early critics have labeled this film, writer Ted Allenl Bethune is a complex, fatally flawecl man.

He's a boozehound and a skirt-chaser monomaniacal, short-tempered, self-centred and as stubborn as a pig on ice. It's no wonder his long-suffcrng wife (Helen Mirren) and friend (Colm FeoreJ abandon him; the wonder is that they stood by him so long. That explanation lies in the mans brilliance, vision and sheer charismaAs played with near-monumental intensity by Sutherland, we understand what made Bethune larger than life, and support him warts and all. There's another subtext here, one that is surprisingly apt in the current backlash against the avarice, corruption and personal advancement that defined the 1980s. Communism may be ancient history but basic humanism is back in style.

If it docs nothing else, Bethune delivers the principle that the common good is good for all, that health and happiness are rights, not privileges. But Bethune docs more than that. Against all odds, it's an affecting, solidly, entertaining movie about one of the great men of this or any other countf John Grijji Fest coverage, schedule PAGES 011, 013 CP Star breaks silence PAGE 013 Bill Cosby delivers his routine to a sparse CNE crowd.