My 15 seconds of fame in filmed-in-Hamilton miniseries ‘Amerika’
Earlier this month in these pages, TV/film writer Daniel Nolan wrote about the 35th anniversary of the $40 million ABC miniseries Amerika" that was partly shot in Hamilton.
He did a respectable job. But, there was one part of the story he left out - my role in the epic production.
Often forgotten - amid the marquee of stars that included Kris Kristofferson, Robert Urich, Sam Neill and Mariel Hemingway - was that Amerika" was my film debut.
And while it turned out to be my last motion picture, I like to think that my 15-second cameo was a highlight of an otherwise dreary 14 hour snoozer.
I didn't have any lines playing a worker stapling signs at a political rally. But, I figured you had to start somewhere.
Let me flash back to those Spy vs. Spy days of July 1986 - three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall - when filming took place at what was then called Copps Coliseum.
Amerika" was a bit of a hot button in the Cold War because it hysterically imagined the U.S. having been taken over by the Soviet Union. There goes those paranoid Yankees again, we thought.
It didn't really get into details about what led to the astonishing turn of events. But somehow, the Iron Curtain shifted across the ocean. It was like The Russians are Coming" only they were already here.
And to rub salt into it, the newly conquered seemed to accept the new leaders, the new rules and a strange new way to spell America.
It was all pretty silly. But we were excited in Hamilton because Amerika" was one of the first major pictures to be shot here.
They needed thousands of extras' for crowd scenes in the stands at Copps and a smaller group of a couple of dozen others to play small parts on the floor of the arena. I was in that second category with the goal of writing a story about the experience for The Spectator. Participatory journalism," made famous by George Plimpton and others, was still popular then.
I don't remember much about the filming, other than it took half a day to audition and an exasperating 14-hours to shoot.
One side benefit was the labourer role gave me the chance to wear a favourite ugly shirt, a tattered flannel, red-and-blue plaid garment from my bachelor days. It was something my wife Linda had tried to get rid of several times.
I remember in February 1987 sitting with her watching episode four, near the end, when the camera suddenly zeroed in on me for my big moment.
Oh my God, you're wearing that awful shirt on network television," she said.
There was another part to the story. And I admit this is where we, at The Spec, might have gone a little over the top.
Shortly before the broadcast, a preview copy of the miniseries landed in the newsroom. And we thought it would be a fun, wacky adventure of Cold War intrigue to kind of, well, pass it on to the Soviets. If it caused a diplomatic incident, that would make for an interesting story.
So, I put the VHS recording into a locked briefcase and boarded a plane to Ottawa to meet with officials from the Soviet Embassy to watch as much as they could stand. We were hoping for senior diplomats or KGB agents. But, we ended up with two guys from the Soviet state media and the head of communications for the embassy.
Not too surprisingly, they scoffed at the program, saying it was another example of American propaganda, capitalism gone kooky and Hollywood opium for the masses.
The problem with this film is it is stupid and boring ... at least with Rambo movies, they're dynamic," said Soviet TV and radio correspondent, Alexei Melnikov.
It turned out North Americans were also unimpressed when they got the chance to see it a couple of weeks later. The show plunged in the ratings faster than Slim Pickens falling from a plane on an H-bomb.
It was never broadcast again. And today Amerika" resides on YouTube, where so many bad productions - along with my film career - have gone to die.
More telephone tales
The Feb. 1 Flashbacks about Hamilton having the first public pay phone in Canadian history led to a lot of emails from readers wanting to share their telephone tales.
Among them was a note from retired Stelco worker Dwight McConville, who sent me some photos of a phone booth that he was sure I didn't know about.
It's in his garage on the east Mountain. He got it in a trade for a bottle of whisky more than 50 years ago.
The abandoned booth was on private property off Victoria Avenue and not much use to anyone because it didn't have a phone at the time.
But, Dwight didn't let that deter him.
He later hunted down an old, retired pay phone from Bell that cost him $26.25. It's one of those old dial ones that goes ding, ding, ding as the coins run through," he says.
Using some ingenuity, additional parts, and advice from handy friends, he was able to connect it to his land line and it does everything it used to do."
So, every time the phone rings inside the house, it sounds in the garage as well.
Back in its Bell service days, outgoing calls used to cost 10 cents. That's what the yellowed original instruction card above the phone says. But Dwight configured things, so coins are no longer required.
The booth still has some old phone numbers and graffiti scribbled on its back wall. He sometimes thinks about dialing one of the numbers to see who might answer.
Hello, this is Dwight calling from the year 2022 ..." he could say.
The way it was
Old newspapers can give interesting glimpses of bygone times.
On Feb. 16, 1833 - 189 years ago this week - a local paper called The Garland published an article describing the police village of Hamilton as having 120 dwelling houses and 1,000 residents.
It listed four public buildings, seven taverns, 16 stores, two watchmakers, two saddlers, four merchant tailors, four cabinet makers, four boot and shoemakers, two bakers, four newspapers, one druggist, one tin and sheet iron manufactory, and four shops for making either men's or women's hats.
It's another example of the benefits of journalism. If a newspaper didn't write it then, we wouldn't know it today.