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Crime Wave sweeps city!

Guy Maddin may be one of Canada's best-known unknown filmmakers. From his early, improbable success with "Tales From the Gimli Hospital," the director has relied on near-extinct film techniques to convey both a heavy dose of melodrama and a sly sense of humour. Maddin now works with international stars, but his humble origins are with the Winnipeg Film Group — a filmmakers' co-op that, over 30 years, has brought global acclaim to many Manitoba moviemakers.

John Paizs might be Winnipeg's biggest filmmaking success story. Movies have been Paizs's calling since the age of 11, when he first experimented with his dad's 8-mm camera. He's made nine movies in as many years and been invited to the Toronto Film Festival to present a series of shorts called The Three Worlds of Nick. In this clip, CBC Winnipeg profiles Paizs and his movies as his feature Crime Wave begins a record-breaking run at the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque.
. John Paizs, the son of Hungarian immigrants, was born in 1958 and grew up in Winnipeg's ethnically diverse North End.
. While making movies in his spare time, Paizs worked as a traffic counter for the City of Winnipeg. His job was to sit in a booth and track the movement of cars through city intersections. A character in his film Crime Wave does the same job.

. Paizs's earliest movies were made using claymation and animation, and he worked as an animator on local TV commercials.
. In the early 1980s he branched into live action, making five shorts with the resources and pooled talent of the Winnipeg Film Group.
. "When I started filmmaking, the films produced by the Winnipeg Film Group were earnest, socially conscious slices of small town Canadiana. I brought a New Wave sensibility to my films," Paizs said in a 1999 interview.

. Three of Paizs's shorts - Springtime in Greenland, Oak, Ivy and Other Dead Elms and The International Style - are thematically linked through the main character, a strong, silent type named Nick. Packaged together as The Three Worlds of Nick, they were screened at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1984 - the first Winnipeg Film Group productions to play the festival.

. Crime Wave, a feature, was Paizs's next movie. The film is narrated by 12-year-old Kim (Eva Kovacs), who relates the story of aspiring colour-crime writer Steven Penny (Paizs in a non-speaking role). Penny, a tenant living above Kim's parents' garage, writes dynamic beginnings and endings to his scripts, but gets stuck with middles.
. The movie, shot in "eye-popping hues of fake Technicolor," was inspired by 1950s instructional films and by the work of American director John Waters.

. Crime Wave played Toronto's film festival in 1985. A Boston critic hailed it as "the funniest Canadian film ever made." But Paizs was unhappy with audience reaction to the film's conclusion and shot a new one.
. "I knew Crime Wave's ending lacked something. I could hear people laughing all the way through the first hour, but then it gets dark and there was silence," Paizs told Take One in 1999. "It never became a cult hit, but it really did connect with anyone who has a dream to make it."

. The movie played at festivals in the United States but never opened in theatres. Its distributor didn't know how to promote it, saying, "It's not a picture for everyone. It requires special handling."
. Crime Wave was eventually released on video as The Big Crime Wave. It occasionally airs on late-night television.
. In 1997 the Manitoba film industry named Crime Wave the Best Film of the Decade at its biannual Blizzard Awards.

. Paizs moved to television in the early 1990s, making films for Kids in the Hall and directing episodes of the series Maniac Mansion.
. In 1999 Paizs was back at the Toronto International Film Festival as director of Top of the Food Chain. The sci-fi B-movie parody is about a dying town whose TV reception goes fuzzy right before aliens begin dining on the locals.
. As of 2004 Paizs is Director in Residence at the National Film Centre in Toronto.

. Peter Jordan, a Winnipeg musician and actor who appears in this clip and in Paizs's Oak, Ivy and Other Dead Elms, later became a CBC personality. His best-known work was in a series called It's A Living, in which Jordan tried out several new jobs each week.
. Eva Kovacs, who plays Kim in Crime Wave, is (as of 2004) a news anchor for Global television in Winnipeg.
Medium: Television
Program: 24 Hours
Broadcast Date: July 17, 1987
Guest(s): Peter Jordan, John Paizs
Reporter: Robert Enright
Duration: 4:49
Film credits: Favorite Films, Zeitgeist Films, Winnipeg Film Group

Last updated: October 26, 2012

Page consulted on November 29, 2012

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