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Monday, August 14 at 8 p.m.
Repeating Sunday, September 24 at 2:30 p.m.
On CBC Newsworld: Saturday August 19 at 2 p.m. ET and
Sunday August 20 at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. ET
He seems to embody the very essence of an old-style Hollywood movie
mogul. All the symbols of power and prestige are there, and Robert Lantos
revels in them, proudly: the mansions, the sports cars, the celebrity dinners,
and a reputation for fierce competitiveness and bare-knuckled bargaining.
But Lantos is a Hungarian-Canadian, and one for whom the symbols of success
celebrate not only his professional life, but life itself. When you are
born in the rubble of war-torn Europe, every step in your journey is a victory.
The
Outsider: The Life and Times of Robert Lantos chronicles the rise of
the only son of Holocaust survivors as he struggles to escape the ghosts
of his past to become the key architect of today’s Canadian film and
television industry. It is the story of a born storyteller whose passion
for documenting the human experience never waned, and of a born outsider
who became one of Canada’s ultimate insiders. Rich in interviews with
family, friends and colleagues including Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons,
The Outsider offers unprecedented access to Robert Lantos - a
rare look at the man behind the public persona.
As a young immigrant boy in Uruguay, Lantos took refuge from the tough streets in the local cinema and dreamed of other worlds. He settled with his family in Montreal in the 1960s, and made his very first foray into the film world when he spent $500 to bring The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival to sell-out crowds at the McGill Film Society. In the process, he forged a bond with his long time business partner Victor Loewy, and realized that it just might be possible to make a living in the movies.
Lantos
capitalized on his early success by starting a Montreal-based company distributing
other peoples’ films - and then his own - including the hugely popular
In Praise of Older Women. Some claim that it was this racy coming-of-age
story that put the fledgling Toronto Film Festival on the map; it certainly
marked Robert Lantos as the best of a new breed of talented and ambitious
Canadian film producers.
From his new base in Toronto, Robert Lantos built entertainment empire Alliance Entertainment. The company produced dozens of award-winning movies (Black Robe, Crash) and hundreds of hours of television. As Lantos candidly admits, the pressures of building such an empire probably contributed not only to the breakdown of his marriage but also to his 1998 decision to sell the business. In the end, the move allowed him to return to the story telling he loved so much, and made it possible for him to produce Ararat and Sunshine, his most personal films.
Today, Robert Lantos continues his love affair with cinema and filmmakers.
He is currently producing director Jeremy Podeswa’s Fugitive Pieces
from Anne Michael’s novel, which is filming this summer in Greece.
Links
Robert Lantos: The film reference library
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