>>PREVIEW
THE OUTSIDER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROBERT LANTOS
Monday, August 14 at 8 p.m.
CBC
Rare is the entertainment mogul who can walk away from the empire he or she has created. Canadian movie and television pioneer Robert Lantos did just that.
In 1998, Lantos, often described as the godfather of Canadian cinema, shocked show business observers by selling Alliance Entertainment, the vast production and broadcast entity he had built to prominence. As the upcoming TV presentation, The Outsider: The Life and Times of Robert Lantos says, "The businessman had to be laid to rest so the storyteller could reemerge."
This small-screen biography piece neatly encapsulates the winding personal and professional roads travelled by this impassioned and complicated man. Born in Hungary, Lantos first fell in love with the movies as an immigrant boy living in Uruguay. Years after his family had moved to Canada, he began distributing the films of others before taking a stab at film production.
Lantos recalls, "I had, perhaps, the misfortune that my first film, In Praise of Older Women (1978), was a success. So I thought I knew what I was doing." He now feels that it was the next few films that failed to catch on with audiences that taught him a lot more.
Lantos would go on to produce many critically acclaimed and award-wining movies, including Joshua Then and Now (1985), Black Robe (1991), Sunshine (1999) and Being Julia (2005).
Now the subject of a CBC Life and Times retrospective, Robert Lantos has had to adjust to being repeatedly applauded for his past achievements, while feeling he still has so much to accomplish. The now 57-year-old says, "I initially crossed that bridge in the early ’90s when I got my first lifetime achievement. It was an Air Canada Award. I thought it was kind of early to be giving me that. It’s been 15 years since then and they haven’t managed to slow me down with those kinds of awards."
His acceptance speech for that Air Canada honour at the 1991 Genie Awards created some controversy. Always a man to stand by his convictions, Lantos chastised the award sponsors for excluding Canadian films from their in-flight movie lineups.
While Lantos initially took heat for his comments, they were enough to prompt the airline to change its film policy and add Canadian content.
That show-stopping Genie Awards moment is included in The Outsider. The TV bio also features interviews with many people that have worked with Lantos, including award-winning actors Jeremy Irons and Annette Benning, and esteemed directors Atom Egoyan and Norman Jewison. The Outsider additionally benefits from many candid conversations with the man himself who admits to being greatly inspired by his holocaust survivor parents.
Today, Lantos remains at peace with his decision to sell off Alliance Entertainment (now Alliance Atlantis) and says he does his best not to follow the company’s ups and downs. "I let it go when I sold it. There’s no point in second guessing what’s not mine."
Still, Lantos does remain proud of his show business achievements. "When I first started, some 30 years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian television and film industry," he says. "There is today. If somewhere along the line, I had something to do with that, then that is a source of great gratification for me." |
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