Hollywood's Canada

Download or read book Hollywood's Canada written by Pierre Berton and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 1975 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1907 and 1975, Hollywood movie-makers made 575 movies specifically set (although not usually filmed) in Canada. That statistic will startle those Canadians who have been told that foreign audiences won't sit still for a film about their country. As Pierre Berton points out in this explosive, tragic, and often funny book, the opposite is true. Movies about Canada have been making money in international markets for half a century. But the Canada that has been shown to the world is very different from the real Canada; and the Canadian image - now firmly fixed in the minds of three generations of moviegoers - is a caricature of the real thing. If Canadians have no sense of their own identity, it is partly because American movie-makers have distorted and blurred that identity. And if foreigners think of this country as a land of snowswept forests and mountains, devoid of larger cities and peopled by happy-go-lucky French-Canadians, wicked half-breeds, wild trappers and loggers, savage Indians and , above all, grim-jawed Mounties - that's because Hollywood has pictured us that way. -- Jacket flap.