It’s 1970, and the Toronto authorities have paused the
construction of the Spadina Expressway, a project whose costs have
ballooned since it began. Many people in the proposed road’s path
are pushing to make that pause permanent, citing the pollution,
property seizures, and other problems the route will bring.
Prominent figures around the city rally to their cause, citing a
variety of arguments—some more libertarian, some more
environmental, some more practical than ideological.
One of these opponents is Marshall McLuhan,
the famous communications theorist. Another is Jane
Jacobs, the great defender of city neighborhoods. McLuhan gets
the notion of fighting the freeway with a film. I’ll let the
website McLuhan Galaxy
pick up the story from there:
He enthusiastically approached
Jacobs to co-write the script. In his office, they energetically
discussed the issues surrounding the Spadina Expressway—flitting
from idea to idea, as was McLuhan’s wont—while a secretary took
down all they said. At the conversation’s conclusion, McLuhan
turned to Jacobs and pronounced the script complete: “Well, that’s
it. We’ve got the script.”When she finally received the secretary’s typescript, Jacobs was
aghast. “I started looking through it, and it was even more garbled
and unreadable than I expected,” she recalled….”The thing jumped
around, without beginning or end. This did not bother Marshall but
it did bother me. I thought we needed a thread.” Nevertheless, they
pressed ahead with filming under the guidance of local filmmaker
David MacKay (although other sources cite Christopher Chapman as
the director). MacKay used the script as the basis for filming
questions and answers with McLuhan and Jacobs….Although she said it “bore no relationship at all to [the] original
script,” Jacobs was impressed with the finished product when the
12-and-a-half-minute film premiered before a packed audience at
Convocation Hall on October 15, 1970. “There was a shape to it. It
had music. It did have a thread and raised a lot of important
issues,” Jacobs felt; then she added, “It’s a mystery to me that
something tangible, coherent and constructive could come out of
that mess.”
The movie—called The Burning Would, after a line
in Finnegans
Wake—is below. You can judge for yourself how tangible,
coherent, and constructive it is; if nothing else, it’s a
perfect time-capsule artifact of the era. It doesn’t seem to have
hurt the cause: In 1971, the expressway was cancelled, and the
homes in the road’s path were saved.
(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
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