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Daryl Duke, Hero

TV pioneer pressed for local control, passion, quality.

Charles Campbell 9 Nov 2006TheTyee.ca

Charles Campbell is editor of Tyee Books.

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Duke: Faithful to his B.C. roots. Photo Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

I went to a funeral on Tuesday, and I had no idea how much it would affect me. Daryl Duke -- not a close friend but a dear one -- had died in late October, at 77, from pulmonary fibrosis. The funeral, at Christ Church Cathedral, was elegant and moving. It wasn't until the next day, however, that I discovered something of Daryl's that I'd never seen before, and wept.

Any remembrance of Daryl Duke makes it clear enough that he was a truly important figure in this city's -- this country's -- cultural history. For me, he is a hero, but not because of the often-cited experiences and accomplishments. Yes, as a young UBC philosophy grad and poet he was in the Sylvia Hotel pub while Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Lowry were on all fours on the floor, howling like animals. Sure, he was at the centre of the first CBC broadcast originating in Vancouver.

Yes, he went to Toronto, worked on the daring CBC public affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days , and Close-Up, and Wojeck, and Quest. In 1964, he directed the documentary The Times They Are A-Changing, which gave Bob Dylan his first network TV exposure. Lately the work won praise from Martin Scorsese.

Pioneering television

Of course, as most great talent from a cultural backwater must do, he went to Los Angeles and New York, where he worked with TV pioneers Steve Allen and Les Crane. In 1971, he won an Emmy for an episode of The Senator. In 1973, he directed Payday, which starred Rip Torn and won an award from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics. In 1978, he made the thriller The Silent Partner in Toronto, with Elliot Gould and Christopher Plummer. The film made annual 10-best lists at such papers as the Washington Post.

In 1983, he directed Barbara Stanwyck in The Thorn Birds. Its treatment of religion was so controversial that McDonald's refused to advertise. The third episode garnered what was then the fourth-largest network-entertainment-show audience in TV history, and the mini-series won a Golden Globe. In 1986, he directed Tai-Pan, which was ill-received by critics and audiences but will always remain the first western feature filmed in China.

Yet Daryl Duke never really left home. In 1976, he sought to honour it, as the founder, president, CEO and chairman of the board of the TV station CKVU, which held to the crazy idea -- with The Vancouver Show -- that you could actually put the city's life on prime-time television for two hours a night.

That's why Daryl is a hero to me. He could and did go everywhere, but he never forgot where he came from.

'Courage of creation'

I first met him when I edited The Georgia Straight. He phoned because he wanted to write about the state of local television, and I wasn't going to stop him. He lamented the fact that our city almost never made it onto its own stations, except in those miserly two-minute frames doled out on the six o'clock news. Of course, there have been exceptions -- The Gabereau Show, any number of poorly watched breakfast TV programs, Shaw cable's Urban Rush. But Daryl felt they were far from enough, that local TV stations failed miserably in exposing our city to its own rich cultural life.

Daryl Duke never hesitated to say what he thought. It's hardly surprising that he fought Izzy Asper over ownership of CKVU, and lost. "The local outlet of the CBC might as well be nothing more than a fax machine and an 800 number," he once declared.

Perhaps that's why I couldn't spot a single cad or opportunistic schmoozer among those who came together to remember him on Nov. 7. Daryl might have risen from his grave.

Senator Laurier LaPierre, who worked with Daryl on This Hour Has Seven Days and The Vancouver Show, was one of the first to speak. LaPierre said Duke's disappointment that Canada would not honour and herald its artists took him to the U.S. "He was able to tell us before we even knew it that we were worth watching," said LaPierre, who praised Duke's "astonishing courage of creation."

Christ Church Dean Peter Elliott spoke of meeting Daryl not long before he died. Daryl's wife, Anne-Marie Dekker, had phoned him, hoping that Daryl could come down to the cathedral, where he had filmed scenes for his 1973 movie I Heard the Owl Call My Name. On a website of remembrances, Anne-Marie wrote that the film was particularly dear to him.

Daryl couldn't make it, so Elliot came to his long-time West Vancouver home, overlooking the ocean. "Daryl's connection to the things that mattered most to him was palpable," Elliot observed. Then Elliot spoke about interring his ashes on Monday, in the pouring rain: "Daryl's sons talked about how their dad taught them to make friends with the weather." When they were done, the rain ceased, Elliot recalled, and one son declared, "Cue the rain. Stop."

Elliot wished that we all could live our lives with the "intentionality, dignity and respect" of Daryl Duke. Then a lone cellist played "Amazing Grace."

Sacred conjurings

Following the service, there was a reception at the Pan Pacific Hotel. One old friend of Daryl's wondered why a man who was not obviously religious was honoured in such a Christian way. I wondered, too.

I don't wonder anymore. The morning after the service, I went to Videomatica to rent a copy of I Heard the Owl Call My Name. I felt guilty that I hadn't seen Daryl in the last year of his life, even though I knew he was ill. I wanted to honour him by partaking of something important to him.

In the film, which opens with a Christmas service at the cathedral, a young priest who does not know he's dying is sent to serve in an isolated Indian village. I recognized so many things in this movie. The church, the old Burrard Inlet waterfront, Pier B.C., the Lions Gate Bridge through a Scotch mist. Islands in fog, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth village of Ahousat, north of Tofino, where most of the movie was filmed.

It's a film about place, about finding beauty where you don't expect it, about isolation and coming home. It's about faith and death. And it's about the importance of our connection to our community and our landscape. Early on, as fisherman Jim Wallace takes priest Mark Brian to his isolated home, Wallace tells Brian, "My village never gets rained on, because my village is the rain."

There are moments like this in I Heard the Owl Call My Name that might seem precious or naïve or even maudlin. I'm not usually a sucker for that sort of thing. I tend to prefer the black humour of a film like The Silent Partner. Yet as I watched this film I cried, more than once, and not just because of the recurring theme from "Amazing Grace." It is as honest a picture of an isolated B.C. aboriginal community as a very white guy from the city could give you, yet it explores utterly universal themes. It belongs in the canon of great B.C. movies.

When I read Daryl Duke's obituaries in the papers, I wished that they'd given me a better sense of the man. When I went to his remembrance, I found more of what I was looking for. "In his personal relationships he exuded the rarest of qualities," Peter C. Newman wrote in the service's program. "When he believed in you, you believed in yourself."

When I watched I Heard the Owl Call My Name, however, I knew Daryl Duke completely. Although none of the characters was him, although the book the film was based on was not his book, although the town was not exactly his town, he made a film about himself and his place with all his heart. I knew why he went away and why he came home. I knew why he loved this province so much and cared so deeply about its culture. And I knew where his strength of character came from.

Thanks, Daryl, for all that you did, and all that you've left behind.

For a website documenting Daryl Duke's accomplishments, click here.

For an obituary of Daryl Duke from the Globe and Mail, click here.  [Tyee]

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