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May 28, 2004
Search for a great screenplay
Producer started career as a teacher, now makes award-winning
films.
JANNETTE EDMONDS SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Local filmmaker Deboragh Gabler is not above aspiring to one or
more Oscars, but for now she is thrilled to make do with her Emmys
and Peabody Award.
The 40-something ("women don't talk about their age")
member of West Vancouver's Har-El community took home an impressive
four Emmys last year for her film Bang, Bang You're Dead,
a fast-paced treatment of violence in high schools. The film also
won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, an honor that recognizes
distinguished achievement and meritorious service.
Gabler is happy to report that the film is now being used in education
systems, by students and parents alike, to spark discussions about
rage and violence in the schools.
"I like doing family drama," said Gabler. "This was
a post-Columbine film which came out when there were very few teaching
tools to help people understand where this rage was coming from,
so I am very glad the movie is helping in this way."
Gabler and the production company she started seven years ago, Legacy
Filmworks, have several projects on the go – a disaster movie,
a teen thriller ("sort of a ghost story for teens"), a
sitcom pilot and a made-for-television movie. Her office in North
Vancouver's Lions Gate Studios has one wall lined with scripts for
possible projects. With her constantly moving energy and enthusiasm,
she projects the image of someone with a lot of balls in the air.
"As many as we can," she laughed.
Not bad for a Torontonian who started out as a school teacher. As
a student, she got a part-time job with a neighbor cutting negatives,
doing assistant editing and "all the post production things
one does as a junior in this business."
"Even as I was studying to be a school teacher, I fell in love
with the movie business, documentaries and commercials and being
part of a team, and I got bitten by the bug and was obviously unable
to recover from it.
"In those days, one did not choose film as a career path. It
was not as developed as it is today. There were not that many schools
that taught film and filmmaking," she said. "But I always
loved theatre, the arts and stories. Story was my first love."
Soon, Gabler was working as a researcher and writer. She did documentaries
and then the company she worked for after giving up her three-year
teaching career, got into drama. She was a script supervisor, then
a director, then a production manager and then she just never looked
back – film was her life.
Gabler was asked in the early 1990s to come out to Vancouver and
start a trade union for film technicians, "which is still doing
well to this day."
"When I came out here in the early '90s, the film industry
was just really starting to get going. And the reason I was asked
to come out was that productions were being turned away from Vancouver
because there was a lack of qualified labor. So I was asked to come
out and form a film technicians union. That was a kind of deviation
from my producing career, but it allowed me to go to L.A., do the
rounds, do cold calls and bring back business to Vancouver,"
she said.
"When I left the union, we had serviced four to five hundred
million dollars in business, had 3,000 members and money in the
bank. So when I left it in 1995, I felt I had done a good job. But
really, I just wanted to go back and make movies."
She decided to stay in Vancouver and started Legacy Filmworks.
"I love Vancouver," she said. "I am in love with
the Har-El community and I spend a fair amount of time in L.A.,
which is close. I do the business of film there and come back here
to make the movies. It seems to be a very good formula, to have
one foot in L.A. and the other here."
The business of making movies, she has found, has a lot to do with
finding the money to make them. "My folks always said don't
be a secretary and don't be a salesperson. So now I find myself
in my life having to sell. I sell myself to the bank, I sell the
package to investors, I sell the project to get a director involved.
I never realized how much that finding money is part of the producer's
job," she laughed. "It's not just finding the great script
and getting the director and the actors, but finding a way to finance
it all. Ninety per cent of the job is finding the money!"
Gabler pointed at the shelves and shelves of scripts and lamented
that the hardest part is finding a good one. "Somewhere, we
have to find a kernel of gold in a whole haystack of paper. Part
of my greatest frustration in life is finding a great screenplay."
She looks for a work that makes her come away both laughing and
crying, something that has a timelessness to it and which can "touch
you intuitively, not just with fear or emotion but on a deeper level."
She said that is why Bang, Bang did so well, it touched a
deeper chord.
As for her future, she just wants to make great stories come to
life. "I am not afraid of aspiring to an Oscar or two, but
I think greatness comes from trying to create a vision of something
that is going to make a change or do something good, inspire someone.
That is what we do here. We come up with ideas and make them come
to life."
In the meantime, Gabler is enjoying life in West Vancouver and is
active on the board of Har-El, developing a membership guide for
them. She will continue to juggle projects – and questions
about her age.
"It is terrible that experience holds no water and all that
is important is how hip, how young, [how] fresh you are," she
said about the film industry. "It's the beauty and youth syndrome."
Never mind, with all her energy and enthusiasm, she doesn't seem
a day over 30. She laughed as she ran off to take yet another phone
call. Can Oscar be far behind?
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