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Ron Weyman; Pioneer filmmaker at CBC (GREAT)

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Jul 7, 2007, 11:49:04 AM7/7/07
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The Globe and Mail (Canada)

July 7, 2007 Saturday

Pioneer filmmaker turned hard-hitting social issues into
popular television;
He returned from naval duty in the Second World War to
pioneer such shows as Wojeck, writes Sandra Martin, and to
set standards for 'what an archetypal Canadian drama series
ought to be'

BYLINE: Sandra Martin

SECTION: OBITUARIES; RON WEYMAN, 91: SAILOR, PRODUCER,
PAINTER AND NOVELIST; Pg. S11


Forty years ago, when John Vernon as Wojeck and Gordon
Pinsent as Quentin Jurgens, M.P., were upholding Canadian
attributes of social justice on the country's
black-and-white television sets, Ron Weyman was in his
golden age at CBC Television drama. A visual artist and a
navy veteran who had seen HMS Hood go down and landed at
Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Mr. Weyman
learned to make documentaries at the National Film Board and
to shoot film on location by watching Italian directors
Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini in action. That's
the cultural baggage Mr. Weyman brought to CBC-TV in the
mid-1950s. Within a decade, he had persuaded the corporation
to shift from videotape to film and to send directors out of
the studios and into the streets so that they could use real
locations in home-grown stories that reflected contemporary
social issues. And he had put Wojeck, a short-lived but
stellar dramatic series, into the imaginations of viewers.

One early fan was Ivan Fecan, president and CEO of
CTVglobemedia. Back in 1966, when Wojeck premiered, he was a
12-year-old boy. "In Wojeck, I saw performances and stories
and images of Toronto in a way that I had never seen before
and, frankly, rarely afterward. It made a huge impression on
me," he said in a telephone interview this week. Of Mr.
Weyman, he said, "I didn't know him well personally, but I
was a huge fan of his work. He was the real deal, the real
ground-breaker in Canadian drama, and I don't think he ever
got enough credit for what he proved could be done."

A little more than 20 years later, when Mr. Fecan was
program chief at CBC, he hauled six Wojeck episodes out of
the vaults and put them back on the air. Mr. Fecan still
thinks that Mr. Weyman's work sets the standard for "what an
archetypal Canadian drama series ought to be today."

Ronald Charles Tosh Weyman was the third son of four
children of Margaret (Potts) and Joshua Weyman, a machinist.
He was born in England in the middle of the First World War.
The family immigrated to St. Catharines, Ont., in 1923
because Mr. Weyman's older brother Charles had settled
there. Within a few years, the Weymans had moved to the
Danforth area of Toronto, where Ron attended Danforth and
East York Collegiates. When the Depression hit and Ron had
to leave school to help out financially, he took on a
variety of jobs, including working as a tea taster.

As soon as he had some money in his pockets, he bought a
small boat and taught himself to sail. He was also very
interested in painting and acting and, with his younger
sister (broadcaster and sculptor Rita Greer Allen), became
part of a local theatrical group that swirled around Dora
Mavor Moore. Through these connections, Ron met University
of Toronto undergraduates Alison (Ashy) Alford and her older
sister Giovanna (Vanna), the daughters of John Alford, who
was the founding chair of the university's fine arts
department.

After the Second World War broke out in 1939, Mr. Weyman
enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve.
Despite his lack of formal education, he was in the first
group of RCNVR recruits who were seconded to the Royal Navy
for officer training. About the time that France was falling
and Dunkirk was being evacuated, Sub-Lieutenant Weyman was
qualifying as a specialist with anti-submarine detection
equipment.

Among other ships, he was the only Canadian to serve on HMS
Achates as part of the escort-destroyer group attending on
the battlecruiser Hood when she was sunk in 10 minutes by
the German capital ship Bismarck with the loss of all but
three hands during the Battle of the Denmark Strait on May
24, 1941.

After Achates hit a mine on the Murmansk run, with the loss
of half its company, SLt. Weyman joined HMCS St. Croix on
convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic during some of the
most treacherous U-boat engagements of the war. He and Ashy
were married in October, 1941, while he was home on leave.
About 16 months later, when he was overseas again, she died
in her sleep - probably of an epileptic seizure.

As the balance finally shifted in the war, he was promoted
to first lieutenant on a landing ship, tank (LST) and
responsible for getting what he called a "floating radar
palace" on Omaha Beach in June, 1944. Subsequently, he
received a promotion to lieutenant commander and a new
assignment: command of an LST bound for Southeast Asia,
where he was to lead Indian troops onto the beaches of
Malaya and Burma. Before he could see action, the Americans
dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the
Japanese surrendered. In describing his war service, he said
he "was mined once, torpedoed once and got sunk a third
time."

Life was not all battle stations. He had continued to paint
on his various vessels and while on leave in London
contributed some canvasses to an exhibition of Canadian War
Art at The National Gallery in London. One of his paintings,
U-Boat Attack, was purchased by The National Gallery in
Ottawa. Another dozen works (five paintings and seven
drawings) now belong to the Canadian War Museum.

After he was demobilized in Halifax, Mr. Weyman wanted to
become a serious painter and headed to Ottawa to consult
with a curator at The National Gallery. That same weekend,
he encountered Sydney Newman of the fledgling National Film
Board, who suggested he try film instead. By chance, Nick
Reed had just come back from Greece with the film footage
that would later be used in the film Out of the Ruins. He
took Mr. Weyman on as an assistant, and when Mr. Reed
returned to his home in South Carolina, he inherited the
film. "I was hooked," he wrote later.

He was also becoming hooked on his sister-in-law, Vanna. Her
husband, John Terrace, a bomber pilot in the U.S. Army Air
Force, had been shot down over Magdeburg, Germany, in 1944
and was missing in action for two years until his death was
finally confirmed. She and Mr. Weyman became close because
of their bereavements and their mutual interest in the
visual arts. They married on June 28, 1947, and eventually
had five children: Cindy, Jenny, John (Tiki), Peter (Bay)
and James.

Mr. Weyman worked for the NFB from 1946 to 1953. He made
more than 20 films, including After Prison, What?, which won
the prize for best theatrical film at the Canadian Film
Festival in 1951, and The Safety Supervisor, which earned a
first award at the Venice Film Festival in 1952. After seven
years, he quit to freelance in Italy, the ancestral home of
many in his wife's family. While they were abroad, he wrote
and filmed eight documentaries in Italy and the Middle East
for the NFB and the United Nations, learning how to shoot
film on location rather than in studio, a skill that he
brought back to Canada and to the CBC, where he began
working in 1954 under Robert Allen, who was the head of
television drama and the scriptwriter/accountant who had
married Mr. Weyman's younger sister Rita.

His lasting contribution began in the 1962-63 season with
his invention of The Serial, a program that presented
Canadian novels on film and tape and employed Canadian
actors, directors, writers and producers. It was on The
Serial that Mr. Weyman produced dramatizations of Thomas
Raddall's The Wings of the Night, Morley Callaghan's More
Joy in Heaven and the pilots that would become Wojeck,
Quentin Durgens, M.P. and Hatch's Mill, working with such
directors as Paul Almond, David Gardner and later Daryl
Duke.

Tell Them The Streets Are Dancing, based on the files of Dr.
Morton Shulman, was written by Philip Hersch and starred
John Vernon (obituary Feb. 4, 2005), Bruno Gerussi and
Patricia Collins. The plot pitted a crusading big-city
coroner investigating the deaths of five Italian
construction workers against their greedy bosses and corrupt
government inspectors. Audiences loved it and Mr. Weyman
quickly commissioned enough scripts from Mr. Hersch to run
10 episodes the next season, staring Mr. Vernon as Wojeck.
As a model, Wojeck (which ran from 1966 to 1968) was the
forerunner of NBC's Quincy, M.E., and CBC's Da Vinci's
Inquest.

The series, which used the Weymans' own home as the set for
Wojeck's house, attracted 2,900,000 viewers with an overall
audience enjoyment of 80 and climbed into the top 10 of most
popular shows when sold to Britain. Another pilot, Mr.
Member of Parliament, starring Gordon Pinsent as a naive and
conscientious politician, and directed by Mr. Gardner,
became the hit series Quentin Durgens, M.P.

Both programs brought hard-hitting contemporary social
issues (abortion, suicide, abuse of power) into dramatic
stories played out in locations that Canadians recognized as
part of their own worlds. But none of it lasted, for the
same reasons that have beleaguered so many other "golden
ages" in Canada's cultural history: a lack of money, vision
and commitment. The CBC couldn't commit to a third season of
Wojeck or promise steady employment to the actors, directors
and producers, so they all followed the jobs and the money
to Los Angeles. Even Mr. Weyman toyed with moving to
California.

In a brief to CBC management in April, 1970, a frustrated
Mr. Weyman complained that a vacuum existed between the
policy planners and the drama producers that "threatens the
future of CBC drama" and "the survival of our community of
talent." He insisted that "a given volume of production is
essential on a continuing basis, if we hope to maintain a
healthy climate in which talent can survive" and he outlined
the various measures he thought should be taken, including
training and letting people make mistakes in regional and
local productions rather than on the network, where the new
writer or new director "falls on his face in front of
millions of people" while the public and the critics "quite
properly" wonder "if we know what it is we are doing."

He continued to make drama at the CBC in the 1970s with
shows such as Corwin, The Manipulators, Welcome Stranger,
The Albertans and a dramatization of Margaret Laurence's
novel The Fire Dwellers, but nothing exceeded the audience
rapport he had achieved a decade earlier with Wojeck. "The
tragedy is that he got sidetracked," Mr. Fecan said. "He
could have gone on to do so much more, but he never got the
chance and consequently he didn't get the credit he deserved
for what he did."

After he retired from the CBC in 1980, Mr. Weyman turned
back to painting and to writing screenplays and a new form:
novels. He borrowed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous
fictional character Sherlock Holmes and created new
adventures for him after his presumed death at the
Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps in The Adventure of the
Final Problem. Instead of mouldering in his grave, the
famous sleuth was flitting about Canada from 1891 to 1894 at
the behest of Queen Victoria's son, the Prince of Wales and
later Edward VII. At least that was the story Mr. Weyman
spun in his trilogy, Sherlock Holmes & the Ultimate
Disguise, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Mark of the
Beast and Sherlock Holmes Travels in the Canadian West. He
also wrote In Love and War: A Memoir, a vivid account of his
romantic and naval experiences in the Second World War. As
well, he directed the occasional film, learned to play
classical guitar and travelled.

About four years ago, Mr. Weyman suffered a stroke that left
him paralyzed on one side and unable to speak or to feed
himself. Late last month, sensing the end was near, his
family took him to a farmhouse northwest of Toronto that he
and Vanna had bought in 1964, the fount of so many happy
family occasions. "Every time we left the farm, he would
say, 'Goodbye, this place,' " she said in an interview this
week. That's where he died, two days before they would have
celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

RON WEYMAN

Ronald Charles Tosh Weyman was born in Erdith, Kent, on Dec.
13, 1915. He died near Flesherton, Ont., on June 26, 2007.
He was 91. He is survived by his wife Vanna, five children,
11 grandchildren, his sister Rita and extended family. A
celebration of his life will be held tomorrow at the Arts
and Letters Club, 14 Elm St., Toronto.


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