Well, the time has come to begin a blog. I have put it off for too many years, and now I feel ready to share my thoughts with anyone with too much time on their hands.
I created Big Smoke Productions Inc. in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1998. I did so, completely unnecessarily, at the end of filming and editing my first film, STONED: Hemp Nation on Trial. Stoned is a 50-minute documentary following the story of Chris Clay, a 26 year-old owner of the store Hemp Nation, Canada's first hemp store, then located in London, Ontario. Chris was arrested twice for possession, cultivation and trafficking in cannabis sativa, and faced three or four life sentences. Chris challenged the then Narcotic Control Act, saying it was unconstitutional. His case went all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. But I digress.
I created Big Smoke Productions after the film was made. Why "Big Smoke"? Three reasons: 1. One of Toronto's nicknames is The Big Smoke, where I'm from, and where I created the company; 2. My first film was about a man's struggle to legalize marijuana (big smoke); and, 3. There was something appealing about "smoke" in a name for a film (and later theatre) production company - think: smoke and mirrors, illusion, smoking too many cigarettes trying to come up with a name, and so on.
Now Big Smoke Productions is a film and theatre production company. The latest production is Crude Love, an unlikely love story set in the near future in Alberta's Oil Sands between Phyllis McCormack, a driver of the biggest dump truck in the world and Abbie Waxman, a lone eco-warrior set on ending the oil sands. See www.bigsmokeproduction.com for more details.
