Local Intelligence

Chris Haddock's deep understanding of the city informs his morally ambiguous new CBC series with the same veracity that made Da Vinci's Inquest a long-running hit.

By Daniel Wood

EXTERIOR, Penthouse Cabaret.

Beneath the nightclub’s marquee on Seymour Street, a man with unkempt hippie hair and frayed pant cuffs removes from the rim of a sand-filled pail a carefully balanced cigar butt. On quick assessment, the man could pass for one of the vagrants Vancouver hoteliers like to bully. The man puffs and says wryly: “It’s not from the gutter.”

Indeed. In a world of smoke and mirrors, nothing is what it seems. The cigar’s a $25 Montecristo, straight from Havana. The man is 54-year-old writer-producer Chris Haddock, old pal of Larry Campbell, streetwise creator of Da Vinci’s Inquest, and one of Canadian television’s most successful show runners. And the Penthouse, on this day, is no longer the nightclub where Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong whored during the 1950s, but—in its latest incarnation—the Chick A Dee, the setting for Haddock’s 21st century exploration of post-modern moral ambiguity: the 13-part CBC-TV drama, Intelligence. Standing there on the sidewalk, it pleases Haddock—writers find inspiration in irony—that in 1983 the cigar-smoking Joe Philliponi, the Penthouse’s real owner, was murdered in his office just a few feet away. And that the alleged murderer’s real daughter, Tami Morrisroe, married a Vancouver gangster, Sal Ciancio, to learn the identity of the true killer. Only to discover that her new husband was, in fact, a drug-trade enforcer, responsible for eight alleged Vancouver-area hits—including the murders of a Burnaby couple who’d become informers for the RCMP. It pleases Haddock that two generations of Vancouver power-brokers—many of the province’s leading businessmen, politicians and lawyers today—once climbed the stairs here to indulge in the pleasures of illicit flesh. And that the police, thanks to discreet gifts from management, chose for decades to look the other way. It pleases him even more that when Vancouver’s Co-
ordinated Law Enforcement Unit (CLEU) tried to investigate the roots of crime in the city, they were themselves penetrated by a Chinese Triad member masquerading as a Hong Kong detective.

Worlds within worlds; lies within lies. Haddock puffs. He loves, he says, duplicity. The curb is lined with white production trucks; the sidewalk with cables. Teamsters slouch. Actors wait. Assistant directors slug espresso. “All this,” he says with a nod, “is conjured out of my impressions of Vancouver. The trick is to make something fantastical appear as reality. Everyone has to make their deals with the Devil.”

IINTERIOR, Strippers’ Dressing Room.

Hunched near the twin monitors at the Penthouse shoot’s cable-filled Video Junction, Haddock sits, nicotine circulating, as two of his Intelligence characters—The Banker (David Lovgren) and Tina (Lauren Lee Smith)—prepare to do lines of coke by the strippers’ ceiling-high mirrors. The air is full of fake smoke and conversation. Director Charles Smith awaits the third take. The First AD shouts, “Rolling!” and the words are echoed up and down the labyrinthine set: “Action!” from Smith. The scene unfolds again.

“Cut!” Smith announces, and turns to Haddock, trying to read the Show Runner’s expression. “Good?” he asks. There’s a moment’s hesitation. “‘Often in error, but never in doubt’—my mother’s family motto,” he teases.

Haddock grins. “Good.”

The Banker passes on his way out, wiping fake coke from his nose.

Haddock understands the pressure of making television. He’s been involved in the business for two decades. On this late August day, he has four Intelligence scripts in the bag. And four he’s working on in his Kitsilano home. That leaves five more to do in the next two months. He admits he likes the danger that comes from the voracious demands of TV. It’s what adds roughness and reality to drama. It creates edge. But at $1 million per show, and a lot of script deadlines looming, and a crew of 180 to feed, he cannot screw up. “The Machine,” as he calls it, is catching up to him. “Soon, I’ll be tossing pages over my shoulder at the advancing army,” he says jokingly of those around him. “You start cannibalizing the future.” Just as he’s been cannibalizing his own Vancouver past.

EXTERIOR, Quattro on Fourth.

To understand Chris Haddock, you need to know about the scar that runs like a lightning bolt beneath his left eye and across his cheek. He grew up amid a well-off Kitsilano family where music, theatre and intelligent conversation ruled. His father was a UBC forestry prof, his mother a homemaker. Haddock, fourth of five children, was born with a large and—to him—painfully obvious facial birthmark. During childhood he paid the price of being visibly different. “It gave me a real perspective, an early awareness that people were judged. It made me an outsider. I learned about deception. I still need a mask, another character to hide behind. I’m always one step away from revealing myself.” At 13, he lost his birthmark to surgery. Along with the scar came rebelliousness.

According to wine expert David Scholefield, a close friend from Queen Mary Elementary School days, Haddock was a romantic dreamer, an idealist who’d escape into storytelling and invented dialogue. His hero was Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz guitarist who overcame the disability of having just two good fingers. “Chris was drawn to the dark side, the other side. To what’s really going on. He saw hypocrisy. He was aware you don’t have to lap it up. He’d say: there’s always a story behind the story. You dig…and you find secrets.”

CONTINUE