Local Intelligence — Page 2

The Quattro waiter brings pasta to the outdoor table. Traffic streams along Fourth Avenue on this warm evening. Over wine, the hours and decades slip away. After graduating from Lord Byng Secondary at the height of the city’s Hippie Era, Haddock needed a narrative, and his father’s old violin was, for a while, it. For several years—wearing fingerless gloves in winter—he played at the Broadway and Maple liquor store, earning virtually nothing. To support himself, he broke rocks for the new seawall being built along False Creek’s south shore. The violin, however, got him into a half-dozen local bands, including a gig in Squamish that his old musical partner, Mike Jacobs, remembers fondly. Haddock’s bow got hopelessly stuck, mid-performance, in the strings, producing silence where there should have been a riff. As Haddock fought onstage with his violin, a boozy logger came up, waving a $5 bill, and shouted: “This is for you. Put that thing out of its misery!” Haddock cringed. After that, he switched to bass—playing instead the rhythm line.

“There were no signs he was going to be any kind of a success,” Jacobs recalls, laughing at how things have turned out.

Rock ’n’ roll introduced Haddock to a late-night Vancouver world far removed from the comfortable one he’d grown up in. Playing with a local R&B band called the Questionnaires in the early ’80s, he was seduced by the city’s street life—the drug dealers, the hookers, the criminals who lay out of view of polite society. He discovered a place populated by the con artists that were as much a part of the city’s inglorious history as “Gassy” Jack Deighton or Murray Pezim. A marked man himself, he fit right in. He secretly fled an irate landlord one winter night at 1 a.m. when the rent was overdue; and faced a loaded pistol when he and Jacobs insisted on a cash payment at Gary Taylor’s Show Lounge. He smoked his share of bad Mexican weed, played bass guitar, chatted up a lot of strippers and learned a few things that would serve him well later on.

At 10:55 p.m.—with two dead bottles of wine at the Quattro table—Haddock reflects on his experience: “Making music’s like making television. It’s a quick collaboration. You hire good players. For the 20 elements I bring to a TV script, there are 200 more you can’t control. It’s like playing rock ’n’ roll. You want to entertain people with the melody, but it’s the rhythm that really gets ’em. That’s what’s fundamental: the rhythm. I write rock ’n’ roll television.”

VOICE-OVER, from Los Angeles.

The man on the phone, former B.C. screenwriter Alan Di Fiore, knows the story—how a casual invitation to Haddock in the mid-’80s to create the musical theme for a new TV show led to his writing scripts for locally shot series like MacGyver and Airwolf, and how these, in turn, led the two of them to team up on TV pitches in Hollywood.

Haddock soon discovered in L.A. that his determination to say something of consequence was seen by studio big shots as parochial, or worse: political. Haddock would write scripts…and rewrite them to studio demands…and rewrite again…only to find himself replaced by a new screenwriter. Di Fiore compares Hollywood to being nibbled to death by ducks. Haddock is less charitable. “L.A.’s brutal. I was always arguing with the executives. They’d want endings…things nicely wrapped up. I’d say: ‘Something unfinished allows the viewer to engage. Life’s not neat and tidy. Ambiguity’s the greatest thing. It keeps everything in tension.’ They’d look at me like I was from Mars! ‘The television business,’” he continues, quoting Hunter S. Thompson, “‘is a cruel and shallow money trench…where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.’” By 1995, Haddock had returned to Vancouver.

INTERIOR, Victoria Building, Room 204, Ottawa.

Senator Larry Campbell—once B.C.’s chief coroner, and subsequently Vancouver’s mayor—first sat down with Haddock at Umberto’s Restaurant in 1993, and listened to the scriptwriter propose a street-savvy TV series based on criminal forensics. This was years before CSI first aired. Campbell liked Haddock’s idea and his unpretentious manner, and even more the fact that the two men shared a deep affection for the long-overlooked, no-bullshit people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The show, said Haddock, would be ambiguous, gritty, issue-based and, with Campbell’s input, light years distant from the prettified and petrified B.C. of The Beachcombers.

Coroner Dominic Da Vinci—Campbell’s screen alter ego—was born. To understand his characters, Haddock would cruise the city’s back rooms and alleys looking for details: schmoozing with detectives, attending accident scenes, pulling drawers in the morgue, even forcing himself to watch—seated adjacent to the door, just in case—autopsies.

At first, CBC-TV executives wanted Haddock to make the settings for Da Vinci’s Inquest generic; they feared Vancouver wouldn’t engage Toronto. But Haddock felt it was time for the city to stop playing stand-in for Seattle or Boston or any of the other places Hollywood North has been cast as. He fought for specificity: the dumpster-filled lanes, the rain, the corner of Hastings and Main, the missing prostitutes. No longer just a pretty but vacuous face, Vancouver became the show’s central—if inglorious—character. In its seven-year run, Da Vinci’s Inquest won over 50 Gemini and Leo awards.

Says Campbell today: “The people who live on the West Coast aren’t naïve. Drugs, prostitution, smuggling…they know the criminal world isn’t any different than the regular world. The two are entwined. They’ve always been entwined. It’s the rest of the country that goes, ‘Whooaaa!’ This is classic Haddock.”

NIGHT EXTERIOR, Waterfall Building on West Second.

Haddock is sprawled loose-legged in a high-backed Intelligence chair, working his cigar as the film crew prepares the next shot. Light from an aerial platform bathes the street below in a preternatural bluish colour. Day-players huddle out of sightlines awaiting the word “Action!”
Mary Spalding (Klea Scott), conniving head of Vancouver’s fictional Organized Crime Unit (OCU), exits a door, her trajectory downhill recorded by a dolly-mounted camera, pulled backward along the sidewalk by three crewmen. The Waterfall Building, Haddock explains, is the site of a police eavesdropping operation on a known underworld mole who has penetrated the OCU. The spy is being spied upon—in his girlfriend’s ritzy apartment. But who is the girlfriend working for…really? Could it be—in this world of espionage and crime—that Jimmy Reardon (Ian Tracy), head of Reardon Shipping on Annacis Island, third-generation smuggler, millionaire exporter of illicit B.C. bud, owner of the Chick A Dee strip club, local socialite, and secretly turned confidant to the spy-chief herself, is playing with Spalding? Feeding her lies? Or is she, in fact, playing him? Who’s the cat? Who’s the rat? What is real? What’s illusion?

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