Jennifer Dale is one of Canada's most popular actors. Her American equivalent would be Lindsay Wagner or Stefanie Powers: women who have done many guest appearances on many TV shows and have had their own TV series.
These days Jennifer has a recurring role as the Director of a shadowy government agency on "John Woo's Once A Thief". She has a lot of fun with the part and the writers give her suggestive things to say every episode.
You'd expect a movie director known as The Mozart of Mayhem to be macho and blunt or at the very least bit brusque. It turns out that John Woo, wha has worn the Mayhem moniker since a British critic coined it several years ago, is exceedingly polite and cheerful. Reached at his Hollywood office to chat about Once a Thief, his two-hour TV movie made in Canada for Alliance, Woo sounds like a first-time director who is astonished that anyone is paying attention to him.
"Thank you so much for being interested in my movie," he says. "It really is nice of you."
This mind you, is a man who has made a string of movies with so much ballistic bombast and murder that Quentin Tarantino considers him a guru. Woo broke out of Hong Kong's quickie-movie industry in l986 with the gangster epic Better Tomorrow. After several more super-kinetic thrillers in Hong Kong, Woo made Hard Target (1993), starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and last year's big-grossing Broken Arrow, with John Travolta and Christian Slater.
One has to ask him, for a start, how he feels about being The Mozart of Mayhem. It turns out he's quite tickled. "Oh, I feel very, very flattered. And I'm grateful for the attention. I suppose it's true that I'm a kind of conductor when I'm making a movie. I use visuals to tell a story and I don't care about logic. I just want to make it happen. Being a Mozart is okay with me."
Once a Thief follows a pair af fugitive-lovers (Sandrine Holt, Ivan Sergei) who flee the. embrace of the Hong Kong mob for Canada only to be used by a vicious Canadian cop (Jennifer Dale as the "Director" of an anti-mob outfit) for undercover work. As sassy, bright and chockfull of action as Once a Thief certainly is, Woo's box-office success begs the question, why make a movie for TV?
"Actually, Once a Thief was a movie I made in Hong Kong a few years ago but I wasn't happy with it. Not enough money, not enough time, you know how it is but it was pointed out to me that it had the potential to be a TV series. Like what happens to these two young people. I thought it was worth a try and I've never worked in TV so it was another challenge. Then I thought that if it became a series, I could give jobs to all these young directors making episodes every week. Alliance gave me a pretty big budget, so I just went up to Vancouver and made it in 28 days. That's pretty good, isn't it? Because, you know, it rained every day."
"It's focused on a love story, not like most of my movies," says Woo, and that seemed a special treat for me. Everybody is always surprised when I say that my favourite kind of movie is a musical. But I make movies that aren't so different from musicals - lots of action and visuals and not so much dialogue." If not a musical, Once a Thief certainly brings Woo closer to family entertainment. The movie is at times deliriously giddy - the two lovers are adorable and their antics are framed as if part af an old-fashioned fairy tale. You know that their sweetness will conquer everything, even Jennifer Dale's gleefully nasty dominatrix. It's just that things keep getting blown up in the mast cartoon-like fashion.
Whatever the result, and Fox is still considering Once a Thief as a mid- or late-season series, Woo is delighted with the movie and with working in Canada. Asked the obligatory question about making a movie here, he's characteristically polite but also very astute, a Mozart of good manners: "I loved working in Canada. Everybody works very hard there, but they work quietly."
Once a Thief airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Fox, 9 p.m. an Global
Globe and Mail TV magazine Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, 1997
The title of the series explains to those in the know what the producers are trying to get across, even if it is no guarantee that they will succeed. John Woo is the best-known director to come out of Hong Kong's high-energy film industry, and is much better known since he crossed the Pacific to make Broken Arrow and Face/Off. His specialty is the action film, a Hong Kong mainstay often derided as chop-socky but his violence is artistic in its choreography - at least for those whose eyes can separate the form from thc content.
His greatest champions have been film-world insiders who have a greater appreciation for the camera techniques used by Woo to make a gunfight or a brawl almost a dance. Now Davis and Laurin, ex-Montreal sketch comedians (including a year of writing for Air Farce), and veterins of the Hollywood wars (NBC's South Beach among others), are Iooking to see if the more broadly based TV audience can summon up the same enthusiasm for the name of John Woo.
Davis and Laurin, who work with Toronto's Alliance Communications, were first sumznoned by the William Morris Agency to meet the master himself in 1994. The rapport they developed eventually led to a two-hour pilot directed by Woo himself, which was shown on Global and Fox earlier this year. Fox lost interest in the series, for which Woo is listed as executive producer and acts as an all-purpose consultant. Davis and Laurin blame executive-suite upheavals that orphaned the show. Global then automatically took a pass, because the Canadian network's audience share would drop some 30 per cent without simulcasting with the U.S. network.
But much as Alliance found with Due South, with a big enough international market a series can be sustained whatever the Americans think. John Woo's name carries weight, and not just in the Asian market. Germany, France and Britain are all involved along with CTV, allowing for a budget of $1.5-million an episode.
So what are we in the global TV marketplace getting with John Woo's Once a Thief? It's hard to say, which is not so much a critic's cop-out as a comment on the inconsistent style of the three episodes I've seen. Monday's premiere about the race to get a secret list of Chinese dissidents is far and away the most daring and disconneeted of the three, coming closest to Woo's own work while satisfying Davis and Laurin's wish to make something different - "what everyone in TV is looking for and everyone is afraid of," Laurin says. An attack on a group of red-book-waving Maoists in a city that looks a lot like Toronto is inexplicably launched from an outdoor cafe where the heroes are sipping Ting-tao beer, one of their many Hong Kong longings. It's just another day on the job, and it is this casual attitude to the action that enables the deliciously arch comedy - such as gangsters worrying about whether the Latin word nexus, as in crime nexus, is a fourth-declension Latin noun.
The series, to make it sound more straightforward than it really is, concerns three young operatives for a shadowy agency presided over by the dominatrix Director (played with no end of innuendo by Jennifer Dale). Two of the agents, Sandrine Holt and Ivan Sergei, have found their way to the forces of good after fleeing the crime family that raised them in Hong Kong. The other, Nicholas Lea who came to fame as Krycek on The X Files), is an ex-cop who shares with Sergei a passion for Holt. Together they battle computerized crime syndicates, human-organ dealers and anyone else who might carry out their bad work in warehouse lofts and steamy nightclubs (such as a Stalinesque bar where dinner comes with a show trial).
But someone on the decision-making side seems to have gotten nervous. What starts out crazy but captivating becomes by the organ-transplant episode a little-too-tame remake of another ironic action show, The Avengers. It would be a shame if John Woo's Once a Thief decided to seek safety in Nielsen numbers.
Globe and Mail Friday September 12, 1997
![[Jennifer Dale]](dale_j97.jpg)
ALEX DuKAY PHOTO
Starring in the John Woo action series Once A Thief is ``kinky fun, a great comedy role. I'm so tough I don't even have a name,'' says versatile actress.
In a tough business where there are no second acts, Jennifer Dale is heading into her 8th starring role in a TV series and shows no signs of letting up
By Jim Bawden
Toronto Star Television Columnist
``Sure, I can name all my TV series,'' says Jennifer Dale with a nervous giggle.
``You mean the series where I was a regular and not a guest?'' she asks, hedging for time.
``Oh, all right, there was Empire Inc., but that was a miniseries. Then came Vanderberg when I was pregnant with my daughter so it was 14 years ago. Then In Opposition. Or was it after No Place Like Home? Then Saying Goodbye, or was that before? Then Family Passions and then Side Effects.''
She's running out of breath, ``. . . and now John Woo's Once A Thief. Did I miss one or two?''
Canadian TV is supposed to be a ruthless business where there are no second acts. Only a few Canadian performers get to star in more than one series. Dale's string of eight series, mostly in the hit category, puts her way out in the lead. She's been nominated for five Gemini Awards and resisted all blandishments to move on to the Los Angeles market.
``Grrrr! Now I'm having fun as a dominatrix,'' she laughs. ``In Thief, I get to wear these beautiful leather costumes. It's all kinky fun, a great comedy role. I'm so tough I don't even have a name. I am the director of a slightly disreputable international crime-fighting unit.
``I keep my charges at bay with weapons and knowledge. If they don't do exactly as required I'll ship them all back to the sadistic boss who caused them to defect to my side.''
She stops eating her liver and bacon dinner to comically snarl, ``It's a hoot. I've never had this much fun and I get to do my own stunts. I have the bruises and pulled muscles to show for it, too!'' Says executive producer Bill Laurin, ``Most actresses have beauty or talent. Jennifer has both gifts - she's Canada's premier serious TV actress. She can be ironic and sly here, intimidating and accessible. We wanted her from the beginning. She fulfils a lifetime fantasy of mine.''
Predicts Laurin, ``There'll be Web sites devoted to her once Thief gets rolling.''
Action director Woo shot the two-hour television pilot for the series last spring in Vancouver, bringing it in on a $4.5-million budget in 26 days.
``It was rush, rush,'' says Dale, who had to journey to Los Angeles and be tested before Fox TV executives let her pitch Woo. Although the TV-movie (made by Toronto's Alliance Communications) garnered strong ratings, Fox passed on the projected series, which will instead be made for fall on CTV as well as U.S. syndication. The total budget is $30 million for the projected 22 episodes.
``It takes a long time to shoot because the stunts have to be co-ordinated,'' reports Dale. ``This is cartoon action, not realistic violence. And without a U.S. network we can push that envelope just a bit and become even more outrageous.
``We shoot all over Toronto but my scenes are mainly done in my boardroom set at the old Molson's brewery on Front St.
``During those chilly spring days of shooting, I found my leather ensembles did not afford much protection from the cold.''
Woo just might make it up from his Hollywood base to direct an episode or two - he's reading the scripts and screening dailies and making comments.
The body count in a Woo flick can number in the hundreds, which is impossible in a TV series that Dale says without hesitation ``is family fare. It's a satirical comment on our times. My character does all these outrageous things and never gets hurt.
``That's not realistic.''
Dale was the proverbial cute kid whose mother wanted her to be a star. She was taking dancing lessons at age 5 and at the venerable age of 9 changed her name from Ciurluini to Dale and got a part in the musical Gypsy at the Royal Alexandra theatre. ``That was in 1963,'' she says, which is as close as she comes to discussing her age.
Up close she still looks eerily like she did in her 1979 movie debut, the much-maligned Canadian film Suzanne co-starring Winston Reckert. ``It was this nice, little film and the first for Winston and me. We were so inexperienced but filled with good intentions and it had a splashy premiere at the Festival of Festivals and everybody expected too much.''
She rebounded to co-star with Kenneth Welsh in her first big TV miniseries Empire Inc., a fictionalized account of the rise of a Montreal businessman in which she played the rebellious daughter.
Vanderberg is a series that's a bit cloudy in her memory - she played the vamp, the stars were Paul and Susan Hogan and it was supposed to be CBC's answer to Dallas, set in the boardrooms of Calgary.
``I'll admit I did at one stage set off for the Los Angeles tango during pilot seasons.
``But my intentions were always mixed - I dreaded getting trapped in a successful American series and vegetating. The cattle-call auditions were something else - I'd do up to three auditions a day.''
Marriage to producer Robert Lantos (they subsequently divorced) and two small children (now teenagers) kept her rooted in Toronto.
``This city is a livable place - it has a lot of ingredients not found in L.A.,'' she says.
Dale admits that she has `worked for some hacks on TV who have the attitude that getting the scene done quickly is all-important'
``I was always working as much as I wanted. I would have liked to do more movies. But that may yet happen.''
She has worked for some first-class directors like Atom Egoyan (in The Adjuster), but candidly admits that she has ``worked for some hacks on TV who have the attitude that getting the scene done quickly is all-important.
``There have been times when I had to direct myself. That's not the attitude on Thief, thank goodness.''
She's not exaggerating by saying she's always working.
Her credits read like a Who's Who of Canadian TV series: guest shots on everything from Bordertown to Diamonds to E.N.G. to Philip Marlowe.
Her best work? She liked playing Victorian adventuress Betsy Bigelow in two CBC TV-movies, Love And Larceny (1984) and Grand Larceny (1991) and thinks there should have been one more sequel wrapping up the whole story (perhaps titled Larceny At Sea).
``But I think my best work was in a little series for TVOntario called Saying Goodbye.
``I was a woman in deep grief from the unexpected death of her young husband. It was an all-consuming part.
``Then there was this little series - I keep using that word little, but it only ran six episodes - called No Place Like Home.
``I was a fading soap opera actress who came home at the death of my father and had to try to pick up the pieces with my sister, who had stayed at home and resented it.
``Patricia Gage was the sister and we really thought we had something going.''
But there was no funding available from Telefilm Canada for additional episodes.
Dale was brought into CBC's Side Effects for the second season with great fanfare.
CBC publicity made it appear she was going to singlehandedly save the series, a notion she calls ridiculous.
``How can one actress do that?''
The series did not make it through the year despite improvements. The lesson: Once viewers sample a series and find it wanting, they won't return for a second look.
One Dale series still running (mornings on CFTO) is the German-financed soap opera Family Passions, a trashy but fun bundle of cliches that cast Dale as a promiscuous ex-ballerina.
``We had a lot of promising young talent, but it was difficult turning out a show a day.
``There's such a demand for Canadian content some of my lesser work keeps getting rerun.''
Dale recently made a stage comeback in a Toronto production of Modigliani after a decade's absence (sister Cynthia is at Stratford this summer in Camelot).
``I experienced stark terror before each performance, but I proved I could do it. Now I'm ready for something bigger in theatre.''
Dale stays in shape by working out at the gym and by working out on the set as a dominatrix.
``It's an incredibly physical part and I get to act out all my hostilities,'' she says.
``Then I can go off salsa dancing at nights, which is my real passion - I'm also learning the tango these days.
``Just don't mess with me when I'm wearing my leather.''
Toronto Star June 22, 1997
www.t-o.com web site.
John Woo's ONCE A THIEF: The Movie was directed by John Woo (Face/OFF, Broken Arrow, Hard Target, Hard Boiled). John Woo and Terence Chang will be the executive producers of the series. William Laurin and Glenn Davis (South Beach, Scene of the Crime) serve as executive producers and writers. Wendy Grean is producer. John Woo's ONCE A THIEF is an Alliance Communications Corporation production for broadcast on the CTV Television Network in Canada, ProSieben in Germany, TF1 in France and will air in Austria and Spain. Alliance distributes world-wide.
From the Alliance web site.
From: Barbara Karadimos To: gjhong@accessv.com Subject: RE: John Woo's Once A Thief Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:15:55 -0500Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding the program "Jon Woo's Once A Thief".
We are delighted to hear that you enjoy this program. We hope you will continue to enjoy watching it in its new timeslot on Saturday evenings at 10:00pm. I have also passed your message regarding wanting more pictures of the show on our website onto our webmaster.
Fan letters can be addressed to:
John Woo's Once A Thief c/o Alliance 121 Bloor Street East, Suite 1400 Toronto, Ontario M4W 3M5
Screenventures XXI Productions
"Once A Thief"
624 Fleet Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 1A9
Go to Sympatico review.
