Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker John Zaritsky, centre, during the shooting of No Limits: The Thalidomide Saga, in 2015.Handout
What started as a very bad day at the office turned into one of the best days of John Zaritsky’s professional life. At the CBC, where he worked for The Fifth Estate, Mr. Zaritsky was told he was being let go – budget cuts; he had the least seniority. Perhaps his irascible nature had something to do with it; he wasn’t always the easiest person to work with. He packed up his stuff and lugged the boxes onto the streetcar to his Cabbagetown home. There, the phone rang. It was Peter Herrndorf, vice-president and general manager of CBC English, calling to congratulate him: That day, a documentary Mr. Zaritsky had made, Just Another Missing Kid, had been nominated for an Academy Award.
“Well that’s great, Peter; I’ve got news for you: I just got fired,” Mr. Zaritsky grunted back, according to his friend, Michael Savoie, who heard the story many times.
“Talk about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat,” says Mr. Herrndorf, who saw to it that his Oscar nominee’s position was reinstated.
Mr. Zaritsky had been recruited by the CBC from The Globe and Mail, where he had been a dogged, National Newspaper Award-winning investigative reporter. The CBC was looking to beef up its investigative journalism and long-form documentary unit. Mr. Zaritsky was a key part of that strategy.
Just Another Missing Kid followed the plight of an Ottawa family trying to figure out what happened to 19-year-old Eric Wilson. He was on his way to Boulder, Colo., in his white Volkswagen van when he went missing. His family found it impossible to get action from police, who wrote him off as just another runaway.
It was supposed to be a regular Fifth Estate segment, 20 or 30 minutes long. But as Mr. Zaritsky delved deeper into the story, it grew to 90 minutes.
“We knew we had a really good film,” editor Gordon McClellan says. “And he kept going back and shooting more.” His use of recreations – a controversial innovation – involved buying white VW vans at numerous shooting locations and having some of the film’s subjects retrace their steps for the camera.
The doc caused a sensation.
“I said it’s going to win an Emmy,” Mr. McClellan recalls. “We were wrong about the Emmy.”
Mr. Zaritsky claims an ACTRA Award for best TV program for Just Another Missing Kid, on May 12, 1982.JOHN McNEILL/The Globe and Mail
At the 55th Academy Awards, Mr. Zaritsky was in the audience when actor Jo Beth Williams, presenting the award for best feature-length documentary, opened the envelope and called out his name.
“That changed his life forever,” his wife, Annie Clutton, says.
“The offers just started to come and they were big offers,” says Mr. Savoie, who has been director of photography on several Zaritsky projects. “Basically he could do whatever he wanted at that point.”
What he wanted to do was continue making socially conscious films about ordinary people fighting injustice or obstacles: thalidomide, AIDS, cancer, the illegality of assisted death, love during civil war.
“There was one thing I was determined not to do: cheapen the Oscar, cheapen its integrity, do anything that I would ever be ashamed of,” he said in a documentary about him, Mr. Zaritsky on TV. “I have no sympathy for fat cats. What’s interesting about fat cats? But underdogs ... that’s something I can really get my teeth into.”
He chronicled their stories with tenacity and compassion. He was relentless, says camera operator Adam P.W. Smith. “Not somebody who is full of opinions, but somebody who wants to shine a light and open doors and look.”
“He liked to shock people, but with the truth,” says Ms. Clutton, who notes that he gravitated toward stories that others might be afraid to tell. “The more trouble he could cause with a story, the more impact that he could cause, the better.”
Just Another Missing Kid, for instance, was widely viewed by police departments. He changed people’s lives – and often stayed in them. Mary Ewert, whose husband, Craig, was the subject of The Suicide Tourist, about assisted death, wrote on Facebook that the experience “created a bond with John that lasted til the end.”
Mr. Zaritsky had been dealing with multiple ailments in recent years. He lost an eye in 2013 following cataract surgery. The effects of his COPD were getting worse. Around Christmas, walking became difficult. He developed pneumonia and was having trouble breathing.
When paramedics were called to their apartment – on the Academy Awards weekend – Ms. Clutton says the responders noticed his Oscar statue, next to the TV. “They were quite taken with it,” says Ms. Clutton, who figures they must have mentioned this to hospital staff, who treated him like a celebrity.
Mr. Zaritsky enjoyed the good things in life, but was in no way motivated by the fruits of his fame. He was driven by a need to expose wrongs. A dedicated news junkie, he was intensely interested in what was going on in Ukraine; his family heritage was Ukrainian. “This war was absolutely front and centre of his mind every day; how his people were doing,” Ms. Clutton says.
He began the last day of his life, at Vancouver General Hospital, as he did almost every other day: watching the news. On March 30, he died of heart failure. He was 78.
In his memory, Ms. Clutton says there are two things he would want people to do: take a friend out for beer, and watch a locally made documentary “and allow your life to be changed a little.”
John Zaritsky was born July 13, 1943, in St. Catharines, Ont.; one of four children to Michael Zaritsky, a well-known family doctor, and his wife, Yvonne, a nurse.
At 15, John was suspended from high school – apparently for swearing at the principal. The day he turned 16, he was permanently expelled from the public-school system.
With some help – and, apparently, a generous donation – from Dr. Zaritsky, John was enrolled at the local Catholic high school, where he excelled in academics and extracurricular endeavours.
After graduating from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, he began working as a journalist. At The Globe and Mail, he won the 1972 NNA for revealing scandals involving the Ontario government.
Recruited by the CBC, he transformed into a gifted filmmaker who had a “wonderful feel for the rhythms of documentary work,” Mr. Herrndorf says.
“The thing that stood out was he was a brilliant, brilliant interviewer,” Mr. McClellan says. “The best I’d ever seen. He had grown men crying.”
It wasn’t an act. He earned interviewees’ trust because he cared, and empathized with their struggles.
Mr. Zaritsky had a penchant for dressing in brightly coloured sweaters and shoes.Annie Clutton/handout
After he won the Oscar, he made documentaries for Frontline at PBS. They included the 1990 film Born in Africa, about Philly Lutaaya, a Ugandan music star with AIDS who was determined to raise awareness by going public with his own diagnosis.
“Eighteen months ago, Frontline and The AIDS Quarterly set out to produce a major program about AIDS in Africa. It’s a difficult story to report,” said Peter Jennings in his introduction, adding that Mr. Zaritsky had spent months negotiating with African governments.
Also for Frontline, Mr. Zaritsky made Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo, about a couple, Muslim Admira Ismic and Eastern Orthodox Serb Bosko Brkic, killed trying to escape during the siege of Sarajevo. The photo of them dead in each other’s arms was broadcast around the world.
“Every journalist in the world wanted that story, and Zaritsky was the one that got it,” says Mr. Savoie, who filmed the 1994 documentary. He says Mr. Zaritsky and his local fixer went to Ms. Ismic’s parents’ house “and would sit there day after day after day until they said yes.”
His film about assisted death, The Suicide Tourist, caused outrage in Britain (where it was renamed Right to Die?), even prompting discussion in Britain’s Parliament.
There was one subject Mr. Zaritsky returned to in three different films: thalidomide. He was outraged by the story and devoted to the people he interviewed, whose lives had been altered by the drug. His final completed film, No Limits: The Thalidomide Saga, released in 2016, delved into the drug’s links to the Nazis.
He also made films about ALS, Huntington’s disease, prostate cancer (with which he himself was diagnosed), rapists, and a film about U.S. prisoners who trained horses while behind bars. The New York Times called his 1996 Frontline doc Murder on Abortion Row “a remarkable, heart-wrenching film,” “thought- provoking” and “dramatically gripping.”
He made fun stuff too: the film documenting the making of the African relief anthem Tears Are Not Enough by Canadian pop stars; Ski Bums, which he made in his beloved Whistler; A Different Drummer: Celebrating Eccentrics – including a Utah man who lived entirely without money, and Vancouver’s so-called Duck Lady.
Broadcast in 35 countries and screened at more than 40 film festivals including Sundance and TIFF, Mr. Zaritsky’s films – many produced by his then-wife, Virginia Storring – received more than 40 awards.
“He often said they were all like his children, because he never had kids,” Mr. Savoie says.
He also taught: He was artist-in-residence at University of California, Berkeley and taught documentary film at the University of British Columbia.
“As such a heavy-hitter in the Canadian documentary industry, he could have absolutely been intimidating, but instead he was such a cheerleader for his students,” says former UBC student Nimisha Mukerji, who was encouraged by Mr. Zaritsky to make her award-winning documentary, 65 Red Roses. “He’s 100 per cent the reason that I went into documentary filmmaking. And I would go so far as to credit him with my career.”
He delighted in his grandchildren – Imogen, 10, and Reid, 8 – children of Ms. Clutton’s daughter, Errin Lally.
There were other things he loved to do: ski, travel. He had a huge affection for Amsterdam, where he often spent his summers – and where he proposed to Ms. Clutton. Beginning in May, 2016, they took a gap year, living in various places around Europe.
But retirement would not stick. “He kept trying to stop and he couldn’t stop himself, bless his heart,” says Mr. Smith, who worked on Mr. Zaritsky on TV and became a friend.
He had a few projects on the go these past few years, in particular a documentary about a serial killer. He was working on it the day he went into the hospital.
He was also working on his memoir, co-written with Bobbie-Jo Cook. They met at the West End Vancouver bar where she was a server and he regularly enjoyed a glass of happy-hour wine while doing crosswords. He was telling Ms. Cook one of his “thousands of stories,” she says, when she said he needed to write them all down. “You haven’t had a normal life,” she told him. Noting she had studied writing at film school, he asked her to write it.
“Johnny was a rebel with a cause,” says Ms. Cook, who is now working on the final chapter.
On March 29, he called Ms. Cook to the hospital. “He wanted to get literally his last words in,” she says. “He had his oxygen mask on and I was leaning over and he was catching his breath ... but he was damned if Annie or I would try to stop him.”
Ms. Cook says Mr. Zaritsky taught her so much about how to live. “To squeeze the juices out of life,” she says. “To follow the beat of your own drum and do things for your own reasons, and to hell what anybody thinks.”