Globe film critic Jay Scott changed how Canadians consumed and talked about culture

This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.

If you worked in the Canadian film industry in the 1970s, 80s or 90s, you probably had a Jay Scott story. Perhaps you were there when he held a riotous party inside a hotel room at Toronto’s Park Plaza, keeping neighbour critic Roger Ebert up all night and prompting phone call after phone call to the front desk pleading for quiet. Maybe you were there when he arrived at a Cannes party in nothing but a Speedo. Or you might have been stargazing outside a row of limos, delighted to see actress Liza Minnelli step out, her arms locked with none other than … Jay Scott, film critic for The Globe and Mail.

But for every Jay Scott story, there are a hundred more Jay Scott reviews – intensely insightful, playfully experimental and relentlessly entertaining master classes in arts journalism that opened up entire worlds to readers. Over the course of his 16-year career at The Globe, Scott changed how Canadians consumed, talked about and processed culture.

But before Scott could do any of that – before he could introduce North American audiences to the brilliance of filmmakers such as Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder, champion such emerging Canadian voices as Denys Arcand and David Cronenberg, become a passionate advocate for queer storytellers or predict how the blockbuster machine would one day rule the Earth – a young man named Jeffrey Scott Beaven had to figure out how to get the hell out of Albuquerque, N.M.

In Jay Scott’s first year as a Globe critic, he raved about Richard Donner’s Superman (‘glorious’) and listed Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, starring Brooke Shields, as one of his top 10 movies. Reuters, supplied

Among his least favourite films of 1978, Scott cited the raunchy comedy Animal House, the treacly drama Moment by Moment, Robert Altman’s A Wedding and Two Solitudes, based on Hugh MacLennan’s seminal Canadian novel (‘It is not enough that we make exploitation films for the Americans: now we are copying their ponderous historical dramatizations’.) Globe and Mail archives

Scott's religious parents were not fans of film and entertainment, but he would fall in love with the arts at a young age.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

Beaven was born Oct. 4, 1949, in Lincoln, Neb., the only son of Muriel, a high-school English teacher, and Bruce, an insurance salesman. Both parents were Seventh-Day Adventists who didn’t own a television and believed cinema was a sin. Still, they took the boy to see his first movie, the Marlon Brando comedy The Teahouse of the August Moon, when he was 7.

“I got really excited by it and have vivid memories of it,” Scott (as he later became known professionally) recalled during a 1985 radio interview. “Then I got sent to a few Disney movies, and I remember Bambi’s mother dying, which was particularly traumatic.”

Aside from sneaking into a double bill of Dracula and The Thing That Couldn’t Die when he was 8 (“It caused me nightmares for months, but I loved it”), and a showing of Ben-Hur with his parents at age 11 (“I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever come across”), Scott would not see another film until late into his high-school career in Albuquerque, where the family had relocated.

After enduring a tumultuous adolescence – his parents divorced when he was 16, his father dying by suicide shortly thereafter – Scott propelled himself into the arts.

He studied art history at New College in Sarasota, Fla., before focusing on acting at the University of New Mexico, where he also edited his campus newspaper’s arts section. At last, people with a range of tastes and philosophies surrounded him; he was, as he would later say, “liberated.”

Well, almost. Scott was not yet out of the closet and, in 1968, he married Mary Bloom, whom he met while in Sarasota. One year later, the couple packed their bags for Toronto, where Scott got a job writing for a construction-trade paper, the Daily Commercial News. Depending on whom you ask, the move north was an act of draft dodging, a career-motivated leap of faith or something more ineffable.

“I think he wanted to get out of Dodge. Albuquerque was a tough town, it was rough for him there,” recalls Helga Stephenson, Scott’s close friend and the long-time head of Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (before it was called the Toronto International Film Festival). “He was kind of a lost boy.”

On Albuquerque's stretch of Route 66, cars pass the KiMo theatre, one of the city's oldest movie houses. Its name came from a 1927 contest by the Albuquerque Journal, where Scott would work 50 years later.Susan Montoya Bryan/The Associated Press

The couple’s emigration did not immediately take, though; the pair moved back to New Mexico in 1972. Scott joined the Albuquerque Journal as an investigative reporter, writing film reviews on the side.

Wanting a break from the grind of news, Scott answered an ad for The Calgary Albertan, which was seeking an arts reporter. Back in Canada, he quickly made his mark, winning a 1975 National Newspaper Award for a theatre review of The Alberta Cowboy Show by Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille only a few months into his new job. The honour caught the eye of The Globe’s editor-in-chief, Richard Doyle, who hired the young star as a features reporter in 1977.

Now 28 years old, Jeffrey Scott Beaven was reborn, in byline form, as “Jay Scott.”

Initially, Scott wrote a daily Globe column called FYI, a high-low mix of gossip and news. A year later he moved over to the arts desk to cover film. While the paper boasted a decent history of film critics – starting with Roly Young in the 1930s through to Martin Knelman in the seventies – movies were a tertiary concern. The arts section was internally known as “M&D” – music and drama – derogatorily dubbed “the pansy patch.” However, Scott and a fresh batch of twentysomething writers and editors had an eye toward changing that.

“I won’t demean Jay’s predecessors by saying it was like high-school book review writing, but it was much more traditional, without his flair and creativity and unexpectedness,” says Karen York, who joined The Globe a year before Scott and would soon become his editor.

“In terms of Globe style, it was quite grey up till that point, very reportorial,” says Liam Lacey, who started on The Globe’s arts desk as a music writer two years after Scott. “Jay played around, he experimented, he had fun – he had opening graphs that were 60 words long. He threw around allusions. It was sexy, not in the range of what newspapers were doing.”

Scott listens to actor Lorne Greene's reminiscences at the 1981 National Newspaper Awards ceremony in Toronto, where Scott won the prize for critical writing.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail

Scott wrote film reviews in the form of dialogues (Woody Allen’s Interiors was critiqued via a discussion between a tragedian and a comic); fictional first-person monologues (Sidney Lumet’s The Morning After was dissected with an imagined confession from Jane Fonda’s heroine); and even multiple-choice questionnaires (Was Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia a: a rip-off of The Birds, but not as scary; b: a rip-off of Tremors, but not as funny; c: a rip-off of Gremlins, but not as clever; or d: a rip-off of Poltergeist, but not as gross? The answer: all of the above.)

When Scott loved a film, his reviews were invitations to broaden sensibilities and curiosities. On Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: “When it was all over, when the audience had applauded desultorily, too devastated and perhaps too heartbroken and certainly too depressed to summon the bravos that were demanded, Coppola’s $30-million Vietnam War movie would dissolve in the mind into one long, fluid camera movement, a movie fabricated from a single operatic take to a single operatic purpose, a movie commencing with the mundane and ending with the monstrous, a movie made with the swiftness, the silence, the subtlety – and the savagery – of a spear thrown home to the centre of the heart.”

When Scott loathed a film, his reviews were puckishly sour sucker-punches, enthusiastic exhortations to join the well-deserved pile-on. On Frank Perry’s Mommie Dearest: “What appears to be one of the worst movies this year – it was hissed at an invitational screening this week – Mommie Dearest might be a consciously subversive satire of hype, the American dream, the nuclear family, gossip-mongering and the movies themselves (no one ever goes out a door without pausing at the threshold to make a curtain speech), all filmed in the style of a Joan Crawford vehicle. Then again, it might be a hoot ‘n’ holler stinker, more dirty fun than mud wrestling.”

In one of the more infamous scenes from Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) has a meltdown after finding wire hangers, which she hates, in the closet of her adopted daughter.

Scott loved art-house dramas as much as he did glossy blockbusters. Margarethe von Trotta’s “near masterpiece” Marianne and Juliane was as worthy of serious conversation as James Cameron’s “efficient, cold-blooded” The Terminator. Movies were just one of Scott’s obsessions, though. He was a social animal, as eager to see things as he was to be seen. He devoured, and wrote about, books, music, visual art and restaurants. Scott ushered in a sea change at the paper, becoming as much of a star as those he was writing about.

As Scott’s profile rose – he published two books, hosted his own show on TVOntario, and won two more NNAs – every newspaper and magazine was desperate to find its own Jay Scott. Rival critics were eager to rise to his level, without wholly ripping him off.

“I couldn’t read him before I wrote my own review. Whatever I was struggling to write about in the back of my head would be in the front of his head,” recalls Brian D. Johnson, long-time film critic and arts writer for Maclean’s magazine. “One thing I stole from him quite consciously was that by the time that you got to the second graph of his review, you would know what was singular, groundbreaking, or new about this film – why it mattered for somebody who didn’t even go to the movies.”

Films from the New Hollywood movement, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, spurred a new style of writing about film in the 1970s and 1980s.American Zoetrope-Miramax Films/AP; supplied

Outside of Canadian journalism, things were also changing. Hollywood’s easy riders and raging bulls – Coppola, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich – were stripping the façade off the American dream and taking the real pulse of Western culture. Their roguish work required an equally rebellious strain of analysis and critique.

“Jay was part of a new wave of criticism, like Pauline Kael at The New Yorker, who sought to mix true intellect with what was going on in film,” says Harlan Jacobson, the long-time editor of Film Comment who would meet up with Scott at Cannes and Toronto. “There was an understanding with Jay that a movie was the opening salvo for a conversation about an important topic to the culture at large.”

In 1980, Scott and his wife divorced. Scott soon found a long-term romantic partner in Gene Corby, a schoolteacher. Yet he did not exactly broadcast his sexuality, at least not to his co-workers or readers.

“He was sociable and witty, but I don’t know how many people in the office were as knowledgeable about his background,” says William Thorsell, The Globe’s editor-in-chief from 1989 through 1999. “Because we were gay newsroom brothers in a sense, he would confide in a way with me and not others.”

According to Cheryl Thibedeau, Corby’s niece, Scott felt he also had to put his personal life to the side while operating inside the Hollywood machine.

“One time he interviewed Mel Gibson, he actually had him over to his house for lunch, and he invited me. But he asked me: ‘Do you really want to meet a homophobic, misogynistic man?’ No, as it turned out I didn’t,” Thibedeau recalls.

Scott was a vocal champion of emerging gay filmmakers, particularly Fassbinder and a young Pedro Almodóvar. And when he felt that homophobia was being weaponized on screen, he was ferocious: “Everybody connected with Basic Instinct should be spanked and put to bed without supper, but on the basis of the evidence at hand in this sadomasochistic disaster, they might enjoy it.”

A Jay Scott quote gets pride of place in this 1982 ad for Lola, whose director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, died that year from a drug overdose.Globe and Mail archives

The latter half of Scott’s Globe career represented a remarkable run of criticism that knew no borders, geographical or metaphorical. Just as he helped establish Toronto’s Festival of Festivals as an international destination, Scott brought the global cinema of Cannes back to Canadian readers.

“Everyone knew that Jay liked to party at Cannes, but there was a moment where you’d be at a party with him and then he was gone, returning to his hotel to write reviews until dawn, then back at morning screenings,” says Bonnie Volund, a film marketing and publicity veteran. “It’d be, ‘Oh my God, I just saw you two hours ago, how did you write that review just now?’”

Whether out of Cannes or Toronto, industry gatekeepers from every corner of the world knew that Scott could make or break movies, careers, companies and lives.

“Jay was one of those barometers – he had a feel for the moment in time, the culture, the audience,” says Tom Bernard, co-founder of New York-based Sony Pictures Classics. “He put movies on the map that no one else did, he was always on the edge, discovering new works.”

One such discovery was Diva, director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s operatic thriller that flopped when first released in France in the spring of 1981. After Diva had its North American premiere at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals that fall, Scott hailed it as “the most impressive debut from a French director since Godard’s Breathless.” Distributors were suddenly fighting with each other to secure Diva’s North American rights.

“Jay’s run was the only time since I’ve been making films where what a Canadian critic said had influence with critics elsewhere, as opposed to the other way around,” says Canadian mega-producer Robert Lantos, whose 1991 drama Black Robe became a Canadian box-office sensation in no small part due to Scott’s rave review (“a technical achievement of the highest order”). Scott’s opinion was so highly coveted that Lantos cooked up a private arrangement between them.

“I would show him a film I had produced first before anyone else in the world saw it, and in exchange for that priority, if he didn’t like the film, he would agree not to write about it until everyone else did,” Lantos explains. “But if he did like the film, Jay would write about it before anyone else, with my blessing. He had influence over any other Canadian critic and beyond our borders, too.”

In Jay Scott’s last year of film criticism, he gave four-star ratings to Aladdin (‘adults will laugh at things kids don't get’) and Unforgiven (‘who would have thought that the cheroot-smoking, poncho-wearing star of all those surreal spaghetti westerns would turn into one of Hollywood's most daring filmmakers?’). Disney, courtesy of Everett Collection; Warner Bros.

Jurassic Park underwhelmed Scott (‘a thrill or two, a chill or three, but no poetry, no wonder, no art’), and he was even less fond of The Firm (‘flabby’) and Last Action Hero (‘not a bomb but a dud’). Universal Pictures, Courtesy Everett Collection, Columbia Pictures Release

When Corby died from AIDS in 1989, it shook Scott deeply. “My uncle died a terrible AIDS death, and Jay didn’t ever want to go like that,” Thibedeau recalls. Scott himself tested HIV-positive in 1986, and by 1991 would become noticeably thin and weak. Although his pace slowed, he never stopped writing, even attending Cannes in the spring of 1993, when it was a struggle to walk the Croisette. Two months later, Scott died of AIDS.

His funeral was as unorthodox as his writing. Arranged by Stephenson and Thorsell, Scott’s ceremony was held at the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, but as per his instructions, there would be no Christian liturgy. There was, however, a boom-box blasting Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings.

Listing The Globe’s arts and culture writers who picked up Scott’s legacy – John Allemang, John Bentley Mays, John Haslett Cuff, Joanne Kates, Johanna Schneller and Stephen Godfrey (who died suddenly the same year as Scott) – threatens to require a separate chapter. Liam Lacey and Rick Groen would immediately continue to cover and expand the paper’s film coverage, albeit with Groen confessing that he was “admiring and intimidated and foolish enough to steal from Jay shamelessly.”

In the decades since Scott’s death, wave after wave of disruptive change has rocked both the journalism and film industries. As traditional print advertising crashes, arts writing is the first beat chucked overboard to save costs. Although there are now more outlets than ever offering film reviews online, only a small handful of writers can claim to make livings as full-time critics.

As for the movie business, it would likely feel both disorienting and familiar to Scott were he alive today. The streaming wars, the crash of theatrical exhibition and the overreliance on uber-franchises might seem apocalyptic to any cinema lover who remembers the 1970s. Yet Scott was all too aware of the direction that things were heading.

In his 1993 review of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, one of his last bylines before he died, Scott laid out a vision of the future. “Some day, scientists will pick through the fossilized remains of Hollywood. They will find Jurassic Park. They will screen it. They will use it to reconstruct life eons ago, when directors and producers roamed, if not ruled, the Earth. Citing the film as evidence, the scientists will release their conclusions: Movies died out because they got too big for their pea-sized brains. The scientists will have a name for the extinct species: Cinesaurus.”

Barry Hertz is film editor at The Globe and Mail.