AN ORIGINAL LOOK AT CITYTV MOGUL MOSES ZNAIMER
Ottawa Citizen, June 26, 2006
By Alex Strachan

Encounters with Moses, tonight's eccentric, cleverly conceived Life & Times profile of Citytv mogul Moses Znaimer, is a classic example of why Life & Times is so often more interesting and daring than A&E's bigger, better known Biography.

Life & Times encourages its filmmakers to bring their own unique style and vision to their subject, which is just as well: A bland, predictable biography of Znaimer, the Marshall McLuhan of the MuchMusic generation, would be ridiculous.

From his early appearances on the CBC program Take 30 and his gig hosting CBC Radio's Cross County Checkup, to his winning a UHF licence in Toronto in the early '70s and the evolution of Citytv and its audacious music twin, MuchMusic, to his flamboyant pronouncements about media and technology -- "Any sissy can make a program; real men, and women, create channels" -- Znaimer prides himself on being an original, and his life story demands original treatment.

Filmmaker Mike Sheerin tosses the Life & Times rule book at the beginning. Instead of beginning at the beginning -- Znaimer was born in 1942 to Jewish parents in Tajikistan, in the then-Soviet Union -- Sheerin sits Znaimer down in a studio and asks random, seemingly unconnected questions, broken up by seemingly random film clips and archival footage from Znaimer's past.

It's an old 60 Minutes trick -- making a famous subject watch themselves from a former life and then making them squirm with a Mike Wallace-style followup ("What were you thinking? Were you serious?") -- but Sheerin takes it one step further, by cutting to separate interviews with Znaimer's contemporaries, cohorts and critics, who weigh in with their own pithy, pointed remarks.

The result is a dazzling, innovative hour of television.

Viewers expecting a traditional profile will be disappointed -- annoyed even. Those who are looking for something more are in for a real treat.

We see flashes of Znaimer as he really is: mercurial, flamboyant, difficult, egotistical, thoughtful, maniacal, suspicious, charming, halting, decisive, infuriating, contradictory, hard to read.

"How would you describe your management style back then?" Sheerin asks him at one point.

"A combination of intensity and neglect," Znaimer replies. "A relentless improver of things," he adds later.

In a separate interview, Denise Donlon, one of the original architects of MuchMusic and one of the more respected figures on the Canadian music scene, hears that and almost doubles over in laughter.
"The relentless improver," she says. "OK."

Encounters with Moses is startlingly good – revealing and perceptive, eccentric and entertaining at the same time.

This is biography as it should be.

GO DOWN MOSES
Metro News, June 26, 2006
By Rick McGinnis

Tonight at 8 p.m. on CBC’s Life and Times, another television pioneer will be profiled. Moses Znaimer’s name might be largely unknown outside of Canada, and only sporadically recognizable elsewhere in Canada, but it’s woven into Toronto’s self-consciousness, thanks largely to Znaimer’s tireless efforts as the founder of Citytv and its empire of stations to make his fate seem inextricable from that of the city.

Mike Sheerin’s documentary paints a chilly portrait of the man as a celebrity loner whose fame is somehow undercut by an almost terminal aloofness.

Znaimer’s 2003 exit from City takes up the largest portion of the show, a management putsch described by Znaimer as a “generational rollover” by “a new gang” who had to jettison the “heavy presence” of the past, which is both perceptive and accurate, and probably informed by acute hindsight.

Znaimer might have been one of the few who predicted the age of narrowcasting and the specialization that defines the cable universe, but he clearly was caught off guard by the rejection of the cult of personality by viewers who demanded that their own personality ultimately took precedence over that of some self-styled broadcast guru – a demand that CHUM-City’s management seemed to understand much more acutely.

THREE TO SEE
National Post, June 26, 2006

Mercurial, charming, egotistical, infuriating – Moses Znaimer is all those and more. Filmmaker Mike Sheerin tries to get at the inner essence of the man in the Life & Times profile “Encounters with Moses,” by sitting down with him and asking him awkward, off-the-wall questions about life, art and, well, just about anything, really. The result is one of the more lively, engaging and eccentric Life & Times episodes you’ll see in this lifetime.

PICK OF THE DAY
The Globe and Mail, June 24, 2006
By Henrietta Walmark

Well, now we know. There was rampant speculation about Znaimer's sudden departure in 2003 from the Citytv empire he founded and ran for 30 years. By the end of this hour, it's clear whether the TV pioneer quit or was sent packing. Departing from the standard biographical format, Encounters With Moses relies on viewers to read between the lines about his career as Znaimer is simply asked to comment on archival footage from his early days as a co-host, alongside Patrick Watson, of CBC's 1969 current affairs show The Way It Is. Znaimer, ever self-contained, seems bemused by the approach. And there's a lovely wry, if guarded, quality to Znaimer's responses when questioned first about women and then about sex. This enigmatic bio is also, if inadvertently, an indictment of television by committee.

CHANNELLING LIFE OF MEDIA SEER
The North Shore News, June 23, 2006
By Rosalind Duane

Sitting across from Canadian media giant Moses Znaimer, director Mike Sheerin repeatedly asks the same question but isn't getting the response he's looking for.

It is the "fourth act" of his Life and Times feature Encounters with Moses and Sheerin is cutting to the chase. He wants to know what sparked Znaimer's sudden departure in 2003 from CITY TV after giving birth to the little Toronto station and guiding it through 30 years of growth into a cross-country powerhouse.

When Znaimer left his post, questions arose about whether he quit or was fired. In Sheerin's upcoming encounter with Znaimer, the answer is not easily forthcoming.
"There is a tension in how it's portrayed but that's because that tension actually happened," notes Sheerin.

He says he first approached Znaimer almost two years ago about the project and within a week, Znaimer had agreed to be a part of the program. Sheerin explains that the program shows the evolution of his relationship with Znaimer during the filming.

"What you see on the screen is what happened, but more than that it's the feeling that it feels authentic to the way the last two years of my life went," says Sheerin.

This isn't the first Life and Times Sheerin has been involved with. He helmed The Biographer's Voice: The Life and Times of Peter C. Newman, as well as The Secret Mulroney Tapes.

Znaimer was an easy choice for a Life and Times feature, notes Sheerin.

"When you're coming up with ideas for Life and Times it's a pretty simple thing: Who's famous in Canada and will they let us make a film about them? And I grew up in Scarborough (a suburb of Toronto) and was actually born the year that City TV was born so I grew up watching Moses' products," says Sheerin. Znaimer's TV empire also includes MuchMusic and the specialty channel Bravo.

While he always tries to take a different approach to storytelling on screen, Sheerin says it was especially important to present Znaimer's life story in an interesting way.

"It was the method in which I thought best reflected Moses' life and career. He changed the way we not only watch television but make television, so to make a documentary on him you have to take a unique approach to it as well."

One of the challenges Sheerin faced when putting the show together was balancing Znaimer's personal story and the story of his career. He says while he believes that most of the people watching the show will have already heard of Znaimer and know that he started City TV and MuchMusic, they probably won't be familiar with aspects of his personal life, including that he and his parents fled from the Nazis and settled in Montreal, but the rest of his family were killed in the Holocaust. The film includes details of how Znaimer rose from refugee to media mogul.

"There's a tug of war going on there (between showing the person versus his career); the way the film works is sort of in my mind everything comes together in the fourth act and my job is to make sure that by the time the viewer gets to the fourth act they know the significance of it," explains Sheerin. "You do have to obviously tell the story; the nuts and bolts of someone's life - what did they achieve, where were they born, what was their life like - but you also want to build a mood and you want to make sure that the viewers' mood is ready to ingest the information you're about to give them at the climax of your film so it all makes sense to them."

Sheerin says he is pleased with the final cut and notes that despite his directing and producing background, Znaimer did not have any editorial input into the project.

"Moses is very famous for his desire to control things and that's not something he apologizes for. He likes to have control and one of the big things for him was giving up not only a little bit of control but total control," notes Sheerin. "I think we got along great and he was nothing but a co-operative subject for me. So yea, it was an interesting dance at times, but overall he was a fantastic guy to work with."

Sheerin comes to documentary filmmaking from a journalism background. It was when he was attending Ryerson University's journalism program in Toronto that he took a TV course and was hooked.

"I knew I wanted to be in television and I knew fairly early on as well that I wanted to tell long-form stories, and have time to sit with the story rather than just have to pump something out in a few hours that's a minute-and-half long," says Sheerin. "It's exactly what I should be doing I think."

He notes that he particularly likes documentaries because he enjoys telling real-life stories.

"From a storyteller's point of view, it's a challenge because you have to creatively tell a story that's true, and you can't just make up a character and insert him or her somewhere in the storyline to make it more dramatic. You are bound by reality and that poses a challenge but it also poses a great way to exercise your creative muscles," he explains.

Sheerin says the market is particularly hot right now for feature-length documentaries, and Canada has a rich tradition in the documentary field because it is supported here by networks and audiences.
At 33, Sheerin says he is sure he's doing the type of work he wants to do.

"This job scratches my itch," he says. "This is my creative outlet and I love what I do."