OTTAWA – Danny Schur has, over more than 15 years, put his creative and emotional heart into telling the story of a Ukrainian immigrant who became a pivotal figure in his account of Canada’s most famous labor strike 100 years ago. But it was Mr. Schur’s physical heart that nearly felled the Ukrainian Canadian award-winning music composer and producer before the culmination of much of his life’s labour hit the big screen.
While playing in goal in a pickup-hockey game on the evening of September 30 in his hometown, Winnipeg, Mr. Schur, 53, suffered a heart attack. It was as surprising as it was scary.
A regular runner who plays hockey three times a week, six-foot-tall, 185-pound Mr. Schur is in good shape. But when he was rushed to the hospital, the medical team discovered that one of his cardiac arteries was 90 percent blocked and required the insertion of a stent to keep blood flowing – and Mr. Schur alive.
The medical emergency was also heartbreaking on the professional level.
Since he’s grounded from flying for two months, Mr. Schur had to miss an advance screening of his new multimillion-dollar movie, “Stand!” (http://stand-movie.com/) at the Canadian Embassy in Washington on October 3, and had to take a pass from attending the movie musical’s U.S. premiere on November 9 at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, where he had personally hoped to pitch the feature to distributors.
“Stand!” builds on “Strike! The Musical” (http://www.strikemusical.com/), which is set against the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike that began on May 15 that year and claimed the life of a Ukrainian immigrant, Mike Sokolowski, and injured some 30 others when the strike reached a boiling point on June 21 in what became known as “Bloody Saturday.”
Mike Sokolowski (played by American star, Gregg Henry, left in pics – the father) and Stefan Sokolowski (played by Canada’s Marshall Williams).
In both the theatrical and cinematic versions, a character based on Sokolowski leaves behind his wife and three children in Ukraine, and comes to Canada during the first world war with his eldest son, Stefan, hoping to find work and earn enough money to bring the rest of the family to join them. However, the father and son, as with thousands of other Ukrainians who arrived in Canada with Austro-Hungarian citizenship, were declared enemy aliens and sent to an internment camp.
At war’s end, Sokolowski senior and junior end up Winnipeg and find themselves in a city ignited by the strike. Stefan supports the massive labor disruption, which saw some 30,000 people take to the streets and falls in love with his pro-strike, Ukrainian-born Jewish suffragette neighbor, Rebecca. Fearing they will all be deported because of the budding romance, Mike turns against the strikers.
(The interfaith Romeo-and-Juliet angle was inspired by a Catholic-Jewish marriage in Mr. Schur’s family.)
Unlike “Strike!” that focused on the Ukrainians caught up in the general strike, “Stand!” broadens the plotline to introduce new characters who come together from different backgrounds to fight for their rights.
The wider story was not Mr. Schur’s idea, but that of Robert Adetuyi, a Sudbury, Ontario-born filmmaker and screenwriter in Hollywood whom Mr. Schur tapped to direct the movie musical.
“In our first conversation, he said to me that it was a very white story,” explained Ethelbert, Manitoba-born Mr. Schur. “He himself is a man of color and has a very interesting immigrant story. His dad was from Nigeria and was the first black man to settle in Sudbury in the mid-1940s and fell in love with a German-born woman.”
Changes were made. Emma the Irish maid in “Strike!” became Emma the black maid in “Stand!”
The character switch was based as much on history as it was in expanding the racial content, according to Mr. Schur.
Between 1907 and 1919, black Oklahoman farmers came up to Canada and made their homes in Winnipeg and as far west as Edmonton and Vegreville, Alberta – known as the home of the world’s largest pysanka – near where an all-black community called Amber Valley was established in 1909.
“Blacks and Ukrainians would hang out together because they were the two dispossessed people at the time,” said Mr. Schur, who similarly “swapped out” an Irish character from the stage production and replaced him with a Métis veteran of World War I.
“The Ukrainian-Canadian experience becomes a metaphor for all these dispossessed people – be it immigrants, immigrants of color and Indigenous people who were treated so poorly,” he explained.
Adapting the musical into a film was not Mr. Schur’s idea initially.
“During the first run of the musical in Winnipeg in 2005, [actor] Jeff Goldblum was sitting beside me on the second last night – he was going out with the female lead [Winnipeg-born Catherine Wreford],” recalled Mr. Schur. “He said to me, ‘Big story. Big ideas. It would make a great movie.’ And I thought, wow if Jeff Goldblum believes that, I should pursue it.”
And pursue it Mr. Schur did.
“Stand!” opens on Cineplex screens in 30 Canadian cities on November 29 – an “unparalleled” and “unprecedented” achievement for a Canadian independent movie without either a studio’s backing or a distributor’s involvement, according to Mr. Schur, who convinced Toronto-based Cineplex Inc. executives of the timeliness and relevance of the musical feature.
He argued that although the movie is set 100 years ago, it today is “a metaphor for current nativism and demonization of immigrants.”
To put the wide Canadian release of “Stand!” in perspective, Mr. Schur said that it joins other mega-budget films, such as “Frozen 2,” which comes out a week before, and the Christmastime arrivals of the latest “Star Wars” movie and “Cats,” based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary musical.
“This is an international story about the success of the Canadian film industry,” said Mr. Schur. “A Canadian film has cornered market advantage through underdog pluck that rivals the most entrepreneurial U.S. or European efforts.”
In addition to writing the movie’s lyrics, music and score, and co-writing the screenplay, Mr. Schur was also the co-producer – and it’s difficult to imagine “Stand!” hitting as many theaters as it will, let alone getting off the ground in the first place without him.
As creative as he is, Mr. Schur is also a doggedly determined businessman who began hyping “Stand!” to The Ukrainian Weekly this past spring.
It took him five years to secure $7 million (about $5.4 million U.S.) in financing for the production. “I had no idea how tough it is to raise that kind of cash,” Mr. Schur said.
“It’s still less than one episode of ‘Game of Thrones,’ but for a Canadian movie, 7 million dollars is an awful lot.”
A substantial amount of the equity (one-third of the budget) came from Winnipeg’s Ukrainian Canadian community, including the Taras Shevchenko Foundation and some 20 individual investors.
The feature, which was shot in Winnipeg between August and September of last year, also received significant support from the city’s crown jewel – the renowned Canadian Museum of Human Rights – the only national Canadian museum outside of the capital region – that includes an exhibit on the 1919 strike.
The museum will distribute digital copies of “Stand!” to over 750,000 students in Canada and the U.S.
Canada’s labor movement contributed $1.25 million ($957,000 U.S.) for the Canadian distribution, while American labor gave $400,000 U.S. for the digital downloads.
“This movie will engage a new generation in the vital role they can play in standing up for justice and fairness,” said Martin O’Hanlon, president of CWA Canada, the country’s oldest and only all-media union in a news release last year.
“The message is especially timely and important in the age of [Donald] Trump, when we need to fight right-wing efforts to crush unions and suppress wages and workers’ rights.”
CWA Canada, an autonomous branch of the Communications Workers of America union, also contributed $10,000 ($7,600 U.S.) to the student-distribution project.
Mr. Schur hopes that high box-office numbers for “Stand!” will whet the appetite for more presentations of the live version of the story in “Strike!”
This summer, the production played at Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage, Canada’s largest and longest-running outdoor theater, 15 years after “Strike!” made its debut in an elaborate staging on the streets of Winnipeg, where the events of the strike unfolded.
“It’s not like a painting that you finish and it’s done,” said Mr. Schur. “The beauty of stage and movies is that the two reinforce each other, and in our case, the more success the movie has, the more desire there is for the stage show.”
He’s hoping to bring “Strike!” to Canada’s largest city, Toronto, as well as the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and – thanks to an anonymous investor who also happens to be a Broadway producer – present the musical in the North American theater world’s capital in New York as soon as next autumn.
Meanwhile, “Stand!” had a red-carpet screening at Winnipeg’s 2,305 seat Centennial Concert Hall on September 24. The black-tie gala featured the director and stars, artifacts from the stage production were displayed throughout the theater, and Mr. Schur ensured that “perogies” were on the reception menu for guests.
His recent health scare has done nothing to diminish his passion for promoting what has become the greatest production of his career to date.
“If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, this could be my epitaph. But I’m by no means close to being done with this,” said Mr. Schur, who following his recent cardiac-rehab exercise stress test was told by the doctor that he has “a Lance Armstrong-like ability to process oxygen.”
Mr. Schur also hopes that his 20-year-old daughter Anna – an aspiring storyteller like her father – will become involved in sharing the Sokolowski saga on stage with more of the world.
“I told her that she’s probably going to be working for her old man and doing ‘Strike!’ somewhere.”