Hotel Manager

Giving orders: Ken Finkleman on the set of At the Hotel.

Screenwriters Ellen Vanstone and Morwyn Brebner lounge on a bed at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel, swirling drinks in hand, discussing their involvement in Ken Finkleman’s new CBC miniseries, At the Hotel. The filmmaker himself paces nearby, concerned.

“Ken had a hotel story,” Vanstone offers. “Kind of a Love Boat crossed with Twin Peaks: strange characters coming and going, music, comedy, a murder…”

“Adultery,” Brebner adds, laughing, moments before a bellhop arrives, bearing a silver tray of baby hamburgers.

In addition to the writers and the director, there are another hundred people or so circulating in the Royal York Imperial Room’s honeymoon suite set. It’s the launch party for the series. At the Hotel’s musical director, Robert Carli, is as giddy as a truant schoolboy; he tells me of the joy he experienced conspiring with Finkleman to re-create the series’ musical numbers, which range from opera to Broadway show tunes to the Ink Spots’ classic single That Cat is High.

Everyone in the room seems happy except for Finkleman, the Winnipeg-born, ex-Hollywood plot mechanic who got Airplane II: The Sequel off the ground before returning to Canada to produce, create and star in the international Emmy award-winning TV saga, The Newsroom (1996-2005). There’s a reason the filmmaker seems jumpy. In minutes, he will pull an Edward R. Murrow from Good Night, and Good Luck, publicly scolding the CBC for “paying too much attention to ratings.”

As if anticipating the filibuster, Vanstone explains, “Ken works best when he’s embattled. He loves it on set, managing chaos.” When I advise the screenwriter that Finkleman has a reputation for filling the answering machines of unappreciative critics, she laughs. “He goes after TV executives, too.”

One of Finkleman’s gifts is his ability to shield colleagues from the business side of show business. When I visited the set of Finkleman’s Foolish Hearts in 1999, I encountered a grip who exclaimed, “working on this show doesn’t feel like a job, it’s fun.” Of course, the trick in producing successful television is permitting the audience to share in the excitement of creative activity. Viewers who thought Finkleman phoned in the last instalment of The Newsroom should be heartened by At the Hotel: it’s Finkleman’s most fanciful and ambitious project to date.

Hired help: Natalie Lisinska stars in At the Hotel.

The show features a number of eccentrics — “chambermaids, show-business types, murderers, detectives,” according to Vanstone — who pass through the fictional Chateau Rousseau. The characters, played by an inspired cast that includes Maury Chaykin, Alberta Watson, Tom McCamus and Martha Henry, first had to go through what Vanstone calls “the Ken filter.” That is, “his twisted Winnipeg-law school-Hollywood-CBC way of telling a story. Ask him about the filter.”

I do just that. Twelve hours later, we cut from the bustle of the Royal York to Finkleman’s Toronto office, an under-decorated seventh-floor space a short stroll from Chinatown. Like most writers, Finkleman seems glad to be interrupted from work on a Friday afternoon. That said, he reacts to my first question as if he’s bitten into bad seafood.

“Twisted Winnipeg-law school…?” He tries to get Vanstone on the phone. She isn’t home. He decides not to leave a blistering message.

As it turns out, the filmmaker is more than happy to talk about how he quit law school to follow brother Danny Finkleman, then a popular CBC radio correspondent, to Toronto in the early ’70s, landing a writing job along with Dan Aykroyd on a show featuring Norm Crosby, a well-known comedian, as a deaf talk-show host who read lips. After winning a Gemini writing for King of Kensington, Finkleman went to Hollywood, where he says, “I learned leverage. The second I signed a deal with Paramount, I pitched Warner Brothers over the phone, saying, ‘I can’t do anything for you now, I’m working for Paramount.’ In Hollywood, everyone wants what they can’t have.”

Finkleman eventually soured on assembly-line writing. (For him, the only glad reminders of his work on Grease 2 and the Madonna vehicle Who’s That Girl? are the residuals.) Finkleman’s career changed forever in the early ’90s, when he got the filmmaking equivalent of religion, discovering the European art films of people like Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Returning to Canada, he created the acid satires The Newsroom, More Tears and Foolish Hearts.

Finkleman’s Newsroom alter ego, George Findlay, never checks into At the Hotel. “There was no place for me; I can only play myself,” he shrugs. Still, there is reason to believe Vanstone when she says that the Chateau Rousseau is all in Finkleman’s head. The characters are all showbiz people (like Don McKellar’s rock video director) or theatrical types — hotel owner Martha Henry and faithful butler Hrant Alianak do a sly take on Gloria Swanson and Eric von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard.

Chateau Finkleman, on the other hand, is a curiously circumscribed world. The director doesn’t watch television, finish many books, or pay attention to Hollywood movies. Nevertheless, he understands his own career. “Ken’s filter” is particularly evident in an interlude in the second episode of At the Hotel. A long-separated comedy team, wonderfully played by Maury Chaykin and Kathleen Laskey, reconvene at the hotel to rehearse for a TV special.

“That was fun,” Finkleman beams. “I saw Maury’s part as Fred in Ginger & Fred. You know, the Fellini movie. He’s a hack who drinks too much, but has come to terms with himself. Maury was great. I played him Nichols and May albums, and then Shelley Berman — brilliant comedian — to help him get the rhythm of stand-up. Anne, [the character’s] partner, I modelled her after a TV writer I knew, very correct, never married.” Finkleman writes the name of a recognizable figure on paper, holding it aloft without speaking into my tape recorder.

While the filmmaker exhibits a contagious, child-like enthusiasm talking about the creative challenge of television, as a producer, he will always be tilting at executives and critics. Fighting seems an essential part of Finkleman’s job description. “I can’t deliver [large audience] numbers,” he admits. “I can only try to do good television. You try, you hope it works. Sometimes it does.”

At the Hotel debuts Tuesday, March 7 at 9 p.m. on CBC-TV.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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