Strike! to begin filming in May

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This article was published 22/03/2018 (2224 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Danny Schur, the city historian and playwright, is about to fulfil his silver-screen dream.

After years of lobbying actors, directors and potential investors around the world, the co-writer of Strike! The Musical has secured at least $8 million in funding and tax credits to shoot a movie adaptation of the musical, which details the events of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. The film, to be directed by Robert Adetuyi, is scheduled to begin shooting in Winnipeg no later than May 28 and is expected to take six to seven weeks, Schur says.

He says he’s gone through a roller-coaster of emotions during the 15 years since he’s came up with the Strike! idea, written the musical, and began pitching the project at the Cannes Film Festival and to power brokers in Washington, D.C.

“All of the above,” Schur replies, when asked if he was excited or relieved that his quest is close to succeeding. “The weight of the world is what I feel now. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, logistically.”

Those logistics include hiring the film crew, filling out the cast and the countless other tasks that come with filming a movie. Eventually, he hopes Winnipeggers will show their civic pride for the film’s climax, when a recreation of Bloody Saturday, when protesters clashed with police on the streets of downtown Winnipeg, will be filmed.

“We’ll be looking for 2,000 to 5,000 extras,” Schur says. “We ask Winnipeggers to do their civic duty and be part of the silent march to pay homage to citizens of 100 years ago.”

Adetuyi, who was born and grew up in Sudbury, Ont., the son of Nigerian parents, and now is based in Los Angeles, joined the project about a year ago. He specializes in musicals and dance-oriented films — he has directed You Got Served: Beat the World in 2011 and a 2017 sequel of the cheerleading film Bring it On.

He has been in Winnipeg already, scouting the Exchange District, the Manitoba Legislative Building and other key historical sites that can serve as locations for filming.

“I don’t know if it’s excited or a little bit anxious,” Adetuyi told the Free Press. “We’re getting to the creative stage, start to think about the project now from the point of view of mounting it.”

He says with the critical and financial success of musicals such as 2016’s La La Land and Broadway hits such as Hamilton and Come From Away have created a new sweet spot for original musicals such as Strike!.

“The success of Hamilton on Broadway has really brought a lot of attention to historical musicals,” Ateduyi says. “On film, with the success of La La Land, one of the new trends is the original musical on film. Mostly when you see a musical on film it’s a remake of a stage play but now you seeing original musicals hitting the screen.

“More producers are coming to me about developing musicals. Before you were out there trying to sell the idea of musicals.”

Schur is hoping to take the completed film to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January 2019, in an attempt to secure a distribution deal, but he says he has already booked the Canadian Museum for Human Rights for June 21, 1919, the 100th anniversary of the general strike’s Bloody Saturday, as the film’s commercial première.

The Winnipeg General Strike was sparked by the return of soldiers from the First World War, which ended only a few months earlier. They left their jobs to fight in the trenches of Europe, and demanded their jobs back, but factories had scaled down production after the Armistice was signed in November 1918. Labour unions across the city demanded higher wages from industries that had benefited from lucrative wartime contracts. Meanwhile, an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, had flooded into Winnipeg and also sought jobs in the city’s metal fabrication and construction industries. Protests against the strikers were launched, stoked by fears of Canada’s increased immigration. Strike leaders were arrested in June 1919, and on June 21, 1919, protests were launched against the arrests and clashed with anti-strike protesters and the North West Mounted Police. One person, Mike Sokolowski, died in the melee.

Sokolowski is a pivotal character in the musical, and in the film he will be played by Canadian character actor Bruce Greenwood, who last appeared in film as former U.S. defence secretary Robert McNamara in the 2017 Steven Spielberg newspaper drama The Post. Schur says Greenwood can’t wait for shotting to start at Portage and Main.

“He just totally embraced this project,” Schur says of Greenwood, who has also appeared in the 2009 reboot of Star Trek as well as countless other movies and TV shows.

Greenwood joins British actress Samantha Barks in the film. In 2015, Schur pitched the film to Barks, the former star of the Broadway production of Les Misérables, and she agreed to play Rebecca, the musical’s female lead in Strike!. She has remained on board, and Schur’s said Barks’s tight schedule — she will star in the Broadway production of Pretty Woman: The Musical, which opens in July — is the reason why filming has to take place this spring.

“When I read the script, I hadn’t read something of this quality for a long time,” Adetuyi says. “I was excited to receive a project of this nature. Samantha Barks was already attached and I loved her in Les Miz. Not only was I reading a great script but one with a leading lady attached really elevated the project.”

Mexican actor Diego Boneta will play Mike Sokolowski’s son, who is romantically linked to Rebecca, the relationship at the heart of Strike!, says Schur.

“They’re going to make an astonishing Romeo and Juliet,” Schur says.

Schur says they’ve made “thousands of tweaks” to the script of the musical that Schur co-wrote with Rick Chafe and was performed at Rainbow Stage in 2004. Characters have been combined and one character, a housemaid, becomes an African-Canadian instead of an Irishwoman, at Atuduyi’s suggestion.

“I’ve done a lot of research on Canadian history on black people and Hispanic cultures, and I thought the film should represent that,” Atuduyi says. “In Winnipeg there was a black community in 1919, and one of the first things I said is we should make one of the key roles a black person.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall