Mission: To produce her first feature film and expand her company’s repertoire from producing documentaries to producing fiction
Assets: Experience producing, directing and writing documentaries and running her own company
Yield: Commercial success with Make Believe Media’s true crime series
By Jenny Wagler
Local filmmaker Lynn Booth credits writer Mavis Gallant with teaching her one of her most important career lessons.
It was 2005 and Booth was directing and producing one of her favourite projects: the 2006 documentary Mavis Gallant: the Writing of Mavis Gallant.
Booth remembers asking Gallant if the experimentation and wild living of Paris in the ’60s and ’70s had distracted her from her writing.
“I said, ‘Were you ever drawn into that and away from your writing?’” Booth said.
But Gallant, she said, didn’t hesitate.
“She said, ‘No, I knew I had one chance and I wasn’t going to blow it.’”
That insight, Booth said, rare for a woman of Gallant’s generation, has since inspired her to take her own work more seriously: growing and developing her film production company, Make Believe Media, which she launched in 1999.
“I committed fully to Make Believe Media and its life,” she said, noting that she’s long wrestled with the desire to drive her own creative projects as well as run her company.
“It’s always an ongoing choice: my [own] project where I get to sit in a room, write and go out and shoot it, or the company,” she said. “And I keep choosing the company.”
But if Booth credits Gallant with strengthening her resolve and commitment to her work, Booth’s long list of film accomplishments dating back to the mid-’90s point to a woman whose ideas, tenacity and market savvy have armed her to grow a successful business in the ever-changing Vancouver world of film and television.
She was honoured this month by being named Women in Film and TV Vancouver’s woman of the year.
“You have to be such a tiger to survive in this business,” Booth’s longtime colleague, director and producer Jill Sharpe said. “Every time you get the game rules straight then all the conditions of how you finance changes.”
But Sharpe said Booth has always had what it takes to succeed in the business: a fierce determination rooted in a deep love for her work. Sharpe recounts that, when financing started to dry up locally for documentary work a few years ago, Booth did not take it lying down.
“I remember Lynn getting on a plane and going to Toronto, kind of saying ‘Dammit, I’m going to get a piece of that pie,’” Sharpe said. “And she has. She just was not going to get squeezed out in the West.”
Booth’s trajectory has taken her from a University of Western Ontario degree in psychology to a brief stint on a PhD track in psychology at McMaster University to several years working as a marketing specialist in Toronto before she came to Vancouver and studied creative writing and screenwriting at the University of British Columbia (UBC) through a diploma program in applied creative non-fiction.
While completing the program, she took production and post-production workshops at artist-run co-ops in Toronto and Vancouver, cobbling together skills in things like lighting, camera work and video editing, and worked on a couple of films. But Booth said she had no clear plan at the time.
“I wanted to be a witness in the world,” she said, commenting that she was getting interested in the ideas of global citizenship and the work of non-governmental organizations.
She wrote her UBC thesis, Words of Difference, about independent press movements in Canada.
Booth wasn’t even out the door at UBC in 1994 when she secured a grant for her first film project from the BC Midwifery Task Force. Booth was writer, director and producer for Nurturing Women, an educational film about midwifery care. After hiring a team and pulling off that project, Booth ran fundraising campaigns and made documentaries for Harvey McKinnon Productions. She produced Life and Times of David Suzuki and Life and Times of William Shatner.
By 1999, Booth launched Make Believe Media. “I had my own projects that I wanted to get going on, and I just felt the best way to do that was to have my own company.”
Working with one assistant and then a researcher, Booth launched into producing and writing a series of biographies and other documentaries over the next few years, including 2001’s Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture and 2002’s Pretty Boys, which examines the male modelling industry. At the time, she said, unlike in Vancouver’s current market, local financing was available for documentary filmmakers.
“Vancouver, B.C., was the right place for me to be,” she said. “I got every kind of support that one could have dreamt of.”
In 2005, Booth and Make Believe Media hit a key turning point: developing the company’s first series, the true crime show Very Bad Men.
“By doing a series I was able to have a larger cash flow to expand my staffing, which meant that I had a larger team both on the business and the creative side, and that’s a lot of fun,” she said. “And the other thing is it’s a whole lot easier to sell 13 episodes or 26 episodes than it is to sell one episode; people in the world are looking to acquire series.”
Booth has since followed up on Very Bad Men’s success with two other true crime series, True Pulp Murder and The Devil You Know, interspersed with the occasional documentary such as last year’s No Fun City.
Booth said that while she’s always loved reading true crime, and takes inspiration from works such as Truman Capote’s groundbreaking non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, which chronicles the brutal murder of a family in 1959, she never would have imagined that she’d produce so much in the true crime genre.
But she said the market for it has been undeniable. “I pitched a lot of series about true love and butterflies and on the wonderful aspects of growing old and creativity and health and nutrition and on and on and on,” she said wryly. “But nobody wants those; they want the true crime.”
Booth plans to steer her company into new territory over the next five years: fiction. She said she’s interested in producing something in the scripted, episodic realm.
Nearer term, Booth has optioned the biography Beautiful Shadow: the Life of Patricia Highsmith and is working on both biography and feature film projects regarding the life the American thriller writer.
If a feature film is a tall order for any filmmaker, Booth is approaching it with her usual tenacity.
“I think somebody mentioned that it might not happen – that a lot of people dream of making a feature film,” she said. “ I haven’t countenanced that idea. I’m just going to carry on until I have to switch gears.”