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Crime Wave sweeps city!

Broadcast Date: July 17, 1987

John Paizs might be Winnipeg's biggest filmmaking success story. Movies have been Paizs's calling since the age of 11, when he first experimented with his dad's 8-mm camera. He's made nine movies in as many years and been invited to the Toronto Film Festival to present a series of shorts called The Three Worlds of Nick. In this clip, CBC Winnipeg profiles Paizs and his movies as his feature Crime Wave begins a record-breaking run at the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque.

Crime Wave sweeps city!

• John Paizs, the son of Hungarian immigrants, was born in 1958 and grew up in Winnipeg's ethnically diverse North End.
• While making movies in his spare time, Paizs worked as a traffic counter for the City of Winnipeg. His job was to sit in a booth and track the movement of cars through city intersections. A character in his film Crime Wave does the same job.

• Paizs's earliest movies were made using claymation and animation, and he worked as an animator on local TV commercials.
• In the early 1980s he branched into live action, making five shorts with the resources and pooled talent of the Winnipeg Film Group.
• "When I started filmmaking, the films produced by the Winnipeg Film Group were earnest, socially conscious slices of small town Canadiana. I brought a New Wave sensibility to my films," Paizs said in a 1999 interview.

• Three of Paizs's shorts — Springtime in Greenland, Oak, Ivy and Other Dead Elms and The International Style — are thematically linked through the main character, a strong, silent type named Nick. Packaged together as The Three Worlds of Nick, they were screened at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in 1984 — the first Winnipeg Film Group productions to play the festival.

• Crime Wave, a feature, was Paizs's next movie. The film is narrated by 12-year-old Kim (Eva Kovacs), who relates the story of aspiring colour-crime writer Steven Penny (Paizs in a non-speaking role). Penny, a tenant living above Kim's parents' garage, writes dynamic beginnings and endings to his scripts, but gets stuck with middles.
• The movie, shot in "eye-popping hues of fake Technicolor," was inspired by 1950s instructional films and by the work of American director John Waters.

• Crime Wave played Toronto's film festival in 1985. A Boston critic hailed it as "the funniest Canadian film ever made." But Paizs was unhappy with audience reaction to the film's conclusion and shot a new one.
• "I knew Crime Wave's ending lacked something. I could hear people laughing all the way through the first hour, but then it gets dark and there was silence," Paizs told Take One in 1999. "It never became a cult hit, but it really did connect with anyone who has a dream to make it."

• The movie played at festivals in the United States but never opened in theatres. Its distributor didn't know how to promote it, saying, "It's not a picture for everyone. It requires special handling."
• Crime Wave was eventually released on video as The Big Crime Wave. It occasionally airs on late-night television.
• In 1997 the Manitoba film industry named Crime Wave the Best Film of the Decade at its biannual Blizzard Awards.

• Paizs moved to television in the early 1990s, making films for Kids in the Hall and directing episodes of the series Maniac Mansion.
• In 1999 Paizs was back at the Toronto International Film Festival as director of Top of the Food Chain. The sci-fi B-movie parody is about a dying town whose TV reception goes fuzzy right before aliens begin dining on the locals.
• As of 2004 Paizs is Director in Residence at the National Film Centre in Toronto.

• Peter Jordan, a Winnipeg musician and actor who appears in this clip and in Paizs's Oak, Ivy and Other Dead Elms, later became a CBC personality. His best-known work was in a series called It's A Living, in which Jordan tried out several new jobs each week.
• Eva Kovacs, who plays Kim in Crime Wave, is (as of 2004) a news anchor for Global television in Winnipeg.

Crime Wave sweeps city!

Medium: Television

Program: 24 Hours

Broadcast Date: July 17, 1987

Guest(s): Peter Jordan, John Paizs

Reporter: Robert Enright

Duration: 4:49

Film credits: Favorite Films, Zeitgeist Films, Winnipeg Film Group

Last updated:
Sept. 10, 2004