VANCOUVER VICE

Intelligence, A New TV Series, Updates Our Tawdry Past With
Cross-Border Espionage

The old black-and-white photographs, looming over red-velour booths
like frescoes at an Orthodox church, tell of a Vancouver long gone
but still here, little-known and yet profoundly iconic. Deep within
the black-and-lavender cinder-block facade of the Penthouse Night
Club, still on Seymour Street after almost 60 years, are the
permanently smiling faces of Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and
Johnnie Ray, each luminary caught in frozen-'50s moments of
three-olive splendour beside various round-faced Philliponi brothers.
These include garrulous club founder Joe, who survived late-'70s
trials for running a "common bawdy house" only to be shot dead in his
club in 1983.

The legacy of sin, soul, and sudden death is not unique to the
Penthouse, but such repositories of the city's secret history,
although still bawdy, are considerably less common today.

This nexus certainly fascinated Chris Haddock while he was wrapping
his long-running series Da Vinci's Inquest, and the veteran
writer-producer found himself contemplating the Canada not seen in
Heritage Moments. That's when he came up with Intelligence, a new
dramatic series airing on CBC beginning Tuesday (October 10) at 9 p.m.

When scouting locations for the show--which crosscuts between the
worlds of drug sales and international espionage, contrasting rural
drug runs on boats and floatplanes with urban turf wars on the street
and in high-security government buildings--he realized that the
Penthouse would make a uniquely atmospheric home base for the show.
Think Cheers with guns, grass, and silicone tits.

"This place is like an archaeological site," the producer says on a
blindingly sunny Monday afternoon upon emerging from the club to
light a big cigar. "Every layer from the 1940s to the present is
still here, all piled up in such fascinating ways," he continues
before going back in and showing off labyrinthine quarters on at
least four levels.

A while later, series costar John Cassini, who plays the fellow who
runs the Chik-a-Dee--the club's fictional counterpart--mentions:
"This thing is so big and mysterious that apparently Sammy Davis Jr.
stayed here for a week sometime in the '60s, while recovering from
some divorce or something, and hardly anybody even knew he was here."

For his part, Haddock wasn't all that interested in the show-biz side
of his dig, which serves as headquarters for the show's complicated
hero (Jimmy Reardon, as played by Da Vinci alumnus Ian Tracey), along
with his business partner (Cassini) and Jimmy's troublemaking brother
(Bernie Coulson). As a writer, Haddock was drawn to the grey areas
that we generalize as crime.

In particular, the local history of rum-running and pot-smuggling
seemed like territory that shouldn't remain uncharted.

And he knew he could cover more ground by throwing in elements of
modern law enforcement, represented by Panama-born Klea Scott as the
new head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit, as well as various
stray players from Ottawa and Washington, D.C., each jockeying for
authority in a post-9/11 world.

More than anything, the show (which started life as a two-hour pilot
that played earlier this year) is really a vehicle for Tracey, whose
character embodies everything the producer finds fascinating about
the Coast's unwritten history.

"I told CBC, early in the process of making Da Vinci," explains
Haddock, now ensconced in one of the lap-dancing booths upstairs,
"that if I ever did another show for them, I wanted it to feature
Ian. I knew he could carry his own show and deserved it. He's just so likable.

No matter what he does, you just empathize with the guy. So I was
curious to see him as an antihero, and I had always had this idea
about a smuggler.

I think that this defines us somehow: that if you've never smuggled
anything, you're not really a Canadian."

Years earlier, the producer had written a script for a feature about
a pot mover who came from a long line of coastal bootleggers. Now he
wanted to marry that notion to a tale of cross-border spies in which
ethics, the social good, and loyalty would all be qualities as
rapidly shifting as the price of B.C. bud.

"I had been reading something about the IRA and the whole idea of
sides becoming so intertwined. So I was interested in taking a drug
runner who has inherited his grandfather's 'shipping' business and
making him a kind of supergrass, involved with the intelligence agencies.

I tossed around these ideas and went back to the CBC with them."

With a go on that, Haddock homed in on the Penthouse, finding the
milieu perfect for low-key gangsters who here struggle to lead
interesting, if not quite normal, lives even as they work to maintain
their share of a market being invaded by bikers and Hong Kong triads.

For his part, Tracey was anxious to play a character allowing him to
shade his charisma towards the dark side. At 42, the craggy
B.C.--born actor combines his effortlessly rugged demeanour with an
irreducibly boyish charm.

He started as a child actor, playing Huck Finn in a late-'70s TV
series, and he even had a small part in Robert Lantos's infamous In
Praise of Older Women. Currently, he's best known as Mick Leary, the
upright detective he played on Da Vinci, interrupting his seven
seasons to win a Gemini for his lead in CTV's Milgaard.

On the short-lived follow-up, Da Vinci's City Hall, he was promoted to coroner.

Here, though, he's squarely on the other side of the law, although
circumstances throw him together with Scott's police director, and
the two begin a delicate dance of survival, helping each other
separate the bad guys from the even-worse guys.

Camille Sullivan, who likewise played a detective on the old show
(and can be seen in the locally made Mount Pleasant), is also aboard
as the smuggler's cokehead ex-wife, with whom he has ongoing custody
problems involving their young daughter. All in all, the guy has
quite a lot going against him, although so far Jimmy Reardon has
rather gracefully navigated the increasingly choppy waters.

"Chris I had tossed around a number of ideas over the years," Tracey,
relaxed in a dark blue suit, explains over a smoke in the shaded lane
behind his Penthouse office. "And this is the one that stuck. What
struck me was the idea of marijuana in this country being a lot like
the stages of Prohibition in the States. It suggested a lot of story
lines and a lot of dramatic avenues."

Inside, he had just finished multiple takes of a business meeting
inside the crowded club, with statuesque waitresses drifting by while
a plasticized beauty gyrated silently in a G-string behind the tense
confrontation. From a distance, via wireless headphones and a large
video monitor, the scene was supervised calmly by episode director
Sturla Gunnarsson and cinematographer David Frazee, who both directed
various episodes of Da Vinci.

The following week, the versatile Tracey--who moonlights as a soulful
guitarist and harmonica man--is set to direct episode 10 of the
13-part season. It's clear that he is intimately involved with the
conception of the show.

"Da Vinci was a lot about procedure--about victims and perpetrators.
With this show, we're kind of digging into the cause of some of those
crimes. We've seen a lot of DEA and FBI over the years, but from a
Canadian point of view, we haven't really tapped into stories about
CSIS and our own intelligence services before."

Like Traffic, the movie and series, Intelligence uses the concept of
drug commerce as an opportunity to examine how life really operates
here. If nudity, violence, and unbleeped profanity help draw
attention to that complexity, so much the better.

Haddock says it's all part of the balance of entertainment and social
commentary that Intelligence has already come to represent, even
before it begins its first season. And he thinks unprecedented
network freedom has a lot to do with the integrity of the show.

"We negotiated two 'fucks' per hour," he explains. I'm too polite to
ask what that means. But you can be sure that Sammy Davis Jr. would understand.