Alliance Atlantis

One of the companies that changed the landscape of Canada in film distribution was Atlantis Alliance. Distributing films in Canada is complicated at best, and the history is a bleak lesson of what happens when you let another country control your airwaves. 

Out of the many failed attempts and ventures to kick start distribution of Canadian films in Canada, there were some few successes. The few successful distribution empires that rose from the nation became some of the most prolific in North America. One of these companies was Alliance Atlantis, the most prolific film distributor in Canadian history. The company’s history starts in a perfect grey zone of time. That period was the turn of the decade in the 1970s when the focus was on protecting Canadian content and the fight for recommended Canadian film quotas and federal funding. 

Alliance Atlantis was the hidden gem many Canadians had been waiting for. The company would generate profits from producing, distributing, and broadcasting films and television programs and then redistributing those funds back into the Canadian economy.

The company originated in the 1970s when the founders formed various production companies. The first was the International Cinemedia Center, headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. In 1971, four National Film Board of Canada executives, John Kemeny, Joe Koenig, and George Kaczender, formed the center to develop documentaries.  

Kemeny and his partner Heroux oversaw several Canada and France co-productions, including Atlantic City(1980), Quest for Fire(1981), and 1984’s ill-fated Louisiana. The Louisiana shoot was an epic nightmare, marred by floods, budget overruns, insurance problems, a change of directors, and ongoing tension between Kemeny and star Margot Kidder.

A year after the International Cinemedia Center was founded, the other key players of Alliance Films were entering the film industry. One up-and-coming young man was Robert Lantos. 

Lantos was born on 3 April 1949 in Budapest and spent much of his childhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his family fled after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He immigrated to Canada in 1963. Lantos studied literature at McGill University in Montreal and graduated with a BA in 1970 and an MA in 1972. He was a self-described 14-year-old penniless immigrant who didn’t speak English or French.

Lantos had a pleasure that not many other filmmakers nor most film students had. His McGill mentor and professor would happen to be John Grierson, founder of The National Film Board of Canada. Lantos attributed most of the knowledge he learned about filmmaking in school to Grierson. He described his teachings from Grierson as happening in a hotel room on Crescent Street Montreal, usually with eight or nine people in attendance, where all the students drank copiously during his anecdotal lectures. Lantos only had one course with Grierson throughout his two-year program. He found it the most interesting and considered it his only genuine glimpses and insights into the real world of film that provided a touch of reality.

In the '60s and early '70s, film departments were very politicized. Most of the learning featured more time screening, writing papers, and watching experimental films than Hollywood productions. Even discussing the ones that played in current theatres was highly disapproved of. Lantos had already spent six years in university studying English literature and then fllm communications. At McGill University, He would meet his long-time best friend, Victor Loewy, an immigrant born in Romania. The two McGill students formed a bond. Lantos would hitchhike to school, and Loewy would pick him up. 

Lantos remembers telling Grierson his dream was to write, direct, and produce films for the CBC and the NFB. He asked Grierson if he could write him a reference letter.

Grierson told him he would, but this was a bad idea, and his fastest career route at the NFB would be to work his way in as a driver for the NFB staff rather than applying as a filmmaker, As they had a high turnover. However, he still provided Lantos with a reference letter and set him up with a meeting with the 10th commissioner of the National Film Board.

When progressing through the interview process, Lantos quickly realized he didn’t have the genetic makeup to work with government institutions. The commissioner would sit down with Lantos for high tea and talk him for a walk through the corridors of the National Film Board. Through this walk, he would be introduced to several filmmakers who had spent 10 to 20 years at the film board just waiting to make a film. Lantos was discouraged but not defeated, so he started his career through film distribution.

Even though Lantos’s film career at McGill wasn’t made for his chosen career path, he enjoyed it as it gave him an ability and moment in time to look at films and the world from a purely theoretical point of view. In future interviews, he acknowledged that it impeded him commercially when push came to shove. He was forced to make black-and-white decisions from a commercial perspective, and over-analyzing films tended to be counter-productive. His university training was to analyze and look for shades of meaning and interpretations and to know many interpretations and points of view. To think in those terms was not conducive to commercial success in distribution. One of the most prolific Canadian films that inspired Lantos to explore Canadian filmmaking was The Apprenticeship of Daddy Kravitz(1974). The Apprenticeship of Daddy Kravitz has been designated as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.

The 1970s was home to a filmmaking boom in Canada, and it was a market or opportunity. Money flowed everywhere and was up for grabs, even for inexperienced filmmakers. It was time to jump in, sink, or swim, and Lantos knew what he had to do. But he wanted to make a name for himself in producing ambitious films. It was a rough start. 

In 1972, Lantos was wrapping up his university experience and was ending it on a high note. At the time, Lantos was still in graduate school, freelancing as a writer and researcher for The Montreal Star and CBC Radio. Lantos was enthralled by the thriving counterculture of New York City and caught wind of an event called The Best of The New York Erotic Film Festival led by Andy Warhol, the head of the jury at the Film Festival that year. He had seen an ad in The Village Voice and read that Gore Vidal was on the jury with Warhol, so he was convinced he should attend.

Another thing that excited Lantos about the New York Erotic Film Festival was that many of the filmmakers whose films were in the Festival were filmmakers whose films “he had studied or viewed while he was in his film program.”

The event grew out of the 60s' experimental and underground making that merged with erotic cinema at this time. It was the beginning of the lifting of censorship of porn. It was a significant event in New York where all sorts of experimental filmmakers sent in their shorts in a competition.

Somehow, Lantos convinced CBC Radio and the Montreal Star to provide him with $100 to travel to New York to report on the festival. In a Playback Online Hall of Fame article, Lantos is fond of this period. “There was no plan,” he said, grinning as he recounted his entry into film distribution with The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival in the ’70s. I just wanted to have fun. I wanted to go to New York. I wanted to see films. I wanted to party.”. 

Lantos agreed to buy the rights to the ten short film winners and figured he could have them ‘spliced together’ into one feature-length film. But first, he had to buy the rights and find the right market. Not to mention buying the Canadian rights of the prize-winners, somehow bringing them to Canada, and getting them through censorship. This would be Canada's first official theatrical theatrical showing of explicit material if he were successful. Lantos saw the subject matter as “appealing to an audience that would have never seen movies like that and certainly would have never been caught dead watching pornography.”

 The documentary compilation he acquired was a collection of short subjects entitled The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival(1972). A  trailer for this film is still available on the Internet today, and one of the shorts, a documentary entitled Eyetoon (1968), is also available. However, the distribution of the film is now limited to Australia.

 Lantos needed money to purchase the rights to the films from the filmmakers and attempted to raise some funds, but he mostly failed. Finally, he put together a few hundred dollars, of which the various filmmakers agreed to send him a print of their film on loan for 30 or 60 days while he tried to get it through censorship and raise additional money to pay for the rights. He made the rounds of Famous Players in Toronto and Montreal and other theatre chains with a can of 16mm film consisting of a dozen shorts.

This was a huge learning experience for Lantos; he discovered that central offices programmed movie theatres controlled an entire circuit and were inaccessible to somebody off the street. To show a movie, you would have to have a distribution company with ongoing relationships with the theatre circuits, which he didn't have. He also discovered that they didn't play 16mm film in movie theatres and only played shorts spliced together if they played short films. It looked bleak for Lantos and the Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival, but Lantos had one more trick up his sleeve. 

While Lantos struggled for distribution, Moses Znaimer, a fellow graduate of McGill University, had just launched CityTV in 1972 in Toronto and was barely staying on air by running late-night erotica to attract viewers and advertisers. One of these late-night programming blocks was The Baby Blue Movie, which ran on the air from 1972 to 1975  to “motivate” viewers to search Canada’s First Commercial Ultra high frequency (UHF) station. One of these other films was I am Curious Yellow(1967), a notorious ‘art’ picture from Sweden subject to a famous US Supreme Court judgment.

Within weeks of launching his station, Znaimer was looking for new content. He wanted films with better sound, good-looking actors, and exteriors. One day, while projecting films and previewing what he could air next, Robert Lantos walked into his office, fresh off the boat from Montreal and hot off the heels of one of his first startups, a small exploitation film distribution company in partnership with Steve Roth a fellow friend of Znaimer’s from Mcgill University.  This film distribution company was called Derma Communications/Films (meaning skin in Latin). The film Lantos, presented Znaimer, was The Best of The New York Erotic Film Festival.

Znaimer thought it was hilarious and agreed to buy it. Lantos originally wanted $6,000 for the film but agreed to a price of $600 upfront. Znaimer’s budget for operating the station was $200 an hour, and because Znaimer had never met him before, he wasn’t quite sure if Lantos was trying to scam him. Lantos promptly left the station cheque in hand and flew back to New York to secure the rights to the film he had just sold, leaving an optimistically cautious Znaimer behind, wondering if he would ever see his money again.

This small transaction would break Lantos and Derma into the industry and provide the stepping stones needed to get Derma Communications off the ground and establish it as a reputable name. It would also set the groundwork for the formation of RSL Entertainment, which he founded with Stephen J. Roth in 1975. It was the first formal film sale Lantos ever made. 

The two partners officially formed Derma Communications in 1971. Still, according to an October 1985 Cinema Canada article, Lantos called it “a joke” because of the section of the film industry they were in. 

It’s clear through various media that the relationship between Robert Lantos and Moses Znaimer was interesting. Both of them have slightly different retellings of the start of Derma Communications. Znaimer’s retelling of events can be read through a 1998 Playback Online article, “How I started Robert Lantos in business… and why he owes it all to me.” - Which was a throwback statement from the time Moses Znaimer, Victor Loewy(advertising manager at McGill’s student newspaper) and Gabor Zinner(then-president of the Student Society) had all pitched in gave Lantos  $1000 each to help him with his first start-up way back when they went to school with each other at McGill university. This is a statement Lantos heartfully agrees with within multiple interviews.

At the very end of the article, whether it can best be described as a crude joke, friendship banter or the truth, Znaimer says, “For your next tribute to Robert, which I’m certain will follow on his first Oscar now that he is rededicating himself to the creative business of making movies, remind me to tell you the story of How I Organized A Small Orgy for Robert and I to take Robert’s mind off the imminent collapse of his first picture and his bankruptcy the very next day.” 

This would not be the first or last interview with  Znaimer courting Robert Lantos with unusual introductions. In an interview with Ideacity, a brainchild conference platform also created by Znaimer, Lantos would be invited on stage in 2018 to give a 20-minute talk on his career, with Znaimer opening: “Our next speaker is one of my oldest chums, and I could … get tearful about it, but I'll simply introduce him by well ….calling him up here. He's Robert Lantos. We were discussing what he might do, and he offered me a choice. He said I can tell people why I make movies, or I can discuss my sex life. He said and since my sex life probably involves some portion of your sex life, I said do the first.”

Znaimer stepped down from his role as president of Citytv in April 2003 and would continue to assist in various. He also founded Cannasat Therapeutics in 1984 and incorporated ZoomerMedia in 2008.

Now that Lantos had bought the rights to the film, he still needed to find an audience beyond the scope of CityTV. In a strike of inspiration, he contacted his best friend, the president of the McGill Student Council. They formulated an idea for the film as part of the McGill Winter Carnival, charged admission, and allowed McGill to keep all the profits. This would act as a test to see if there was an audience for the film. There were three screenings, all of which sold out, and by the third one, a mob formed. The tickets sold for two dollars were scalped for $10 and $15, and the Montreal fire squad was called to disperse the ongoing riots. At that point, Lanos knew that he had something. 

Both The Montreal Star and the Gazette came to one of the screenings, and the next day, there were rave reviews about the film. It was hailed as a hybrid cultural accomplishment. Following that, Lantos got what he was looking for: an offer from a movie theatre, the Vendome Theatre at Place Victoria. The theatre needed cash desperately, and they had heard of the New York Erotic Film Festival through the press, and they couldn't do any worse. So Lantos cut them a deal. Generally, in film distribution, the theatre splits the box office with a distributor, and the terms are on a sliding scale where the distributor gets a minimum of 25% and sometimes as much as a maximum of 60% or 65% of the box-office if the box-office is very high. The deal was that the theatre kept the first inflow of dollars, the house expenses for the theatre, and the rest would belong to Lantos. The New York Erotic Film Festival was a huge success. It played at the theatre for 20 weeks, grossed half a million dollars, and went on to play across Canada. In 1973, It broke the censorship barriers of the time and became the first time that the Quebec Censorship Board allowed erotica to be distributed publicly. 

The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival was released theatrically in July 1973, although there is no official record. Yet, according to Lantos, it made more than $1 million at the box office in Canada, “which was an absolute fortune back then. "

The duo's first office was tiny and filled with borrowed furniture. Lantos drafted documents, and Loewy handled all the graphics for their ads—mainly advertising, from putting up posters to delivering cans of films to theaters. The film industry in Canada barely existed then; Canadian distributors were marginal players in their domestic market, which big Hollywood studios dominated. Loewy and Lantos had to compete with Hollywood studios and other Canadian companies that had a lock on American independent films.

Lantos lost most of the money he and Victor Loewy made at the New York Erotic Film Festival. The movie faced numerous censorship body issues throughout multiple provinces, and he and Loewy weren’t set up correctly as a business to distribute a film across Canada.  Feeling confident after the success of their first film, Lantos traveled to the Cannes Film Festival and bought half a dozen movies from Italy, France, and Brazil—these films he liked personally but did not find an audience. Not only did they not find an audience, but they could not get distributed. This was a learning lesson as it was here that Lantos would learn about all the different levels and roles of the distribution business. However, they still had enough money to keep the company afloat and pay off their tuition. 

Lantos and Lowey’s initial strategy was to scout overlooked European films, such as Dusan Makavejev’s “The Coca-Cola Kid”(1985) and Lasse Hallstrom’s “My Life as a Dog,”(1985) and pick them up for U.S. distribution because of their success in Canada. Their strategy worked, leaving them with sole Canadian distribution rights to most non-studio films made in the U.S.

Being an independent distributor was lengthy and complicated, and Lantos and Loewy learned that they had to buy what was available. It was challenging to gain access to films by top European and American directors. They continued to buy movies that contained erotica and what they considered “intelligent, sexy movies.” They were men of culture, of course! However, those were few and hard to come by, and they didn't gain the type of market or audience that the two had hoped for. More and more energy, time, and business concentration were being focused on importing quality films from France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. They powered through and gradually gained more credibility in the business.

L'ange et la femme(1977) was the first official film produced locally in Quebec by Robert Lantos and Vivafilm. It is a love story about a brutally murdered woman and the angel who resurrects her. The film cost $335,000 to make. It was directed by Gilles Carle and starred his ex-girlfriend Carole Laure. The budget for the film was a nightmare, as the production was denied CFDC funding, and there were no other tax credits at the time to help fund the venture.

Lowey and Lantos were running out of options to keep the production going, but they knew there was still hope through their various connections in the distribution world. They knew that Paramount Pictures owned Famous Players. Paramount had an annual obligation to invest in Canadian films because they had been sold recently to Gulf and Western as part of the foreign ownership change, volunteering to invest $200,000 a year in Canadian films. Knowing that it was December 1976, and Paramount had already invested $175,000 into the film industry, Lantos scheduled a meeting with George Destounis, former president of Famous Players, and told him he had a film that required $25,000 of financing as they were short that amount and was being made by one of Quebecs finest directors. Destounis never asked what the budget was and signed them a check for the agreed $25,000.

Post-processing the film was also a different challenge. Without a budget, Lantos contacted an old friend from McGill University who had set up a 60mm black-and-white film lab in his basement to process Marxist gorilla films from Angola. The Angel and the Woman(L'ange et la femme)(1977) would strike controversy for its sex acts, and Vivafilm’s next film, Ticket(Your Ticket is No Longer Valid)(1981), flopped. After that, there was some moderate success with Suzanne(1980) and Agency(1980). Lantos attributes some of his failures to a lack of talent in Canada at the time compared to America, such as not having experienced writers to polish the products and his lack of experience dealing with the chosen film material.

After Lantos left the company to founded RSL Entertainment with Stephen J. Roth in 1975, Loewy continued with Vivafilm. The film business sidetracked Victory Loewy from his hotel administration courses at McGill and his desire to run a restaurant or hotel to support himself and his mother. Even after Lantos left Vivafilm, Loewy continued scoping up French-Canadian film rights and movie distribution. Loewy set out to open up Quebec indie film distribution, which was then controlled by Pierre David, René Malo, André Link, and John Dunning.

While Loewy was kicking ass in Quebec, Lantos was capitalizing on the benefits of the tax shelter era. RSL Entertainment was producing several successful feature films, including Gilles Carle’s L'Ange et la femme (1977) and George Kaczender’s In Praise of Older Women (1978). Lantos also produced Lewis Furey’s musical Night Magic (1985), co-written by Leonard Cohen.

In Praise of Older Women was one of the most expensive films produced at the company's beginning. It took over two years to make and cost a million dollars, and the funds were tough to raise. However, Lantos and the team managed to do so by partnering with Famous Players and private investors. Astral Media also bought the distribution rights up-front, and Stephen Roth’s law practice gave them access to investors. He was the one who brought in all the private financing, which was about 60% of the budget.

The decision was that RSL would merge with the International Cinema Corporation (ICC), its main competitor in Canada, in 1985. The decision to merge was made because of competing interests in the same project, The Sword of Gideon (1986), which became an $8 million, four-hour miniseries coproduced by Canada and France for HBO and CTV. At the time, Telefilm's executive director, Peter Pearson, suggested that the two companies join forces against foreign producers to keep the project in Canadian hands. The result was that Kemeny and Heroux would team up with Stephen Roth, Robert Lantos, Andras Hamori, and Susan Cavan to form “an Alliance,” which was soon renamed Alliance Entertainment. Roth and ICC founders Denis Heroux and John Kemeny would leave shortly after the companies merged to pursue other careers in the film industry.

Alliance films were responsible for releasing Canadian cult classics, such as Due South, Night Heat, Johnny Mnemonic, and Bon Cop Bad Cop. Atlantis would start the 1990s and early 2000s TV science fiction movement by distributing other classics, such as ReBoot, Beast Wars: Transformers, The Ray Bradbury Theater, TekWar, The Outer Limits, and CSI. 

Atlantis was founded in 1978 by Michael MacMillan, Janice L. Platt, Seaton S. MacLean,  Andy Rednick, and Nick Kendall. Based on Church St Toronto, the office occupied 3 rooms on the 1st floor, and the partners lived on the upper two. Their 1st project was a documentary on the Royal Winter Fair for Canada Packers, a meat packing company, done on a budget of $25,000.

Everyone in the Atlantis crew was around 21 years of age and had few connections to the rest of the film community. Their first partnerships were with PS Production Services and film and animation producer Linda Beath. Whenever they needed equipment, they would call up the crew at PS, rent equipment such as Steinbecks, and start mixing. 

In 1983, the company hit big when the short Boys and Girls won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Film. The film was part of a series of six half-hour dramas based on short stories from Canadian literature broadcast on the CBC in 1982 and cost $156,000 for the time. Atlantis Films was considered an independent producer during this time and mostly faced its production efforts adapting short stories or books, which were then adapted to television formats.

The short Boys and Girls saved Atlantis Films as the startup drove the three producers into debt. "We were going to run out of money," said MacMillan in a 2000 interview with the Globe and Mail, "and the Royal Bank was going to call our loan. I was dejected; we were all dejected." MacMillan's wife, Cathy, would come home late to find him reading the want ads in bed. MacMillan recalled when Michael Caine announced that Boys and Girls won: "We all jumped out of our seats for about half a second—but the time I was up in the air seemed like an eternity. And while I was up there, I remember thinking, this will keep the Royal Bank quiet for at least a few months". After the Oscar win, the Atlantis team received various offers to move to Hollywood and work on script development, but they opted to stay in Canada. Later that year, they started Atlantis Television International as the international distributor for Atlantis productions.

Following their successes, Ted Riley joined them in 1984 and Peter Sussman in 1986. MacMillan handled the deal-making, McLean oversaw production, Sussman looked after the creative and business end of projects in LA and abroad, and Riley served as an emissary for presales, coproductions, and sales. Seaton McLean would oversee all production activity for Atlantis Films Limited, producing television series like White Fang(1991), Traders(1996-2000), Earth: Final Conflict(1997-2002), Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House(1991), The Ray Bradbury Theater(1985–1992), PSI Factor(1985-1992), and The Eleventh Hour(2008).

The Ray Bradbury Theater, a half-hour series produced for HBO and later USA Network in 1985, would bring Atlantis international fame. The team was first introduced to Ray Douglas Bradbury by Michael MacMillan Larry Willcock, a star on CHiPS, a TV show from 1977 to 1983. HBO was in talks with Atlantis to create a show for the network, and a deal was soon created, and The Ray Bradbury Theater was created. The series was also sold to Global (network), and Telefilm invested in the first three episodes. After the sixth episode, HBO was replaced as a broadcaster for the series with the USA Network, and it continued with the USA until the end.

Atlantis's first significant production was with foreign distributors, money, and multiple broadcast partners. The Ray Bradbury Theater was a usual production for 1985, as working with multiple broadcast partners was not a standard practice for a single production.

Considered one of the most glorious things to be built for the local film community in Toronto, Atlantis would team up with PS Productions in 1985 to create a 100,000-square-foot and Toronto's most considerable production lot known as The Cinevillage. In the era of 2025, the community would know this location as the home of Revival Film Studios and the former first home of Pixomondo. After the construction of Cinevillage, about 20 more firms moved into the neighborhood to be near the studio complex. 

In a Take 5 interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of Atlantis Films,Michael MacMillan would state: “ It occurs to me that a large part of the success of Atlantis has come about by rewriting the accepted rules of making television in this country. We have frequently broken the established ways of doing things, the accepted norms, especially the norms people say you can't do. People told us we couldn't build Cinevillage. We were out of our minds. People told us that offices in Amsterdam and Sydney were not on. People told us we couldn't apply for specialty channels like The Life Network and Home & Garden TV. We've often done things we weren't supposed to do. In an industry that is changing so fast and growing so fast and is part of the communications industry— which is the growth industry of the past half century and therefore has lots of new people coming into it, lots of money coming into it—you have to keep changing, keep breaking the rules to have the opportunity to do things. Risk is part of the game. If you spend half your time figuring out how to mitigate the risk, creating nets for a soft landing if something doesn't work out the way that you think, then you're willing and able to take bigger risks.”

The Atlantis partners recognized that the company had to sell and co-produce films outside Canada since the domestic market alone was insufficient to survive. Following this revelation, Atlantis spent the late 1980s and 1990s forging bonds with Canadian production companies to help better the national film community and share their international access. These companies included Vancouver-based Sojourn Pictures, Great North Productions in Edmonton, and Winnipeg's Credo Group. The goal was to create a studio arrangement of production partners from coast to coast who could work together to combat the international market. 

Alliance and Atlantis continued to grow alongside each other, launching their first channels concurrently and going public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1993. In August, Alliance Communications would become the second production company in Canada to go public. They were Canada's largest independent film and television producer and raised $34 million in its initial offer and a second $25 million in May 1994. The money raised expanded Alliance's distribution libraries, both domestic and international, and increased overall production. It will also expand its operations to launch its sales arm, Le Monde Entertainment. Atlantis would quickly follow suit and go public on the stock exchange that same year.

1994 was the most profitable year for Alliance and Atlantis, and they celebrated precisely how they saw fit. As recalled by several anonymous audio post-production technicians from the local area, the Halloween parties hosted by both in 1994 were a tax right off filled with “a sheer amount of {redacted} and debauchery to the levels of which they had never seen before.”

Atlantis and ACC also brought legendary post-production CGI houses under one roof, such as Calibre Digital Pictures, Tattersall Sound, Casablanca Sound and Picture, and Salter Street Digital, responsible for This Hour Has 22 Minutes. 

The End of AAC would happen in 2012 when Entertainment One purchased a majority stake in the company. With this purchase, E1 became the new biggest distributor in Canada.