Northern Stars Are Aligned

The staid Princess of Wales Theater here may be a long way in spirit and distance from Grauman’s Chinese, but the sidewalk is familiar. The walkway is freshly embedded with oversized signatures and gold stars, and photographers jostle for closer shots as the actors and musicians arrive to unveil this concrete proof of their celebrity.

But the performers being honored here are all home-grown, and even the paparazzi are impeccably polite.

This is Canada’s Walk of Fame, a 5-year-old venture that some south of the border may view as a further step in Toronto’s bid to establish itself as Hollywood North. Organizers and honorees insist it’s just an overdue attempt to get this self-effacing society to celebrate its own success stories.

“Canada has never recognized its own,” said Robin Duke, who was inducted into the Walk of Fame last week with other cast members of “SCTV,” the low-budget satiric series that kick-started the careers of an entire generation of Canadian comedians.

But America has certainly recognized Canada’s own: Duke’s “SCTV” colleagues--among them Martin Short, the late John Candy, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy--have collectively accounted for much of mainstream U.S. comedy in recent decades. Like Duke and her Toronto colleague Gilda Radner, many were first recruited to work in the U.S. by “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels. Also of Toronto.

The Toronto show biz world feels somewhat under assault these days for its pursuit of what industry leaders in Los Angeles call “runaway” productions. But last week’s awards presentation spotlighted what is seen here as a more powerful southbound phenomenon: the runaway Canadian.

Most of the Canadian entertainment personalities honored with a sidewalk star--the “SCTV” crew, director Arthur Hiller, game show host Monty Hall, Grammy-collecting composer and record producer David Foster--flew in from Los Angeles, where they have long lived and worked. Then most flew right back.

The 42-year-old Walk of Fame in Hollywood covers three miles of sidewalk and boasts 2,197 stars, with one or two more added every month. Immediately adjacent is the older, more exclusive forecourt of Grauman’s, with celebrity footprints and handprints dating to 1927 (not to mention Jimmy Durante’s nose print and Groucho Marx’s cigar print).

In Toronto, the nine gold stars unveiled last week raised the grand total to 62; the “walk” is a brief mid-block stretch of pavement in the downtown theater district.

“This is flattery,” Johnny Grant, the honorary Hollywood mayor and longtime chairman of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame committee, said of Toronto’s efforts. “I congratulate them and wish them the very best.”

Tradition, scale and candlepower aside, Canadians see another salient difference between Toronto’s star-studded sidewalk and the Hollywood original. “You buy your stars down there,” said Dave Thomas, another “SCTV” veteran who went on to become a U.S. sitcom regular. “Here, we get them for free.”

Hollywood Stars Carry Price Tag

Thomas is right: In Hollywood, the honoree is billed a $15,000 “sponsorship fee,” an expense typically absorbed by press agents, who time the sidewalk unveilings to coincide with movie releases.

In studious contrast, the Canadian Walk of Fame is a sober, earnest enterprise. Organizers stress fairness and process: After judges submit nominations, with strict Canadian-roots criteria, any Canadian may cast a vote by e-mail. (The self-chosen electorate remains quite small: Even this year’s 55,000 votes would seem to leave the door open to e-ballot stuffing.)

And to elevate the overall tone of the affair, a few stars are reserved for distinguished artists and writers, making the King Street sidewalk perhaps the only common bond--nationality aside--between Jim Carrey and Margaret Atwood.

To give them an Oscar-like punch, the awards are presented at one annual ceremony. And despite the disclaimers voiced here about the Canadian aversion to self-promotion and show biz hoopla, the most recent Walk of Fame gathering looked like any entertainment awards gala, with a theater packed with tuxedos and beaded gowns and speeches running from the heartfelt to the stagily rehearsed.

“You got your red carpet there, you got limos,” Norman Jewison, the Toronto-born director of such films as “In the Heat of the Night” and a proud Walk-of-Famer, joked approvingly to the capacity crowd of 2,000.

But you know the event is Canadian when the smiling co-hosts are both skaters (Kurt Browning, a figure skater, and Catriona LeMay Doan, a record-breaking Olympian speedster). And when Rich Little gets the crowd giggling with John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson impressions. (If you’re stumped, they’re long-dead Canadian prime ministers.) And instead of the King of Pop getting the audience’s feet tapping, it’s the King of Polka (Walter Ostanek, a Grammy-winning accordionist, who presented a posthumous award to Guy Lombardo).

The evening was also a tutorial in Canadian claims to mainstays of “American” popular culture.

There was Paul Anka, Ottawa teen idol turned Los Angeles music impresario, belting out “My Way,” the song he wrote for Frank Sinatra and unwisely lent to Elvis Presley. And Hall, the Winnipeg boy who turned deal-making and three closed doors into a 27-year TV game show franchise (but is equally recognized here as the philanthropist who built the children’s wing of a Toronto hospital).

The venerable U.S. custom of welcoming the new year with “Auld Lang Syne”? The old Scottish ballad had been the signature song for Lombardo’s Royal Canadians, and when the band was featured on live U.S. radio broadcasts of year-end festivities in the 1930s, “it caught on,” the gala crowd was informed.

Canadians Among Hollywood’s Hierarchy

And, going further back, remember America’s sweetheart? That would be Canadian silent film star Mary Pickford, posthumous walk inductee. Candidates for future post-mortem sidewalk stars include two of the iconic creators of Hollywood itself, studio chiefs Louis B. Mayer (who emigrated from Minsk to New Brunswick when he was 3) and Jack L. Warner (born in London, Ontario).

The ceremony’s target audience is not oblivious Americans but Canadians themselves, organizers stress. “I think they feel that there are many Canadians that Canadians don’t realize are Canadians,” Hiller, the director of more than 30 movies and 300 television shows, among them “Love Story” and “The Out-of-Towners,” said before unveiling his own sidewalk plaque.

One example is Hiller himself, who, as a former head of both the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is a longtime member of the Hollywood establishment. But he started his career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. half a century ago and has quietly maintained ties to his native Alberta, supporting a performing arts college that he says is emerging as “Canada’s Juilliard.”

And those wholesome, American-as-apple-pie actors Michael J. Fox and William Shatner? Yes, them too. They’ve already gotten their stars on the Canadian Walk of Fame.

Performers such as Hall say that to succeed in the United States, they deliberately suppressed their Canadian accents and ended up sounding prototypically American. And many successful Canadians’ comic identities were fashioned from U.S. fodder, from Short’s “Wheel of Fortune”-obsessed Ed Grimley to Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues.

The organizers try to emphasize how Canadian their honorees really are, expatriate success notwithstanding. Aykroyd, one learns in Walk of Fame literature, studied criminology in Ottawa with the aim of following in his Mountie grandfather’s bootsteps. Hiller flew in World War II with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Jewison broke into the business as a researcher for “Hockey Tonight,” a radio show that is a Canadian broadcasting institution.

But in the entertainment world, the work is in Los Angeles, not Toronto, despite the fears of the Screen Actors Guild, and few if any of the honorees living there expect to relocate north, they acknowledged in their visit here.

The no-shows for this year’s ceremony, perhaps not coincidentally the three with the greatest star wattage, are also all resident Southern Californians: Aykroyd (schedule conflicts, organizers said); Short (he abandoned the trip after his Air Canada flight was delayed for hours at LAX); and Wayne Gretzky (he had promised not to miss his son’s baseball game, so asked his father to unveil his star instead).

Leaning on America for Comedic Fodder

Even Thomas, who with old friend Moranis created the earmuffed, Molson-swilling MacKenzie brothers, perhaps the first Canadian comic stereotypes ever to go global, says he’s planning to apply for U.S. citizenship, along with his Canadian-born oldest daughter.

After 12 years in Malibu, he feels thoroughly at home there, he says. And like his peers, most of his cultural source material has long been of American origin, even when it was written and performed here in Toronto.

“I don’t think you can say that our humor was distinctively Canadian,” he said, referring to his years at “SCTV.” “We were parodying television, and television was and is primarily American.”