..."considered the Godfather of Canadian film and Canada's answer to Sam Goldwyn."Peter Morris, The Film Companion (Irwin, 1984)
"A long-overdue but terribly well-executed profile of one of this country’s groundbreaking filmmakers." Andrew Ryan, The Globe and Mail Newspaper
Through original and archival footage, film clips, photographs, interviews with friends and foes, and a judicious measure of sheer speculation, BUDGE probes the singular career of F. R. "Budge" Crawley from his early short films, said to capture "the very quintessence" of Canadian life, to his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to create a private, self-sustaining feature-film industry in Canada. It's the wild ride of a "breakthrough man", whose early films eclipsed the National Film Board on its own documentary turf, who initiated many Canadian film-industry firsts. It's the dispiriting and ultimately crushing succession of near misses and half successes that followed. In the end, it's the tragedy of man who is deaf to the news of his own defeat.
*The DVD also includes a 25 minute documentary I made in the early 1990's about the 1930's Canadian film director - Gordon Sparling, best known for his short film on Montreal "Rhapsody in Two Languages".