Hollywood Suite at 10: And Now, A Word About a Sponsor and, Incidentally, The Fabulous Stains

And now, a word about one of our sponsors.

On Dec. 11, a challenge I issued two years ago to Hollywood Suite programmer Cameron Maitland will finally be answered, when the service’s ‘80s channel screens 1982’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

For lack of a better description The Fabulous Stains is kind of a punk A Star Is Born, with a young, skinny (!) Ray Winstone as the leader of a pure-hearted punk band called The Looters, and a very young Diane Lane as an angry teen who becomes a skunk-haired New Wave feminist icon with her inept band The Stains (whose roster includes another teen newbie named Laura Dern).

Peter Donat, Ray Winstone and Diane Lane in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

Also in the film: Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, Paul Simonon of The Clash and Fee Waybill of The Tubes.

When pay-TV started in Canada in the early ‘80s, I recorded it on my VCR (remember them?) off the movie channel First Choice (remember it? It evolved into another of our sponsors, Crave). I kept the tape for years until it inevitably degraded.

Afterward, I never ran across The Fabulous Stains again. When I watch it on Hollywood Suite, it will be the first time I’ll have seen it in about 35 years.

Hollywood Suite president/co-founder David Kines

This is all by way of saying happy 10th birthday to Hollywood Suite, which launched on November 23, 2011. Yes, they are a sponsor of this website (along with the indispensable Crave). But I subscribed previously as did many of my movie-nut friends. And as I discovered in a sitdown with Hollywood Suite president and co-founder David Kines, I had not received special treatment. The service actually keeps a spreadsheet of viewers’ requests via email and social media, which are assessed and the rights sought out. 

Not all of them, of course. In his office, scanning a list of one viewer’s wanna-see low-budget slasher films, Kines quipped, “This guy might be better off subscribing to Shudder.”

“He probably already does,” I said.

A collection of four separate specialty channels focused on classic movies – divided by decade into ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and ‘00s (plus an on-demand platform) – Hollywood Suite was the brainchild of some of former key players behind the old CHUM/City empire. Kines ran MuchMusic and various related music services. The late Jay Switzer was CHUM senior executive, which means he had his hand in everything, and had City-TV in his genes (his mother, Phyllis Switzer was one of the founders of the feisty, then-UHF station). They were joined by longtime CHUM/City programmer Ellen Bain.

“The idea was that video stores were closing, or closed, and there was a thirst for classic films that wasn’t being satisfied by the existing channels and platforms,” Kines says. “So, we saw there was a niche and an opening in the market. Where do you find Casablanca, or something like The Great Waldo Pepper (the ‘70s film where Robert Redford played an ex-WWI pilot-turned-barnstormer) now that Blockbuster’s gone?”

In its initial incarnation, Hollywood Suite had four channels, divided by studio. “We launched with Warner films, the MGM channel, and then a year later, we partnered up with Sony (which had both a Sony channel and the action-oriented AXN).

“The studio brands were great, they got us on the map, we got recognition. You saw the Warner Brothers’ Leo the Lion, and you kind of got, ‘Okay, this says movies.’

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“They were all retro. But what’s the difference between an MGM film and a Warner Bros film, other than the corporate lineage?”

So, in 2015, Hollywood Suite came up with the Decades format, which was both welcomed by movie fans and made acquisitions harder. “I mean, it’s easy to back up the truck at Warners and say, ‘Hey, give us 200 films please.’

“But contrary to some popular opinion, you don’t just go down to the store and buy the DVD and put it onscreen. Some people will say, ‘Why don’t you have this film? I’ve got it. Just go to Bay Street Video and pick up the DVD.’

“The major studios do have a lot of films, but there’s a lot of films they don’t have. One of my favourite examples is On Golden Pond, a big-name Oscar winning film that nobody could find. We finally found it at a British Broadcaster, ITV, they had the rights. We got (the Helen Mirren series) Prime Suspect from them, so we actually did a deal for Prime Suspect and On Golden Pond at the same time.

“How did it end up there? Who knows? But this is the weird corporate lineage of some films, where they end up under a producer’s bed. It took us a long time to find The Grey Fox.” (Phillip Borsos’ 1982 Western, considered one of the greatest Canadian films ever).

“Yes, we have hits, we have your Lethal Weapon movies. Apocalypse Now, most stuff’s a no-brainer. What’s become interesting over the last 10 years is coloring outside the lines.

Kines remembers giving an interview with the Globe & Mail in which he named 1987’s Withnail & I, about the misadventures of two unemployed London actors, as number one on his acquisitions list. It was the movie that introduced the actor Richard E. Grant to the world

“And we have since found it!” Kines exclaims. This I already knew, because I’ve watched the movie twice on the HS ‘80s since it showed up. “You want to find Withnail and I, and The Fabulous Stains, this is where to come. Or there was Betty Blue, a French film that was big in the ‘80s. We found it, but it took a while.”

Another great Hollywood Suite acquisition, to me anyway, was the remarkable three-hour restoration of Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born with some segments consisting of audio accompanied by still pictures. (The version seen by most had been butchered by at least a half-hour, with long-discarded footage and audio later found by devotees in warehouses and such). The ‘70s Channel is the de facto home for all movies that predate that decade. Hollywood Suite ran the restored A Star Is Born to coincide with the Oscar run of the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper version.

The service’s efforts have not gone unrewarded. “We’ve had subscriber growth month-over-month every single month since we launched,” Kines says. “There’s never been a dip. Of course, we started at zero, Nov 23 2:10 p.m.

“It’s an odd time, because we didn’t know when they were going to put the signal up. So, we were just spitting the feed out until someone took it.” Now it’s on most cable services, and available online via Amazon Prime.

So happy birthday to Hollywood Suite. And thanks for the present of The Fabulous Stains.