movies • war footage

“Scud stud” takes aim at hollywood

Arthur Kent, the Alberta-born former NBC reporter who became known as the “Scud Stud” as a result of his coverage of the Gulf War, wasn’t smiling as he left the movie theatre December 27. It was the veteran foreign correspondent’s 54th birthday, and he’d just seen Charlie Wilson’s War at the behest of friends who said one of his dispatches from Afghanistan appeared in the film alongside Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Kent told his friends they were mistaken—after all, none of the film’s researchers or producers- had contacted him—but he decided to check it out for himself.

Sure enough, nearly half a minute of his voice and several of his camera shots from a story he did for the BBC appeared onscreen to buoy the film’s depiction of Charlie Wilson, a womanizing U.S. Congressman who beefed up the CIA’s covert anti-Soviet mission in Afghanistan in the ’80s. “I almost didn’t recognize my own voice,” says Kent, who’s running in Calgary-Currie. (Kent says he’d sold the BBC rights to the story “specifically for a one-time United Kingdom television broadcast.”)

He was “mystified” to see his news footage in the $75 million US film—especially when the credits finished rolling and his name was nowhere to be seen. The names of other colleagues whose reporting he recognized in the film—including one who got killed in the field—weren’t listed either. Instead, news organizations and networks are credited. Kent says that’s a misattribution that needs to be corrected. “The war in Afghanistan was not filmed by corporations,” he says. “It was filmed by men and women who risked their lives, and we deserve respect. We deserve proper credits.”

Kent, who launched a successful lawsuit against NBC in the early ’90s after a contract dispute, wants an apology and fair compensation from Universal Pictures for using the footage without his permission. He also wants the company to pay his legal costs and give appropriate credit in future distribution forms like DVD. “My lawyers will push for an explanation and of course we’ll have to have a resolution of this situation,” he says. “Hopefully we can resolve this like grownups... If they force us to go further, then reluctantly, we’ll have to do that.” (Universal didn’t respond to a request for an interview by press time.)

JEREMY KLASZUS

planning • Boyle-McCauley

Levy miffs developers

City planners are proposing a novel plan to generate cash for the creation of new park space in The Quarters, the southern part of the Boyle-McCauley neighbourhood just east of downtown, where a major revitalization project is underway.

The planning department hopes to raise $3 million for the new parks by levying a fee on property owners undertaking major developments in the neighbourhood, including new building construction and condo conversions. The proposed levy would be eight per cent of the land value of the property. The parks would front the blocks on the east side of 96 Street, from 103A Avenue to Jasper.

But the plan is heavily criticized by some private developers with interests in the neighbourhood, who say the city is penalizing them—and inadvertently throwing up obstacles to revitalization. George Broumas, owner of Superior Parking Ltd., which operates several parking lots in the area, says he fears the plan could actually end up holding the revitalization plans back. “It’s not only the levy, it’s the whole concept of taking land and turning it into parkland,” he says. “For the street and area to be vibrant, you’ve got to have developments on both sides and make it pedestrian-friendly.”

Duncan Fraser, senior planner with the city, says the city may provide developers with density bonuses—special permissions that allow them to build higher density than would normally be permitted, to compensate for revenue lost to the levy.

The park plan still needs city council approval.
MATTHEW HALLIDAY