Only in the Movies

by BELL, WILLIAM

• ISBN13: 9780385667692
• ISBN10: 0385667698
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-01-12
• Publisher: Doubleday of Canada

Summary

When Jake Blanchard gets a job as a student set designer at the York School of Arts, it's an exciting first step towards realizing his dream of making movies. But soon enough he finds himself starring in a drama of his own creation. Nothing in Jake's life is the same after Vanni, a whip-smart, wisecracking Indian-Irish-Canadian joins his class, and after Jake meets the unforgettable Alba, who is as stunning as she is unattainable. Jake is tongue-tied around Alba and enlists Vanni's help. All of a sudden - like the Shakespeare play Jake's school is putting on - Jake finds himself entwined in a love triangle of sorts, complete with secrets and suppressed passions, contrived plots, miscues and misunderstandings. By the end, as in any good comedy, tensions are resolved and Jake's world has been re-made, though in a way he could not have anticipated.

Author Biography

WILLIAM BELL's novels have been translated into nine languages and have won a number of awards, among them the Ruth Schwartz Award for Excellence (Forbidden City), the Belgium Award for Excellence (Forbidden City), the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award (Five Days of the Ghost), the Mr. Christie's Award (Zack), and the Canadian Library Association's award (Stones and The Blue Helmet).

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE
 
I was twelve years old when I stumbled onto the movie set in the park on 11th Street, and I couldn’t get the spectacle I had witnessed out of my head. It was like Christmas morning. What present should I open first? Acting? Directing? Operating cameras, booms, sound equipment? Creating the story? I began to pay more attention to the movies I watched on TV. I took a few cinema-history books out of the library at the top of our street. I kept my eye out for some of the movies mentioned in the books—Citizen Kane,The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,Casablanca,Red Sorghum. By the time I was nearing the end of grade ten and the school guidance types were nagging us to choose what they called a “career path,” I already knew what I wanted to do with my life.
 
There was only one problem—or, to be exact, two.
 
My parents.
 
 
My sister, Janine, was ten years older than me—I was “mommy’s little surprise”—and had proved she carried the Blanchard business genes when she signed up for accountancy at university as a first step toward business administration and a career as a stockbroker. She planned to amass her first million before she was thirty. I told her that unless she stopped taking courses, she’d still be in college when she was thirty. She tossed her auburn hair, planted her skinny hands on her skinny hips and told me to shut up. Besides, she added, she didn’t care if she made a million. Playing with money, especially other peoples’, was fun.
 
My mother, a tiny, slender woman with a limitless supply of energy, operated a hairdressing business out of our basement. The grey-haired ladies who tottered in and out our side door were a reliable indicator that Maryan’s Custom Styling wasn’t going to put the gleaming salons on Lakeshore Boulevard out of business. But Mom liked her “old dears.” They made few demands, and although they wouldn’t tolerate high prices, they always paid in cash. Our basement was like a small social club where the members came one at a time and swam around for half an hour in chemical smells and gossip.
 
As the hand-painted sign on the side of his blue panel van announced, my father was Cyrus’s Custom Cabinets and Carpentry, Cyrus Blanchard, sole prop. It was unusual to find a tradesman who could build a house working from nothing but a sketch on a piece of paper and then design and craft complex cupboards and cabinets with fine scrollwork and drawers that still rolled freely ten years after they were installed. I had always believed that cabinetry was Dad’s true calling, but it was the less refined work that paid the bills. Dad hired workers when he needed them and paid above scale. He resisted the pressure to expand and make more money. He said the quality of his work would drop. Besides, he didn’t need the aggravation. “Keep it simple” was his motto.
 
One of the people who helped him was me. I went out on the job with him on weekends and holidays. For the first years I guess I mostly got in his way. When I was ten, he gave me my own leather nail bag to hang around my waist, just like the one he wore but smaller. Better still, he put me on the payroll at a dollar an hour. By the time I was twelve, I knew how to frame a room, shingle a roof and plumb a wall. He made me learn how to lay out a roof truss—which required a few geometry lessons—even though most contractors ordered them prefabricated from the builders’ supply. “Anybody can make a phone call,” he’d say. “A builder builds.”
 
During the summer following my graduation from 7th Street Elementary School, he offered to give me a project to complete on my own. The reward would be half union-scale pay. When I agreed to take on the c

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Excerpted from Only in the Movies by William Bell
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