Canadian Walk of Fame: Now With Holograms!

As annual Walk of Fame gala approaches, drastic changes being considered
By John McKay
TORONTO (CP) — It’s the permanence of those concrete sidewalk slabs that impresses.
“Why, they’d need a jackhammer to dig me out of there,” an inductee into Canada’s ever-growing Walk of Fame noted one year.
But hold on.
The stars-in-cement concept may not be that permanent after all.
Peter Soumalias, founder and outgoing chairman of the media event, says that as they approach the eighth annual induction gala this weekend, a special design committee is studying a variety of proposals for something far different from the Hollywood Walk of Fame that served as the template for the Canadian version launched in 1998 in Toronto’s downtown theatre district. Proposals being considered include suspending the celebrity stars’ commemorative plaques from lamp posts, or otherwise heating and lighting them up to create an illuminated path, or perhaps just having an eye-level Wall of Fame instead, possibly with interactive holograms.
“The prospect of walking with my eyes to the ground bumping into people who are doing the same thing all the time wasn’t one that was terribly appealing to us,” Soumalias explains of the original plan.
And the idea now is: “Let’s do something different, let’s do something original, let’s not pretend we’re Hollywood because we’re not.”
The committee — which includes architects and urban designers — would boil the alternative proposals down to three by October and they in turn would have their budgets and technical specifications developed. But Soumalias says such a renovation of the Walk would still be years away.
“One of the options of redesigning it is still to create a permanent monument, and a permanent place of tribute, but not necessarily on the sidewalk,” the Toronto businessman says.
And although the Walk now has a new board chairman, former vice-chair Jack Tomik (who’s also former chair of the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement and president of CanWest Media Sales), Soumalias says he’s delaying his planned departure for a couple of years to help with the renovation plans.
Meanwhile, four days of events are in the works leading up to Sunday evening’s formal unveiling of the nine new sidewalk plaques outside the downtown Elgin Theatre, followed by a CTV-televised gala inside to be hosted by Ottawa-born comic Tom Green.
The inductees this year include singer/songwriters (and Ottawa natives) Paul Anka and Alanis Morissette, boxer George Chuvalo and ballet dancer Rex Harrington. Kiefer Sutherland, star of the hit TV series 24, will join his already inducted parents Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas to become the first complete Canadian acting family on the Walk.
Also enshrined will be the late Fay Wray, who was born in Alberta and moved to Hollywood at a young age to make 70 pictures but who will forever be remembered as the object of King Kong’s perverse affection in the 1933 adventure classic.
And there will be three Canadians who may not be household names but who are well known behind the scenes as driving forces in the music industry: producers Pierre Cossette and Daniel Lanois and concert promoter Michael Cohl.
Soumalias says it’s part of a theme they began with last year’s Walk of Fame when they inducted legendary Hollywood pioneers and Canadian expatriates Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Mack Sennett.
He noted, for example, that not only were those people among the creators of the Academy Awards and founders of the film industry itself, but that Sennett had put up the original Hollywood sign when it was a glorified real estate billboard that said Hollywoodland. Soumalias says the sign began to crumble in the 1970s and was told it was Cossette, also an originator of the Grammy Awards, who began a fundraising campaign to restore the landmark.
“And I said ‘Wait a minute! So a Canadian put up the Hollywood sign and it took a Canadian to put it back up in 1978.’ ”
Each inductee will be formally presented by another celebrity — former dance partner Veronica Tennant for Harrington, for example, Rolling Stone Keith Richards for Cohl and film star Michael Douglas for Sutherland. Plans fell through to get Naomi Watts, who is starring in Peter Jackson’s coming remake of Kong, to sub for Wray. Wray’s daughter Victoria Riskin was also unable to attend because she will be in Tibet.
But in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, Riskin said her mother always had a fond place in her heart for her Canadian heritage.
“Canada’s a country that I love so I’m glad that they’re acknowledging my mother,” she said. “And glad that the country feels proud to have her as a citizen. She maintained, I think, dual citizenship for quite some time.”
In addition to the Sunday TV gala, related events include a series of outdoor concerts and a screening of Kong as well as a contest, supported by the L.A.-based Mary Pickford Foundation, in which young filmmakers were asked to create a short film about Wray.
The winner, Eion Harris of Toronto, will attend the gala and have his short played during the gala broadcast, which will also include performances by Anka, Harrington, Michael Buble and Ron Sexsmith.