Rogue Vehicles: David Cronenberg's Fast Company and the Tax Shelter Period

David Cronenberg's Fast Company (1978) has always had somewhat of a controversial presence in the director's filmography. A love letter to his passion for cars and motor racing rather than a clinical and abject exploration of the human body, which is what he is perhaps best known for doing; especially at the time. It seems to be a quirky addition to an otherwise thematically unified career. The film arrived during the height of Cronenberg's corporeal exploration; his 'body-horror' period, that started with the iconoclastic Shivers (1975) and finished with his remake, The Fly (1986). These were films that blended elements of horror, psychological thriller, erotica and science fiction into an idiosyncratic sub-genre obsessed with bodily augmentation and sexual deviance. However, Fast Company embraces none of these traits; it is not horror or science fiction, nor does it draw on Cronenberg's usual abject intellectualism. Instead, it is a straight-laced movie about funny car and dragster racing and as a result, is usually ostracised by film critics and scholars. In the preface to his systematic, career spanning work, The Artist as Monster, William Beard frankly announces the exclusion of the film from his study; dismissing it as 'formulaic' and 'uninteresting', and then later on as: 'bland, utterly unpersonah' (1) However, Ernest Mathijs, author of The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero, defends the film and its unwelcome presence in an oeuvre that belongs to somebody like Cronenberg. One of We few film scholars to offer any serious or in depth consideration on the subject, Mathijs argues that Fast Company acts as a missing link of 'evolution between Cronenberg's avant-garde work, his early horror shockers and his later work' and that it is: 'a move towards professionalism that made him a filmmaker able to successfully negotiate his concerns'(2) But what of the film itself? Though it may not immediately display the artistic value or thematic depth of his other work, Fast Company does indeed mark a pivotal point in Cronenberg's then burgeoning career as well as a vital time-capsule for an interesting and turbulent period of Canadian cinema: the tax-shelter scheme. The tax-shelter incentives of the 1970s and early 1980s were designed to galvanise and stimulate a national film industry by encouraging businesses to invest their profits into cinema production and in return, be able to deduct said investment from their taxable income. The system, however, was quickly abused as investors annually took advantage of what has been described by Cronenberg on Cronenberg editor Chris Rodley as a 'hideous loophole'. Rodley goes on to explain that the scheme allowed 'anyone with money to burn to promise investment in a specific production. At that point, the investor could write off tax owed on a much larger sum, actually contributing a much smaller amount to the making of the movie'(3). It is also, as noted by George Melnyk, a period largely seen as being a 'source of cultural embarrassment', where 'the prevailing mimicry of American film values resulted in hundreds of unseen and products'(4). For the last three decades, it would be fair to say that Fast Company has been regarded as one such third-rate product. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although it was shot in the province of Alberta, Fast Company--as was the case with many Canadian productions at the time--was designed to look as American as possible for increased marketability and to give it more of a chance against the direct competition of Hollywood. The three top-billing leads were borrowed from the US, with actors William Smith, John Saxon and former playmate of the year turned B-Movie goddess Claudia Jennings hailing from Missouri, New York and Illinois respectively. American cities are mentioned in the dialogue (Seattle for instance) and there is a significant amount of red, white and blue used in the production design. …

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