Tony Currie(I)

His mother, Barbara was a book-keeper from Cardiff, Wales. His father, John was a tool-and-dye-maker from Edinburgh, Scotland and served as a tail gunner in the RAF in WWII. He was the sole survivor when his damaged Halifax crashed in York returning from a mission over the Ruhr. Tony wrote his first one act play when he was six. It was essentially Santa Claus and His Seven Elves named Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy, etc. At 10 he met Bruce Pirrie and together they wrote and performed in school plays often parodying the school teachers. Drawing inspiration from Boris Karloff, Jack P. Pierce and Famous Monsters Magazine Tony made his first Super 8mm. film at age 12 with a borrowed camera from his Uncle and $3 pocket money. it was titled Death to the Vampires and he played Dracula to Bruce Pirrie's Van Hesling (sic). Less than a year later his 12 minute short The Vengeance of Frankenstein featuring Dracula, the Wolfman and the Frankenstein Monster won the Series 70 Contest for Best Film by an Elementary School Student and was screened on TV Ontario and CHCH Hamilton on numerous occasions. In 1970 at age 14 Tony made a 56 minute unauthorized version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies with a cast of two dozen boys. To this point his other Super 8mm. films had been silent with accompanying sound tracks on 1/4 inch reel-to-reel tape. For Lord of the Flies, Tony and his cousin, Gareth Powell (also the cinematographer) invented their own method of recording synchronous sound which was later laboriously transferred to the film's mag strip shot-by-shot. Tony made 25 super 8mm. films before attending Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1974 for film studies. There he made a further 25 16mm. films, two of which, These Foolish Things (1977) and Sentimental Fool (1978) won International awards for student filmmaking. After graduation in 1978 Tony gained work in the post-production field and soon became a feature film dialogue editor. In 1983 he directed an award winning short film, Productivity and Performance by Alex K. (1984) and two years later a feature film, The Pink Chiquitas (1986). The feature was severely re-cut before its release by its producer and all of the dialogue scenes featuring Eartha Kitt were inexplicably deleted. In 1990 together with Bruce Pirrie and Dana Anderson, Tony wrote a comedic adventure feature film script about a by-the-book Mountie, his half wolf-dog and mismatched partner titled, The Resurrection of Frank Slide which was optioned by Canada's then biggest production company. Upon seeing a strikingly similar network television pilot in 1994 and subsequent series produced by the same company they sued for breach of contract, copyright and fiduciary duty. The law suit would last for 10 years before it was successfully mediated. Prior to the end of that suit, Tony relocated to London, England where he worked in post production on a number of feature films. He retired from editing in 2012 and now spends time between homes in Richmond-Upon-Thames and Toronto Beach.