For Immediate Release: September 16, 2003

Acclaimed Director Peter Lynch Unearths A Tall Toronto Tale In Whale Of A Tale.

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The Canadian Filmmaker's Latest Feature Length Documentary To Air on CBC's Rough Cuts, March 2004

Take one self-consciously world-class city and a seemingly-innocuous "found object," mix in an absurd broth of characters and agendas, and you have Peter Lynch's Whale Of A Tale, a fanciful documentary that speaks to our gullibility and desire to believe tall tales.

In Whale Of A Tale said object is a whale bone, incongruously discovered in the '80s under the streets of Toronto - a thousand kilometers from the ocean - during the construction of a streetcar extension from Union Station to the waterfront.

As if awakened from hibernation, the bone would soon come alive as the center of a media storm. The sometimes-hilarious cast of characters drawn to it would include a wishful paleontologist, an obsessed debunker, some wildly unscientific journalists, a police "bone expert" and an erstwhile circus owner.

Currently shooting in Toronto and various locations in the United States, Whale Of A Tale is the latest stream-of-heightened-consciousness from Lynch (Cyberman, The Herd) a Canadian auteur whose style-heavy approach is often compared by critics to that of Werner Herzog. It's an absurdist tale that evokes Lynch's earlier Project Grizzly - in which he chronicled the Ahab-like quest of a Canadian inventor to create a suit that could withstand an attack by North America's largest carnivore.

Whale Of A Tale differs from that effort, however, in that it is a tale of multiple obsessions. It is a kind of Roshomon tale, with the remnant of the dead-sea mammal having a different effect on everyone who comes in contact with it. As such, Lynch tells an evocative story of different realities, his lens wandering darkly from the depths of primordial oceans, to the strata of subterranean Toronto, to the dusty world of academia and "experts."

The film introduces us to Joe Resendes, a Toronto Transit Commission contract worker who found the bone and donated it to the Royal Ontario Museum - at a time when Toronto was a nascent "world-class" city, just beginning to fall in love with itself.

The "story", as told and sold by the media, was that it was an ancient cetacean that inhabited Lake Champlain, a glacial inland sea that once ran from Toronto to the Atlantic.

The press tried to pressure ROM paleontologist Kevin Seymour to abandon natural caution and to voice the most fanciful of possibilities for the whale's origin. He became a reluctant media star, interviewed on TV repeatedly and lionized as a man who could give voice to our desire for a resonant prehistory.

Enter curmudgeonly history buff Allan Ironside, who became convinced that Toronto's own whale had a more prosaic past. His theory was that it was a piece of a lost sideshow attraction, part of a circus called the Harry Piper Zoo which existed at the turn of the 20th century at the present site of the Royal York Hotel. Ironside's story had as many holes as Seymour's. And the combined cloud of doubt raised by all the uncertainties created that which the media shuns most - complexity. As the press began to look away, the tale of the marine anomaly took strange new turns, tailor made for the absurdist eye of director Lynch.

Whale Of A Tale is co-produced by sought-after producer Ed Barreveld (whom he worked with on Project Grizzly and who produced last year's award winning feature, Aftermath: The Remnants of War), the shooter is Stan Denniston and editing will be done by his long time collaborator and wife, Caroline Christie (aside from Lynch's films has edited Michael Moore's The Awful Truth, Elida Schogt's Zyklon Portrait, Comedy Central's Insomniac with Dave Attell and The Comedy Network's Puppets Who Kill). Whale Of A Tale will air on CBC's Rough Cuts in 2004.

As it unearths old truths, Whale Of A Tale suggests a "new" Toronto - one informed by self-awareness and less by hubris, hype and cultural baggage. With an eye towards such evocations of time and place as Fellini's Roma and Ondaatje's In The Skin Of a Lion, Lynch seeks to understand the connection of a dead whale to our own mass consciousness and what it says about our identity.

Of one thing Lynch's certain, Toronto's whale-mania was no fluke.

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Further media information please contact:
Ingrid Hamilton
ingrid@gat.ca
416-802-2079
Dubs available upon request.