Spry, Robin, 1939- : Robin Spry was born in Toronto in 1939, the son of economist and historian Irene Spry and broadcasting activist Graham Spry. He was raised in Ottawa and London, England. He received degrees in engineering and economics from Oxford and the London School of Economics, as well as a diploma in French from the University of Grenoble. He began his career as a filmmaker making short dramatic films in London, writing his own film scripts as well as short stories and a (unpublished) novel.
After completing his education in Europe, Spry returned to Canada in 1965 and joined the National Film Board of Canada, where he learned all aspects of professional filmmaking, working as a production assistant, cameraman, scriptwriter, director, editor and producer. While on staff at the NFB, Spry wrote, directed or produced such award-winning documentaries and television films as Ride for Your Life (1966), Flowers on a One Way Street (1967), Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (1973), and Face (1975). Spry also directed feature films while he was at the NFB, including Prologue (1968), which won the Robert Flaherty Award at the British Academy Awards, and One Man (1976), which was shown at Cannes.
Receiving a Senior Arts Award from the Canada Council in 1977, Spry left the National Film Board to work as a freelance filmmaker, making Drying Up the Streets (1979), winner of an ACTRA award; Don't Forget/Je Me Souviens (1979); and Suzanne (1980), nominated for six Genie Awards. He set up his own company, Filmedia Inc., in 1979, through which he took on writing, directing and producing contracts. In the same year, he co-founded a world sales company, Filmaccord, with Michel Roy, though he resigned in 1982.
Robin Spry joined the independent production company Telescene (est. 1977) in 1982, taking it over in partnership with Paul Painter in 1989. Working first as a commercial director, Spry expanded Telescene's productions to include feature films and television programmes. He directed or produced the award-winning Keeping Track (1985), winner of the SOGIC prize for the year's most commercially successful film in Quebec; Obsessed (1987), winner of the Best Canadian Film Award at the Montreal Film Festival; À Corps Perdu (1988), winner of the Best Film Award at the Atlantic Film Festival; and Une Histoire Inventée (1990), winner of Air Canada's Most Popular Film Award and Best Canadian Film at the Montreal Film Festival. Spry also produced the documentary, Stress and Emotions, which won Best Educational Film Award at the Canadian Film and Television Awards in 1985 and was sold to PBS for a prize-winning series on the brain.
In the 1990s Telescene concentrated on television programmes, Spry producing the dramatic series Urban Angel for CBC and Sirens as well as a series of TV movies based on novels by Mary Higgins Clark. The Canadian market being so small, Telescene increasingly sought the market offered by speciality channels such as the American Fox Family Channel and Nickelodeon and the British SciFi Channel - and Spry produced the teen series Big Wolf on Campus and Student Bodies, the family series Misguided Angels, and the adult science fiction series The Hunger. As Canadian public funding became more and more directed to international co-productions, Telescene initiated the New Zealand co-productions Nightmare Man (1997) and Fearless (1999), the Australia co-productions Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1999) and The Lost World (1999), and the Finland co-production Going to Kansas City (1997). A particularly successful co-production was the Emmy-award nominated television miniseries Hiroshima (1995), a Canada-Japan co-production with major American involvement.
In 1997, Telescene went public and was traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Following the critical success of Hiroshima, Telescene had established subsidiary offices in New York (headed by Michael Yudin) and Los Angeles (headed by Bruce Moccia), as well as a branch office in London (headed by Jamie Brown) - and in 1998 it began working on developing an Action Adventure Network with American partners. But it ran into severe cash flow difficulties, Paul Painter left the company, and, in December 2000, Telescene was forced to file for bankruptcy protection. Unable to find new backing, it declared bankruptcy in 2002. Robin Spry has since joined the CinéGroupe, where he continues to be involved in film production.
