Take One: Film & Television in Canada (ISSN 1192-5507, OCLC 60624126) Although it shares the name with the original Take One, Take One: Film and Television in Canada was a separate publication with no connection to its predecessor. And unlike the original, its focus was entirely Canadian. When its founder, Wyndham Wise – a student of Joe Medjuck when Medjuck taught film studies at Innis College, University of Toronto in the early 1970s – launched the magazine in the fall of 1992, he called Joe in Los Angeles to ask permission to use the name. Medjuck gave permission, but said it would ‘confused librarians.’ He was right.
With no government or institutional support, at first Take One: Film and Television in Canada was published irregularly. When it did eventually receive support from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council, it went quarterly in 1996 and for a brief period in the early 2000s it was published five times a year. It folded in the spring of 2006 after 52 issues and three special issues.
The magazine was published by non-profit organization, the Canadian Independent Film & Television Publishing Association, and Wyndham Wise served as the publisher and editor-in-chief. Over the span of its publishing history, contributing editors included Marc Glassman, Tom McSorley, Maurie Alioff and Cynthia Amsden. It built a reputation as Canada’s finest and most influential film magazine, offering criticism, articles, reviews and interviews and, most notably, significant contributions to the discourse on Canada cinema.
Issue No. 12, Summer 1996 was devoted to 100 Years of Canadian Cinema and included a major essay by Geoff Pevere: “Ghostbusting: 100 Years of Canadian Cinema or Why My Canada Includes The Terminator”; No. 22, Winter 1998 included Wyndham Wise’s essay “Canadian Cinema from Boom to Bust: The Tax-Shelter Years”; and issue No. 28, Summer 2000 contained Cameron Bailey’s “A Secret History of the Toronto New Wave.” In 2001, the University of Toronto Press published Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film, the most comprehensive book of its kind since Peter Morris’s The Film Companion (1984). In 2006, the Take One digital archives were transferred to Northern Stars.
Published earlier (in Monteal, and with no connection to the above):
Take One (1966–1979) While giving due attention to the newly emerging Canadian film scene, Take One was international in scope and the first serious English-Canadian film magazine. It was inexpensive, 25 cents a copy, and initially published bi-monthly. It attracted some of the best film journalists of the time and Terry Mosher, the Montreal political cartoonist, would from time to time provide original cover art. In later years, Joe Medjuck would become more involved with the running of the magazine, and when he left for Hollywood to work for Ivan Reitman at the end of 1979 the magazine folded after 81 issues.