HEALING - FAR EAST AND DEEP SOUTH

All this would have been impossible if the new centre had not been built, and the building continued during the next years. Finally, during the filming of The Crowning Experience, much of which was done on the island, a Canadian movie director, impressed by the expertise and dedication of some of the young people doing the technical work, suggested to Buchman that he build a studio to make films rather than remain dependent on commercial studios. Buchman responded with characteristic enthusiasm. 'Next year it will be producing one MRA film each week to reach the millions,' he wrote in a letter.16 The studio was built during the winter of 1959-60, in sub-zero temperatures, by two hundred or more MRA volunteers. Two planeloads of Buchman's Hollywood friends - actresses and actors, directors and technicians, led by the veteran Western actor Joel McCrea and his family - came up the next summer to inspect the building. They were all greatly impressed by the quality of the building and by its facilities, but raised major doubts as to its location. How could it be adequately employed on an island which was isolated by frozen lakes and bitter winds from early winter until late spring?

Buchman, now eighty, and never at his best at grasping the practicalities of technical operations, had let his vision outrun his common sense. There had been doubters among his colleagues, but he would not listen to them. He preferred to listen to the enthusiasts whose views matched his own. The studio was used occasionally in the following years, but never on any scale to justify the costs of its creation in money and manpower.

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