After three decades of success in any field, many artists might start to think about slowing down. Not Jack Lenz.
Overseeing Lenz Entertainment, a company of about 60 musicians, writers, engineers and puppet artists, the fiftysomething Toronto-based composer and arranger is looking to expand.
He claims his broad-based firm is now the fastest-growing in his field in Canada, producing and writing music for television series, specials and feature films, as well as developing a stable of young recording artists.
To bring what had been its disparate operations under one roof, the firm recently bought a 25,000-square-foot facility in Thorncliffe Park, complete with two state-of-the-art recording and engineering studios and a puppet-making shop for the animated children's series it is producing.
There's talk of building a TV studio on the property to avoid renting space, and this year Lenz will begin production of a long-nurtured feature film, Mona's Dream.
"We got to the point where we had worked on so many shows that we thought, 'Hey we can do this,' " Lenz says of his decision to go big. He's a tall, broad-shouldered, florid-faced man with a warm smile, a hearty laugh and a ready quip. "There may be a bit of folly here, but we had to grow. We couldn't stay where we were. So we went out and got some investors, including Ole, a Toronto music publishing company. And we've created, I think, a unique, independent, Canadian model."
The competition is fierce, he acknowledges. The budget for music in most films, he says, is less than 1 per cent of total costs, "and it's dropping, and you're competing with guys who work out of their basements. Producers are quite happy with that because it costs them less."
Meanwhile, Lenz's 29-year-old son, Asher, a classically trained pianist, has joined the firm as a songwriter, while his wife, Debrah Burton-Lenz, looks after the company's business affairs.
There's no questioning Lenz's musical talent. He has been a composer and arranger for Jimmy Seals and Dash Crofts, written scores of jingles (including the Toronto Blue Jays' theme song, OK, Blue Jays, Let's Play Ball), scored dozens of TV shows (from the CBC National News to Due South to Designer Guys to Little Mosque on the Prairie), and several feature films (among them Paul Gross's Men with Brooms and Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of the Christ, although he was subsequently replaced by John Debney).
"Ooh, boy," Lenz laughs now, recalling the latter experience. "As a person, Mel's a very sweet guy. But the religious thing is so crazy and his views are crazy. It was a tough go. I think he's a tortured guy." When an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine came out about Gibson and his father, Hutton, a Holocaust denier, Lenz told him: "If it were my dad saying these things, I'd distance myself."
More recently, the Lenzs - père et fils - have written a single for Andrea Bocelli (Go Where Love Goes). And Asher, working with singer Adam Crossley, sold a song to pop sensation Josh Groban (So She Dances).
Crossley, putting the finishing touches on his first album of songs co-written with Asher (Anvil of the Heart), is one of several performers that Lenz Entertainment hopes it can stage-manage into stardom. An American, he describes his music as hillbilly, "paddleboat rock." Other Lenz hopefuls include teenage opera prodigy Holly Stell, gospel singer Mark Masri and jazz crooner Cal Dodd.
For years, Lenz earned a tidy income from royalties of music written for children's TV shows, many of which run in syndication forever. Some years, he cashed more royalty cheques than any other member of the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada.
If the fees for writing music were attractive, Lenz reasoned, why not produce the whole shebang - make the puppets, draft the scripts, score the music.
Now, in partnership with Grogs Inc. (Jamie Shannon and Jason Hopley), Lenz has produced Nanalan, a Gemini-award-winning preschool puppet series (reruns are on CBC, new shows are being made for PBS); Weird Years, an animated fish-out-of-water series featuring the adventures of the Dorkovitch family on YTV; Mr. Meaty, a short, offbeat animated after-school show for Nickleodeon, which also airs on CBC, with more than 100 puppet characters; and Ooh & Aah - puppet monkeys that, after winning a stiff competition, began hosting the U.S. Disney Channel's playhouse programming block in March.
A new, five-minute adult puppet series, Swami Jeff's Temple of Wisdom, will start airing on ABC Australia this fall, and Lenz has signed a development deal with Teletoon to expand the series to half-hour shows.
A practising member of the Baha'i faith since 1969 and the father of seven children, Lenz was raised in rural Saskatchewan, the son of a Scottish mother and Hungarian father. He studied piano as a child and later composition at the University of Saskatchewan but, convinced that he couldn't be the teacher his mother wanted him to be, left after two years.
Migrating to Toronto in his late teens, he hung around the local music scene, met soft-rockers Seals and Crofts and, talking himself into a job, eventually became their keyboard and flute player. He toured the world with them, and with Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina.
Asher's route into the business included classical piano and then jazz, which he studied in New York. "I found it provided you with a lot more tools in terms of writing your own music," he said.
I asked Lenz, who remains in awe of the great classical composers of the past three centuries, whether we would still be playing the work of contemporary writers 300 years hence.
"I think we're at the end of a civilization, not the beginning. Bach and others were the fruition of a series of cultural and religious developments. We're at the end of that period and at the beginning of something else. But the beginnings are seldom remembered, just the fruitions. In the chaos of the 20th century and beyond, where is there an environment that produces greatness. I don't see it."
Of all the projects on his plate, Lenz is probably most excited about his feature film, Mona's Dream. His script tells the story of Iran's persecution and execution in 1983 of teenager Mona Mahmudnizhad and nine other members of her Baha'i faith. The film, which will star Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider), has a projected budget of $7-million to $10-million. He's still seeking a co-production arrangement and some foreign financing.
Meantime, Lenz is enjoying his new role as an initiator of projects. "You know," he says, "they used to ask [ composer and lyricist] Sammy Cahn which came first - the music or the words. His answer: The phone call."
Now, it's Jack and Asher Lenz making those calls.
