R.I.P. Kim Manners: The Vancouver production community loses one of its own

Supernatural and The X-Files has lost one of its own.



Kim Manners, a long-time, Vancouver-based director known for his creative eye behind the camera and his boundless energy behind the scenes, died early Sunday evening at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.



Manners had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and late last season had to step down from his day-to-day duties as senior executive producer and lead director of the cult thriller Supernatural.



I first met Manners during The X-Files' fifth season, the series' final year in Vancouver as it would turn out. He was directing a short, inconsequential night scene in a parking garage involving Mitch Pileggi, "Skinner" from the show, and Vancouver acting teacher William B. (Bill) Davis, aka "CSM" or Cigarette-Smoking Man. It was a nothing scene, really, just filler — the kind of scene TV scripts use to "bridge" one key scene with another.



Manners, always one to take a weird angle on the obvious, had decided to shoot the scene at shoelace level — literally. He lied down in a puddle of cold, dank water on the cold, hard cement floor of the parking garage floor and arranged the camera dolly track so that the camera would tilt up from Davis' shoes as the Cigarette-Smoking Man dropped a lit cigarette down toward the camera and then angrily stubbed it out of his toe. Manners laughed easily, and he could curse a blue streak that would put Gordon Ramsay to shame.



He could be demanding to work for — David Duchovny once told me it took him a long time to warm to Manners, who joined The X-Files in its second, some say best season, just as the genre-bending drama was finding its feet and starting to really push the boundaries of what thriller TV could do, in the same way Rod Serling's Twilight Zone did a generation earlier.



Manners' episodes for The X-Files included the seriously "out-there" carnival freak show "Humbug," a second-season episode X-Files creator Chris Carter credits with showing everyone that The X-Files could be darkly funny as well as scary; the gargoyle episode "Grotesque," which won an Emmy for local, B.C.-based cameraman John Bartley, who is now working on Lost in Hawaii; the cockroach episode "War of the Coprophages;" the high-school cult murder episode "Die Hand Die Verietzt," starring a teenage Heather McComb in a sensational performance as a disturbed girl who claims she rape; and the third season's "Oubliette," an episode Duchovny has cited as one of his favourites, featuring Tracey Ellis as a lonely waitress in a diner who forms an empathetic bond with a 12-year-old girl (Vancouver actor Jewel Staite, in one of her first on-screen performances) who has been kidnapped and is about to be murdered unless Mulder (Duchovny) finds her first. He does — barely — but Ellis' waitress, who literally feels the girl's pain, must die so the girl can live. That episode, which Duchovny says featured possibly his best performance in the entire series, revealed Manners at his directorial best.



Manners was much loved by his typically, hard-working crews, despite his demanding reputation and exacting standards. There's a saying in the production business that you can measure a person by how well they're liked by the crew. And Manners was much liked.



I first learned of Nutter's illness from longtime director David Nutter, at a Directors Guild of America get-together earlier this month in Los Angeles.



Nutter, who is an unprecedented 14-for-14 in directing series pilots that then go on to become full-fledged series (The Mentalist is his, as are Without a Trace, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Vancouver-based Smallville and, ironically enough, Supernatural itself), admitted Manners was in the fight of his life, and losing. In true Manners fashion, Manners had kept his battle to himself, all the while boosting the spirits of those around him. A director's job is to get the best out of the people who work with him, even when they're having a bad day, and Manners was one of the best at it.



I learned of Manners' passing last night in an email from Dave Riopel, who works in Supernatural's grip department. That says a lot. In the end, it was not a famous star or a prominent filmmaker who thought to share the news of Manners' passing, but rather one of the unsung, behind-the-scenes workers no one ever reads about in entertainment magazines.



Riopel: "(Manners) will be missed by everyone he met as a unique individual, a unqieu heart, and a great director. This will be acutely felt by his loyal crew, still working today on Supernatural. Rest in peace, Kim."



Indeed.