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Poster for The Making of a President
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Released
1978 · FILM

The Making of a President

Synopsis

In wartime Sault Ste. Marie, the mayor invites the president of the Jewish congregation to speak at the town’s upcoming ecumenical war bonds rally. However, the president has just quit and nobody wants the thankless job. A funny and endearing drama featuring Melvyn Douglas, Nehemiah Persoff, Paul Soles and a 15-year-old Mike Myers. Based on a semi-autobiographical short story by Order of Canada winner Morley Torgov. Collie-haired Myers, in one of his first TV roles, is more behaved than usual as a skateboard-riding young piano prodigy. Hollywood veteran Douglas does most of the heavy lifting as a Jewish elder trying the impossible — recruiting a new president who can, in Torgov’s words, handle himself “among the goyim” at an upcoming town war bond rally. The town’s new tailor (Soles) — thought of as a bit of a peacock — is seen as the perfect candidate. (CBC TV-Movie 1978)

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 8

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

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