JOURNEY WOMEN
​OFF THE MAP
The Story Behind the Series
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DBS-Gorica Productions based in Toronto, Canada, is producing a new, ground-breaking, thirty-nine part documentary series called Off the Map.
 
“Off the Map is a documentary series of thirty-nine half hour programs on world exploration and human discovery.    The programs, highly visual and beautifully shot in distant locales around the world, features ordinary people exploring extraordinary places.  These ordinary people are women who agreed to be filmed taking voyages to uncharted territories.  The candar and simplicity of these women meeting people and exploring countries around the world is contrasted with breathtaking settings.  Off the Map is an adventure in cultural and human geography, profiling images of people and places rarely seen on television.”
 
The series; part travel, part National Geographic, is different from other explorer series in that each episode features a lone woman travelling to isolated, often inhospitable places to meet with people of every race and creed.  Each program features a woman travelling to a far-off country in search of humanity, culture and wilderness.  What makes the series unique is the women themselves.  Coming from different age ranges and backgrounds, they are vibrant, human, and sometimes quirky. The audience will be quick to identify with them as they break nails panning for diamonds and become petrified while crossing a raging river.  
 
The background of the series is almost as interesting as the series itself:
  
Felice Gorica - Producer:
Off the Map is really interesting because of the way it evolved. It wasn’t put together like other projects where the producer finds television broadcasters and financing and then shoots the series.  Off the Map was totally backwards.  It was shot first and I guess you could say we asked questions later. 

The series was conceived by Doug Spencer, a cameraman, who had been travelling around the world for eight years. He had this idea for a series starring ordinary women travelling to exotic locales.  When he approached me about the idea, I thought it was unusual for a man to be putting his whole life into shooting a series about women, but when I saw the footage he filmed, I was impressed. 
Doug had this idea years ago that women’s travel was going to be really popular so he began filming episodes and paying for it himself or would arrange free travel and hotels. Doug would find the women at bus-stops and travel clubs, he even put an ad in the newspaper. The women he found were amazing.  They ranged in age from 20 to 80 and came from all different backgrounds.

Doug then tried to sell the series to broadcasters but because he was not an experienced producer, no one would deal with him.  That didn’t stop him, he kept travelling and filming new episodes.  Finally someone recommended he call me because I was known to help new producers and I had produced many documentaries. As soon as I saw his footage, and understood his commitment, I immediately wanted to work with him.

The problem was we had this great footage, but we had no money to finish it, what do we do?  Luckily I had a call one day from a Canadian television distributor.  She was cold-calling to see if I had any wildlife programs because wildlife is a hot seller.  I said no but I had a series that was very marketable.  The only problem was we had no money to finish it.  She agreed to watch a  few minutes of the footage.

She loved it and has since sold the series to broadcasters which helped us finish the series.  When we explain to broadcasters this series was filmed over a period of eight years, by a cameraman who had almost no equipment, and was the only crew member, they are shocked. They cannot believe the high-quality of this series was achieved with no money and no means. 

I find Doug’s story very inspirational because it shows you don’t need a lot of money to film a series, you  need a lot of determination and the guts to be “a rebel without a crew”.
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Doug Spencer still travels and shoots new episodes every three months. The women all say by the end of the shoot they’re ready to kill him but they love him anyway.
   
Doug Spencer - Director/Cinematographer:
I’d always wanted to make a travel documentary.  But I could never afford to buy, borrow or rent the necessary film or video equipment.  So in the late 70’s and early 80’s I travelled around the world and took black and white still photographs which were published in a book entitled Under One Sun in 1985.

With the advances in video technology in the late 80’s, I decided to take the leap to documentaries and bought $25,000 worth of used video equipment.  I wanted to document the adventures of ordinary people exploring extraordinary places and focus on them crossing cultural boundaries and discovering bonds with indigenous peoples living in wilderness areas.

In 1989, I decided on the objective of my first video documentary:  to travel up the Orinoco River in Venezuela and visit the last of the traditional Yanomani Indians.  A travel writer, at my request, wrote a brief description of the project in the travel section of the Toronto Star and mentioned I was looking for travelling companions to film.  Over the next week more than sixty people called me and I met and interviewed at least forty of them.

In selecting the people for this trip, I kept in mind my last visit to the area several years before.  On that occasion my guide, unknown to me, had made arrangements for me to eat a fertility fish and make love to an Indian princess.  Although I gracefully declined his invitation, I knew this area of the world would provide us with numerous opportunities to get ourselves into trouble.

As well, I had read Redmond O’Hanlon’s popular book, In Trouble Again, where he described some of the dangers one might face in the Amazon basin of southern Venezuela.  One story centred on the so -called tooth-pick fish.  O’Hanlon strongly advised travellers not to urinate in the Orinoco River while bathing because this small fish was capable of swimming up one’s stream into the bladder and extending its spine.  This apparently caused a great deal of pain and before one’s bladder burst, he strongly recommended the victim to go to the nearest hospital and ask a surgeon to cut off his penis.

In any event, for this excursion up the Orinoco River, I decided on two men:  Harry and Larry.  I picked Harry because he had lived in Venezuela before and was fluent in Spanish.  I picked Larry because he had army experience and could handle a gun.  I was told that some local miners were known to take pot shots at tourists so I wanted backup firepower.

Harry, Larry, and I set off on our journey by travelling by boat up the Orinoco.  Along the way our engine broke down.  Our ill-prepared crew forgot to include paddles, and we were forced to paddle several miles to the nearest Indian village with dinner plates.  The trip turned out worse when later that evening, Harry was attacked by an angry turkey.

After this first disaster, I decided to completely rethink the concept of the documentary series.  Why not an adventure travel series from a different point of view?  How about ordinary women exploring extraordinary places?  Sounds like a good idea.  Why not give it a try?
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A year later, I was joined by my first female companion Maureen Magee.  We planned to travel by snowmobile from Pond Inlet on northern Baffin Island in Canada’s Arctic to the edge of the Arctic Ocean.  Maureen later confided that she had packed a large hunting knife on the advice of her workmates in the event I made unwanted advances Nine years and twenty-six women later the stories behind the making of the Off the Map television series continue to unfold.

Tamara Wilen Kure, the woman who travelled with me to Morocco, remembers when we had to run with heavy camera equipment through the winding streets of old Marrakesh to escape an over zealous drunk armed with a pocket knife who insisted on becoming our escort.

Pauline Farley wouldn’t let me forget the time in Panama when I mistakenly drank a gallon of unsterlilized water and unintentionally vomited on the ceremonial chair of the village chief who was deciding on whether he would give us permission to stay and film in his village.

Joan Atkins recalls my feeble attempts to foil Bolivian officials who held us and our video equipment ransom for not having a film permit until we paid $500 US to the local Indian museum.

Mary Bray remembers my reaction to her bell bottoms with white pok-a-dots she considered appropriate for trekking across the jungles of Guyana.  She ended up borrowing my sweat pants.

Emila Prempeh recalls when I smuggled my camera into Mexican archaeological sites because we didn’t have proper film permits.  I concealed it in a huge duffel bag and whipped it out every time the guards weren’t looking.

Hope Beverstein remembers when several Huli warriors and I gathered around my video camera in Papua New Guinea and attempted to repair its microphone after it broke when I was trying to climb into the cave where they kept the skulls of their ancestors.

And I’ll never forget arriving in Bangkok with typhoid fever because I foolishly drank tap water in China and noticed that Roman Polanski was on my flight.  Definitely a bad omen.

What’s in store for future episodes in the series? 

​More trips, more women, and more stories.  And why not a guest spot on the Oprah show?  Me with thirty-nine women.  I’m sure it would be a hit with Oprah.