More on Kim Manners...
VANCOUVER — Supernatural and The X-Files has lost one of its own.
Kim Manners, a 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. Manners was directing a short, inconsequential filler scene in a parking garage and, always one to take a weird angle on the obvious, had decided to shoot the scene at shoelace level. He lay 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 an actor's shoes.
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.
Manners' episodes for The X-Files included the seriously "out-there" carnival freak show "Humbug"; and the third season's "Oubliette," an episode Duchovny has cited as one of his favourites, in which a lonely waitress in a diner forms an empathetic bond with a 12-year-old girl who has been kidnapped and is about to be murdered unless Mulder (Duchovny) finds her first. That episode, which Duchovny says featured possibly his best performance in the entire series, revealed Manners at his directorial best.
Manners had kept his battle with cancer to himself. 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 in an e-mail 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. There's a saying in the production business that you can measure a person by how well they're liked by the crew.
Riopel: "[Manners] will be missed by everyone he met as a unique individual, a unique heart, and a great director. This will be acutely felt by his loyal crew, still working today on Supernatural. Rest in peace, Kim."
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) I was hoping he'd mention William Gibson's 
