Michael Sparaga didn’t start out to make a film that captures the odd spirit of Canada. He wanted a superhero movie.

But as it’s turned out, his very small epic — shot with $35,000 squeezed from his credit cards and Royal Bank line-of-credit — is, on and off the film — as Canadian as bags of milk and the CN Tower.

Except for that Baldwin brother behind the comic book counter.

Waiter leaps into film

Sparaga was a Toronto waiter-slash-film-school-grad-slash-director, when he made a leap of faith. He put everything into making a movie about the second-fiddle to a superhero.

“I could afford to, since I’m not married or have kids — I’m lucky no one loves me,” he explains, on the line from Halifax, at midnight, after another screening.

Called Sidekick — and originally shot at nights and weekends on video — the indie production has, like any good hero, gained the admiration of good citizens across this nation and our neighbors to the south. In no small part, it’s been due to Sparaga’s decision not to sell it off to a quick DVD release. Instead, he and cast and production members — including his director Blake Van de Graaf — are now on a cross-Canada tour, showing Sidekick in every major city that will screen it.

It’s always the same — Sparaga and Van de Graaf sit in the back of the theatre, rocks in their stomachs, waiting to see if the audience responds at all the right moments. Which they do.

They make enough money to afford to get to the next theatre in their eight-city tour, which ends May 1 in Vancouver.

This weekend, they’re in Montreal. On April 15, they’ll be — before heading west — in Toronto at the Royal Cinema.

In their SUV, along with their luggage, will be the only two copies of Sidekick, which has been transferred — thanks to funding by Telefilm Canada — on to film.

“And really, one of those copies is too dark to show,” says Sparaga.

Nod to geeks

In part, a nod to day-dreaming geeks everywhere, Sparaga tacks up movie posters and hands out invitations at comic book shops. He places ads in shopper newspapers. He is quietly relentless in his self-promotion — perhaps not a usual Canadian trait, he admits.

"It’s like I’m selling an elixir,” the write-producer reasons.

One of his main leads, Perry Mucci — who plays the sidekick to a pretty-boy office mate who realizes he has telekinetic abilities — sold tickets in a Halifax box-office during a showing.

While Daniel Baldwin was shooting a film in Toronto, they convinced the actor — who played in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July but is more recognizable as detective Beau Felton in TV’s Homicide: Life on the Streets — to give up spare time to play a comic book store owner in Sidekick.

Down to earth star

He’d even drive himself to the small set.

“During breaks, he’d take me out to his Hummer, and we’d go over lines and talk about my career — very surreal,” recalls actor Mucci, who grew up running down to his favorite video store in the small Ontario town of Hastings.

Baldwin, recalls Sparaga, was just happy he was asked to play someone other than a cop or a villain.

He convinced the Baldwin brother to sign up over coffee, at a Toronto Starbucks — rather than Tim Hortons.

If the plot of Sidekick has some super qualities in it, so to has the story of its making. Focus Features, the U.S. company behind Brokeback Mountain and The Constant Gardener, has optioned Sidekick for a possible re-make.

Focus Features had originally wanted Sidekick not to be shown to anyone. But Sparaga believed his current version could, if pushed, fly.

Won festival award

It’s won a film festival award in Toronto and in a rather remote one in the Ozarks.
And along the way, has captured more than a bit of our secret identity.

“There’s a lot about Canada in this,” Sparaga, who turns 33 on his tour, says.
“We are the sidekick to the United States. (The sidekick in the movie) is a peacekeeper, who’s trying to guide the man with all the power.

“The sidekick somehow expects it to be used for good and the betterment of people.”
Sparaga himself longs for the days of film when everyone didn’t seem so jaded or sarcastic.

“I grew up on Gremlins and Back to the Future, but I also grew up seeing (Canada’s) Littlest Hobo and Degrassi,” he adds.

“It’s so Canadian, that the first superhero film I make is about a sidekick.”
And his own favourite hero? The Canadian-born Superman.

“I love to believe there’s someone out there who is that good to people,” he imagines.
But the movie Canadians — after the screenings — are asking him to consider next.

Something on Bigfoot.