The first film was about other French-speaking Canadians as famous as Trudeau and Lévesque—the Dionne quintuplets. The film was based on Pierre Berton’s bestseller, The Dionne Years. Interestingly, the completed work, The Dionne Quintuplets, was one of the few documentaries, which did not carry a Brittain credit as the writer. The CBC asked Brittain to direct and produce the documentary, but responsibility for the script would be Berton’s. This project also had enormous potential for conflict since both men were used to “calling all the shots.”

“We were not Gilbert and Sullivan,” Brittain sighed. “My greatest strength was writing, and this had been taken away from me.”

The two writers met for lunch at Toronto's chic eatery - Winston's - to hammer out their roles. Between requests for autographs (Berton's not Brittain's), they negotiated the turf under which they would work, with Elsa Franklin, Berton's manager, acting as "mother hen." (Franklin was also an old friend of Brittain's and had introduced him to his second wife, Brigitte). An agreement, of sorts, was reached. The pair departed amicably.

The key to the success of the film was Barbara Sears, a researcher who had worked previously with both Brittain and Berton. She assembled the old footage and led Brittain to the right people to be interviewed. Brittain found the material easy to structure. All the footage needed was the scripted narration, which Berton supplied in one day, following a screening in Montreal, an amazing display of speed, which amazed Brittain, who would spend tortured weeks in designing narration. While the first draft was well written, it didn't work with the images on the screen. Some weeks later, there was an uncomfortable moment when DCB conveyed this information to Franklin, telling her that Berton had to do a re-write. When Canada's most prolific writer arrived back in Montreal, the atmosphere was somewhat frosty.

"We started going through the film painstakingly, foot by foot," Brittain recalled, "discussing the interplay between word and image. The tension eased quickly. Berton was a real professional." In 2000, Pierre Berton was interviewed and remembered the situation somewhat differently from DCB, saying that Brittain had not, in fact, ask him to re-write the narration.

There are always arguments when you're putting a film together with your producer and director. You know one has one view and one has another, and you work them out. But I didn't see any problems there. It was a good film and I was happy to be associated with it.

The 90-minute film was a huge success in terms of ratings when it was broadcast November 19, 1978, capturing an enormous audience, the size that usually only the Stanley Cup play-offs commanded. It was Canada's-maybe even the world's-longest running, most compelling, human-interest story, which began in the middle 1930s. The film, entitled, The Dionne Quintuplets, contained all the elements of a great yarn-joy, sadness, depression and degradation, romance and exploitation-the latter, being something reviewer, Twila Burfield, of The Albertan, raised when she asked how Brittain could make a film about exploitation without being accused of exploitation himself?

Responding, Brittain said, "We know where the last remaining quintuplets live, and we could have filmed them without their knowing . . . We could have taken shots unaware. We didn't."

This point alone is significant in understanding Brittain's compassion as a filmmaker. There would be no doubt whatsoever that, had Seven Days been involved in this project, some producer and film crew would have charged down the path to the doors of the surviving quints.

While Brittain displayed more than a fair measure of restraint in the Quints documentary, this was not so in the next film, the fourth that he did under the new CBC-NFB contract.

Paperland: The Bureaucrat Observed might have been more accurately re-titled, The Office Boy's Revenge or Man Bites Hand That Feeds Him. The film is a sabre-slashing attack on bureaucracy.
Critics had a field day with the film in their reviews describing it as, "vicious, nasty, unfair, rich, devious, wonderful, and extremely funny-even if watching it hurt when you laughed." Very little was left to the imagination. And, from the first words of the script, viewers could guess what was coming:

Here he comes now, trying to act like a normal human being.

But he is that most despised of human creatures.

His activities have brought down upon his shoulders the scorn and outrage of history's multitudes.

He is homo bureaucratis, a bureaucrat, and he lives in a land of paper. 

He has been compared to a cockroach.

Like the cockroach he appears to have no useful function.

Like the cockroach he has many enemies.

Like the cockroach he has survived all attempts at extermination.

"Wherever you turn in the film," Gray said, "you find something, which, somewhere deep inside, will tickle an ancient prejudice about fancied futility of soulless indifference."

In part, the words continued relentlessly:

Bureaucrats were first seen standing by the canal builders of ancient Egypt, filling out forms.

Behind each stonemason in the Great Wall of China stood a bureaucrat with a requisition.

In the dark days of the Medicis, an archbishop was publicly hanged when he attempted to interfere with the central administration.

The bureaucrats of Budapest have served the Hun, the Turk, the Hapsburg, the Fascist and the Communist with fine impartiality.

The bureaucrat lives in an unnatural state.

To do his job properly, he should rid himself of passion, initiative, and common sense.

What remains, according to one sociologist, is the truncated remnant of a human being.

Bureaucracy is like snow; it's all around us, and that Brittain was the most recent in a long line of artists and thinkers who have had something to say about the art of pushing paper, puts Brittain in such good company as Brecht, Shaw and Heller.

Brittain's films are almost always comments on human witlessness and, in Paperland, he's found the ultimate metaphor for madness. At one point his narration reads as follows: 'A public bureaucracy is filled with good intentions and boundless energy. Where its goals are simple, such as putting a man on the moon or transporting Jews to gas ovens, it works with relentless efficiency.' This is a jolting comment and it brings to mind Gothman's lethal observation that the only place you are allowed to jump the lineup is when you are going to the concentration camps. In other words, Brittain is deadly serious about all of this. And when you recall that the Film Board is a major ideological instrument of the federal government and its mandate is to show Canadians to Canadians in a positive light, you might wonder how Brittain managed to get off with such dissident testimony. The answer to that is also included in the text of this extraordinary film. The only thing that saves us from bureaucratic subjugation is the inertia of the bureaucracy itself.

The result was devastating, an hour of unrelenting irony: the bureaucrat who bungled when he ordered enough arctic underwear to last 700 years or the scene of the two-man, road-repair gang in the British Virgin Islands, one worker raking gravel, the other, his boss, supervising the operation.
Explaining his position to The Toronto Star's Bob Pennington, Brittain said:

I'm not for untrammeled laissez-faire. Nor do I believe in the survival of the fittest. My concern is for the monumental waste of money and high intelligence in bureaucracies. Old friends of mine have changed dramatically after a few years in the service. No longer are they outspoken and decisive. What I'd like to see is a return to first principles, the public good, an end to their quite desperate fear of making a mistake. It is this fear that leads to their proliferation and the absence of accountability that is the cornerstone of bureaucracy.

The Film Board establishment, naturally enough, was genuinely shocked when it saw the final product. DCB said he felt like a leper as he walked the halls of Canada's giant film bureaucracy. Tom Daly, a long-time NFB film producer, was especially angry about the film.

There were also other bureaucratic reactions that have never been published. Barrie Howells, who acted as executive producer for the Board on the film, wrote to his CBC counterpart, Paul Wright, to make sure where bureaucratic blame would lie when the discovery was made that the documentary was over-budget by $12,000. Howell to Wright wrote:

Since this coverage was caused by decisions made by Donald Brittain, producer/director, I believe that it falls under section 4, paragraph (d) of the contract which reads any increased costs which may arise as a result of decisions made by the producer/director . . . shall be the responsibility of the CBC. I should also mention that the location manager was also supplied by the CBC.

Despite rave reviews, for reasons known only to the Board, Paperland was not submitted to the annual Canadian film awards.

When Brittain discovered this, he paid the entry fee and shipping charges to send a print of the film to the Academy of Canadian Cinema. The documentary cleaned up, including a Genie to Brittain as best director.

The Public Service remained strangely silent, but one bureaucrat, Keith W. de Bellefeuille-Percy, was shocked that Paperland got the Genie for best documentary film.

"Technical effects, editing, etc., are obviously important in awarding prizes for a film," Percy wrote Academy president Ronald Cohen, adding, "but surely the accuracy of the message is important also. After all, Dr. Goebels [sic] made some fine films in the thirties and early forties. 
But . . . ."

The strain on Brittain throughout the making of Paperland and criticism from his NFB peers was considerable. Halfway through the shooting Brittain fell off the wagon. It happened in Austria where he had gone to shoot Viennese bureaucrats. The first drink was a glass of wine. He did not stop after that.

DCB's stature as a filmmaker was growing rapidly. Other offers to make films began pouring in. There was a commission from the Canadian Bankers' Association to do a sponsored film about Canada's banking industry. Brittain had agreed in late 1978 to undertake the project, but, just as quickly, had backed out.

"In view of disclosures on the CBC regarding the involvement of the chartered banks of Canada with large industrial concerns in South Africa supporting apartheid," Brittain telexed Brian Beauchamp, of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, in December 1978, "I must withdraw the offer of my services."

G.B. Soteroff, director of public relations for the Commerce, said the facts had been distorted, but, if Brittain were so strongly disposed, the bank would accept the return of its initial fee, a measly $1,000.

Brittain, perhaps taking a lesson from Jean Renoir, also turned down an offer from the United Nations in New York to produce a film, which would "create true aversion for all wars in the future." Brittain said he found himself "unequal to the task and did not respond."

Other offers were now coming from a different segment of the film industry-television drama. Undeterred by the memory of the horrible experience of Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, DCB turned, for the second time in his career, to dramatic direction. Mercifully, the experience was infinitely more rewarding than the nightmare in Florida in the summer of 1977 or the "gross breach of business ethics," as he described his dealings with the bureaucrats at the Canadian Film Development Corporation.

What probably hurt Brittain more than anything was the realization that, in the end, the bureaucracy usually always wins.

While Brittain's revenge was sweet with the broadcast of Paperland, it was short-lived. In 1979 and 1980, bureaucrats with the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) - the forerunner of Tele-Film Canada - and Donald Brittain became locked in a bitter dispute. In December 1979, Brittain proposed the joint development of a film property based on the life of Bill Miner, Canada's first train robber. A contract was signed in January 1980. Ten thousand dollars was advanced to Brittain to begin developing the property to a full screenplay.

Several weeks later, to Brittain's complete surprise, the CFDC informed Brittain that a Vancouver filmmaker had approached the corporation with a similar proposal and asked Brittain if he would speak with the man, Philip Borsos, to see whether there was any chance of joining forces. Brittain rejected the idea, saying he already had a contract to make the film on Miner's life and wasn't interested in collaborating with Borsos. Brittain was then invited to read the script that Borsos had developed. He refused, saying he didn't want to open himself to possible charges of plagiarism in the future. Meanwhile, the CFDC continued to assure Brittain that it was backing his project 100 per cent.

A few weeks later, Brittain learned that the CFDC had provided the critical funding for the Borsos project. Then, some time later, he read in the show biz newspaper, Variety, a full-page ad, which spelled out CFDC's involvement. Brittain was furious to learn that they turned to Borsos because Brittain had missed some deadlines in the development of his script. As well, the corporation said, they had had difficulty in finding Brittain in the spring and summer of 1980.

Brittain accused the CFDC of acting "in the same manner as a fly-by-night Hollywood operator." He thought of taking legal action, but was talked out of it by friends and colleagues.

The Miner story appeared on the big screen under the title, The Grey Fox, starring American actor Richard Farnsworth. The film was well received and Brittain's version, Silver and Gold, ended up in a drawer gathering dust.