Carle to direct first of the Tales of

the Wild series for Justine Heroux

Montreal: Cinevideo Plus producer Justine Heroux is set to begin production on an ambitious six-film project called Tales of the Wild. Inspired in large part by the wilderness writings of James Oliver Curwood and Jack London, four of the six 90-minute telefilms will be shot in Quebec and two in France, all in 1994. The $12 million six-pack of ‘nature adventures’ is targeted at family audiences.

Gilles Carle will direct the first two, Blood of the Hunter and A Gentleman of Courage, on location in France early in the new year. Carle also wrote both screenplays. The other titles are Esperanza, Wolves and Gold Hunters, Kazan and Baree, Son of Kazan.

‘I believe in coproduction,’ says Heroux. ‘We couldn’t have produced this only here. The licence fees from broadcasters in France are much higher (than in Canada).’

Heroux’s French coproduction partners are Gaumont Television and Ellipse, the production arm of pay-tv channel Canal +. There are additional windows on France 3 and M6.

It’s been a busy fall for the veteran producer, wrapping two mows, Gabriel Pelletier’s Meurtre en musique and Crosswinds, a two-hour Robert Geoffrion-scripted tv movie from director Allan A. Goldstein.

Shot on Super 16mm in l’Estrie, Que., near Georgeville, Crosswinds was a major logistical headache, says Heroux, made worse by bad weather and tricky fx storms and explosions.

Crosswinds is a romance adventure about four tourists and a ship’s captain who head out on a long-anticipated fishing trip. During a violent storm, they rescue three drowning drug dealers. They live to regret their good deed, however, when the smugglers terrorize them, but eventually the captain cuts a plan for personal revenge.

Leading players include American actor/director/producer David Soul (Starsky and Hutch, Johnny Got His Gun, Secret of the Sahara) in the role of Captain Quill, Carl Marotte, Martin Watier and Vlasta Vrana as the three drug traffickers, and Jean-Francois Blanchard, Grace de Capitani, Andre Champagne and Danielle Schneider as the four tourists. Daniel Pilon plays a police detective and Jean-Pierre Bergeron is dope boss Diego.

Danny Rosner was the shoot’s delegate producer. Luc Campeau was the pm, Richard Tasse was the art director and Sylvain Brault was the dop.

First Choice/The Movie Network and French-track movie channel Super Ecran will broadcast Crosswinds in the spring of 1994. TF1 has the rights in France and Pandora is the exporter.

Meurtre en musique was written by Suzanne Aubry and is based on the Boileau Narcejer novel A Coeur perdu. It was coproduced with Septembre Productions, Paris, and tells the story of a singer at the center of a love triangle that leads to murder. Stars are Joe Bocan, Serge Dupire, Claude Leveille, Yves Jacques and Marcel Sabourin.

Investors include Radio-Quebec, Telefilm Canada and Super Ecran. In France, the film will be telecast by both France 2 and France 3.

Before the cameras

a woman who copes with four kids and a mentally ill and absent husband is the subject of Craque la vie, a Cite-Amerique mow being shot under the direction of Jean Beaudin (Les Filles de Caleb, Being at Home With Claude).

Billed as a dramatic comedy, the 19-day, $1.1 million shoot is based on a screenplay by Cite-Amerique partner Monique Messier, who freely adapted the story from an award-winning Danish telefilm.

It is being shot on location in Montreal and at Studio Saint Martin through to Dec. 15 and stars Linda Sorgini, Annette Garand, Guy Nadon, Patrice L’Ecuyer and Frank Scorpio. Craft specialists joining Beaudin are dop Thomas Vamos, sound recordist Serge Beauchemin, art director Alain Singher and composer Richard Gregoire, who wrote the beautiful music for Blanche.

Investors include Telefilm Canada, Alliance International, the film’s exporter, Cite-Amerique and broadcaster Radio-Canada.

Back from a promotional tour for Blanche’s launch in Switzerland with series lead Pascale Bussieres, Cite-Amerique producer Michel Gauthier reports the first two episodes of the 11-hour mega-production won a 39 share in primetime on Television Swiss Romande. Blanche, the sequel to the 20-hour Les Filles de Caleb, is being broadcast on tsr in four two-hour blocks, culminating with a three-hour special.

Alliance, tsr program director Raymond Vouillamoz and Air Canada have worked out a promotional contest for the telecast. Alliance is presently negotiating a deal for Blanche with France 3.

Gauthier says he and partners Lorraine Richard and Messier will sit down in the next month or so to decide whether they’ll proceed with more of the Arlette Cousture Les Filles de Caleb saga. Taken together, Cousture’s two books have inspired 31 hours of high-quality drama, with a price tag in the $23 million range.

France is tuning

in to Canada

despite disturbing reports from Telefilm Canada staff in Paris that Canada/France coproduction activity is down sharply in 1993 – 16 projects in nine months this year against 25 in 1992, with the dollar ratio cut almost in half from last year’s $145 million – more than ever, Canadian productions are making waves on television in France. Here’s a partial list of on-air and upcoming programs:

Sullivan Films’ Road to Avonlea will be seen in two-hour blocks in primetime on the M6 network; Nelvana’s Rupert and Care Bears are being broadcast on France 3 while its hugely popular series The Adventures of Tintin is seen on M6; Alliance Communications has several entries, including e.n.g., on air on France 2 while The Odyssey and the Lawrencia Bambenek story, Woman on the Run, and Trial & Error are slated for telecast on M6.

Twinned with a French tv movie to be shot in 1994, Verseau International’s Trois femmes, un amour (Le Violin de M, working title) will be broadcast in the next month or two on France 2, purportedly the toughest sell to French tv. La Glace et le feu, the two-hour miniseries on the ice-skating Duchesnays from Communications Claude Heroux International will be broadcast in 1994 on both Canal + and M6. And while there’s no confirmed date for TF1’s broadcast of Productions du Cerf’s Shehaweh, that five-hour miniseries should go to air shortly. Pram Productions’ ratings hit Surprise sur prise is back on France 2 this season and Films Rozon’s Juste pour rire is also in the mix.

There’s more: Cinar Films’ animated White Fang (Croc blanc) can be seen on M6 weekdays at supper hour, while the Atlantis Films tv mow Adrift and the award-winning The Ray Bradbury Theater are both slated for broadcast in l’Hexagone.

French children’s specialty channel Canal J has Desclez Productions’ Iris the Happy Professor as well as the zany Austin Junior Vision Cajun puppet series Chicken Minute (Cocotte Minute). Talk 16, a documentary from Back Alley Film Productions, recently had a second European tv window, this time on arte, a European arts channel.

For the right product, licence fees in this market of 60 million are nothing to sneeze at. France’s M6 spent close to $3 million this year with Sullivan, picking up 65 hours of Road to Avonlea, Anne of Green Gables, two two-hour tv movies – Looking for Miracles, broadcast first on Canal J, and Lantern Hill – and By Way of the Stars, a four-hour miniseries coproduced with Beta Taurus in Germany.

Sullivan’s Trudy Grant says much of the company’s French dubbing was done right here in Montreal, at Pierre Dequoy’s Multidub. All of the Quebec dubbing was accepted by M6, says the veteran exporter.

En garde

from the National Film Board, there’s word that more than 750 people attended a mid-November sro reception/screening of Diane Letourneau’s latest documentary, Tous pour un, un pour tous. Letourneau’s 11th film, Tous pour un chronicles the battles of four Quebecois fencing champions and their bid for Olympic glory.

One of the nfb’s more prolific documentarians, Letourneau was trained as a psychiatric nurse, getting her film start as a researcher and ad in the mid 1970s. Her earlier works include Les servantes de Bon Dieu, an unforgettable study of nuns and their devotion to priests; Pas d’amitie a moitie, a film about friendship among women; A Force de mourir, a dramatic short on euthanasia; and Comme deux gouettes d’eau, a look at the ties that bind couples with identical twins.

Produced by Paul Lapointe of the nfb’s Studio B, French Program, Tous pour un credits go to editor France Pilon and dop’s Jean-Pierre Lachapelle and Roger Rochat. It’s touring Quebec this month and will be screened in Ottawa in mid-January.