ejean Tremblay is the man of the hour, and perhaps the decade, when it comes to writing big-budget television drama in Quebec.

He is one half of the province’s hottest screenwriting team and is considered to be one of Canada’s most influential sports journalists.

That recognition has taken an even firmer hold this year with the ongoing success of Scoop, the Productions sda newsroom drama penned by Tremblay and partner Fabienne Larouche. Scoop reached new heights on Radio-Canada this season, topping the ratings with audiences of 2.6 million to three million during its January-to-April, 13-week run.

Tremblay and Larouche have at least six tv projects in the works, including three series and a miniseries that are slated to go into production in the next 12 to 15 months.

The latest is Urgence, a 39-hour, $30 million foray into a big-city hospital emergency ward. Radio-Canada will broadcast and Claude Godbout and Joanne Forgues of Montreal’s Prisma Productions are the producers. Principal photography is scheduled to begin in June 1995.

On the Quebec television landscape, Tremblay’s series are distinguished by their fast pace and modernity; they are international in spirit but Quebecois in their settings and characterizations.

In the Tremblay/Larouche vision of storywriting, the drama is set in a central location where characters are forced to perform. For Lance et compte, the 39-hour Communications Claude Heroux hockey drama, it was the players’ dressing room; for Scoop, it’s the newsroom; and for Urgence, to be produced over three seasons, it’s the emergency ward.

In the Lance et compte dressing room, Tremblay says he and cowriter Jacques Jacob were able to explore character development against a backdrop of insider intrigues of the professional hockey business. From the Scoop newsroom, the writers are able to dramatize ‘everything that touches the news – the control of money, politics and human relations,’ says Tremblay. ‘Once the basic personalities were established, we were able to develop a more personal side of the characters.’

For Urgence, Tremblay says the emergency ward is a natural crucible for drama, partly because it touches all classes of society.

‘Decisions have to be made quickly,’ he says. ‘The doctors and nurses are under incredible stress. And when choices have to be made, then there is drama. It’s under pressure that people show themselves for who they are.

‘For example, we discovered that in obstetrics… a doctor has literally only minutes to decide if it’s worth taking a chance, whether to get the incubator, or let it (the baby) go,’ he says.

‘By the year 2000, we believe that in Quebec and in Canada, in countries with developed social infrastructures, one of the big issues will be the health-care system. All kinds of efforts will be made to protect the system, but it’s obvious that doctors, nurses and administrators are under enormous pressures. And (budget) cuts will be made. But making cuts means making choices, and the moment you talk about `choice,’ you’re talking about drama.’

Urgence’s 39 one-hour episodes will follow the careers and personal lives of three younger main characters, with the leading role likely going to a male.

Research is underway: Larouche is slated to spend a few weeks in a Chicoutimi hospital, while Tremblay says he’ll visit a Montreal hospital ‘learning about pr.’

The series bible will be written later this fall for a tentative June 1, 1995 startup.

As for Scoop, it goes into production on a fourth and final season – 52 hours in total – later next month under the direction of Pierre Houle and Alain Chartrand. With so much real-life newsroom experience picked up over his years at La Presse, Tremblay says he and Larouche easily could have prepared 65 episodes.

Producers are Francine Forest and Francois Champagne, sda president. The budget for the final 13 episodes is $9.1 million, up $600,000 over last season.

Tremblay says he’s especially pleased director Houle (‘What a discovery!’) is back.

The success of Lance et compte and Scoop, both shot on 16mm film (teleromans produced in-house by broadcasters are taped on video), has crowned Tremblay the man who brought the Quebec teleroman into the modern era.

He is flattered by the assessment, but says the love affair Quebec audiences have with tv dramas that are rooted in the past is not fading.

‘We need the past in Quebec, it’s reassuring’ he says. ‘It’s in our genes. Look at our motto, `Je me souviens.’ We always have to look back to be sure our roots are in the right place. We have survived because of the Catholic Church. It hasn’t been very long since we’ve opened to the world, just 35 years. But I think this strong sense of the past leads us to open to the world.’

Tremblay left Chicoutimi in 1974 to come to Montreal where he joined La Presse.

‘It took me a week to realize it was no big deal,’ he says. ‘Interviewing the mayor of Montreal is the same as interviewing the mayor of Chicoutimi.’

He has traveled widely as a sports writer, covering professional boxing and tennis and Olympic sporting action at games in Montreal, Moscow, Lillehammer, Sarajevo, Calgary, Albertville and Los Angeles. He’s also a regular commentator on Montreal radio station ckoi-fm and stations in Chicoutimi and Quebec City.

It is this international perspective that gives Tremblay’s work its modern feel, a quality reflected in characters created by him and Larouche.

For instance, Emile Rousseau, the rich publisher in Scoop iii, launches a public share offering when he takes on another character, Huxtall, a financial foe loosely based on deceased media mogul Robert Maxwell.

Tremblay, 49, waxes eloquent on his relationship with 35-year-old writing partner Larouche.

‘The fact I work with a young woman represents an extraordinary opportunity for me,’ he says. ‘She’s got character, she’s a modern woman, and she’s got lots of energy. Whenever I fall into a pattern of cliches, macho, cheap sexist humor, she has her own vision, which is younger and feminist. Our chats, arguments, often get super heavy.’

As for Larouche, she is writing a new daily teleroman for Radio-Canada called Polyvalente. It’s about a female phys ed teacher and is slated as a replacement for Lise Payette’s Marilyn.

Larouche has also penned, with help from Tremblay, a new miniseries called Misericorde (Mercy), a four-hour $4 million production to be directed by Jean Beaudin (Blanche, Shehaweh) starting May 27.

This story covers 10 crucial years (1966 to 1976) in the life of a young woman who enters a convent as an adolescent. While her contemporaries are chanting peace and love and listening to Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Marie, played by the talented Marina Orsini, is teaching children and chanting Alleluia in the convent chapel.

The creed of the passionate Marie – that sainthood is achieved through beauty and love – clashes with the stringent rules of the authoritative Sister Cecila, played by the wonderful Monique Miller (Montreal P.Q.). The older sister’s notion of sainthood, in the life of a nun, can only be achieved through service and obeying rules.

Torn between love and her calling, Marie’s dilemma is further exacerbated when her friend Sister Edith falls in love with a captain from Gaspe.

Misericorde is being produced by Philippe Dussault of Neofilm, and will be filmed in Montreal and the Gaspe. Financing comes from Telefilm Canada, Neofilm, the Quebec tax credit program and Television Quatre Saisons, the broadcaster.

Yet another Tremblay project, ‘a tragedy of Greek dimensions,’ is Direct au coeur (Direct to the Heart).

Tremblay has outlined the project, a Cain and Abel story about three working-class kids, two brothers and a sister. The boys are stepbrothers and feuding boxers. Their sister is headed to the top in the rock world.

‘I have an enormous feeling for this series,’ says Tremblay. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for four years and I’m raring to start writing it.’

Originally conceived as a 13-hour project, Tremblay now thinks a boxing story is better limited to five or six hours. Producer Jacques Blain of Modus tv earlier told Playback he’s open to producing Direct au coeur in French or English, or both, as a genuine double-shoot.

Over the past few years, Tremblay has penned a series of Christmas stories, published on page one of La Presse.

Revealing an unexpected sentimental side, he says, ‘My one big dream is to see these stories developed as treatments for television movies. I’m sure there’s a market out there for contemporary stories with a Christmas flavor.’

He says many people in the Quebec industry ‘are on the back of Telefilm and the broadcasters,’ but as far as he’s concerned, Telefilm runs a tight, professional show in the province.

‘We’ve met with them (Telefilm) and if sometimes what they say is corny, on the whole what they say is intelligent,’ he says. ‘We get good input in terms of creativity, and when we had problems we were able to talk them out with Myrianne Pavlovic (Telefilm director, creative evaluation) or Louis Laverdiere (director, Quebec operations).’

Tremblay says he and partner Larouche are ‘maniacs’ when it comes to safeguarding creative control of their carefully researched projects.

‘You wouldn’t believe the research we do,’ he says. ‘We consult psychologists, psychiatrists, journalists, our friends of course, and (for one of the Scoop iv stories) we’re interviewing a police detective, so we can make sure everything’s `correct.’ When it’s not good, when it doesn’t work, it’s not because we haven’t worked on it.’