Point de Mire has diverse fare

lined up for production in 1994

Montreal: A major new teleroman from writer Lise Payette, a six-hour international documentary series on the history of women, five new hours of Quebec public affairs television, and a one-hour special on the 50th anniversary of civil aviation are among this year’s production highlights at Productions Point de Mire, one of Quebec’s more expansionary production companies.

Point de Mire, which will produce in the $14 million range in 1994, is headed by company president Payette, producers Jean-Francois Mercier and Raymond Gauthier, and recently named executive vice-president Huguette Marcotte, a former senior manager with Radio-Canada and Tele-Metropole.

Payette’s latest teleroman adventure is Les Machos (working title). This series chronicles the lives of two big-city brothers, both of whom are married, at least as the series opens. One of the guys is a 40-year-old surgeon who runs a poly-service medical clinic on the second floor of their shared commercial building; the other fellow is a reformed jetsetter and lady’s man who operates a car dealership. The latter has his hands full coping with a high-performance female sales manager, while the clinic staff lineup promises memorable if dicey dramatic dialogue – a gynecologist, a plastic surgeon and a black dermatologist.

Mercier will executive produce and Rejean Chayer is the series’ production co-ordinator.

Payette (Dames de coeur, La bonne aventure, Marilyn) is writing 44 one-hour episodes of Les Machos, slated for broadcast in January 1995 on cftm-tv, the Tele-Metropole flagship station in Montreal, and the TVA Television Network.

Marcotte says the series on women, Les Femmes/Women is a six-hour French/English docudrama chronicling the biological, social and political evolution of women from the ancient past to today. It’s the company’s first English-track production.

Subjects covered in the series, to be shot on 16mm film on five continents, include women’s identity in nature and society, female spirituality and sexuality, the struggle for political and social equality and the ensuing backlash.

The $4.8 million project is being licensed by Radio-Canada, Radio-Quebec and TV5 Quebec/Canada, with support from Huguette Labelle and the Canadian International Development Agency, Status of Women Canada, the United Nations and Telefilm Canada.

Executive story editors and senior writers are Payette and Rena Fraticelli, former head of Studio D, the women’s studio at the National Film Board. Mary Armstrong of Cinefort has been hired as delegate producer.

Marcotte says the goal is to screen episodes at the u.n.-sponsored World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in September 1995. The exporter is Multimedia Group of Canada.

Also on slate at Point de Mire is a $650,000 one-hour documentary marking the 50th anniversary of civil aviation.

This film will be directed by Roger Cardinal and shot in 15 countries starting this summer. The project has received support from Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization, International Air Transport Association and the Canadian and Quebec governments.

Point de Mire will also complete five additional hours of an extended public affairs series on Quebec’s political evolution.

‘Other projects for the fall of 1995 are pending,’ says Marcotte. ‘You might say we are in a period of considerable growth.’

Sirens are blaring

Loads of news, all of it good, from the producers of Sirens, the $25 million syndicated lady police series which began principal photography here June 1.

Sirens, from veteran Montreal producer Robin Spry, president of Telescene, is the biggest boost to the local production economy in who knows how long, and is being immediately translated into 300 new jobs for actors, writers, technicians and a myriad of support personnel.

At the front of the employment line is slim, blonde, green-eyed Quebec actress Jayne Heitmeyer who has landed the highly coveted, domestic content role of Jessie Jankowski, one of the series’ three leads.

‘Although Jayne is not yet well-known to the general public, the Sirens series and her immense talent will soon change that,’ says Spry.

Heitmeyer, a former model and reporter with Montreal radio station CJFM 96 was ‘spotted’ in 1992 during a commercial casting session for Crispy Crunch. She signed with the Glenn Talent Agency of Montreal earlier this year.

Heitmeyer won the role after an exhaustive casting search undertaken by the producers and Elite Productions that involved more than 100 actors in five u.s. and Canadian cities.

Heitmeyer’s costars are American actors Adrienne-Joi Johnson and Liza Snyder, both from the original 13-hour run produced by ABC Productions.

Jean-Claude Lord is the director for the first two one-hour episodes of Sirens. Lord’s credits include the critically acclaimed first year of Lance et compte, Bingo, Delivrez-nous du mal, Eddie and the Cruisers II and the Rock Demers children’s feature film, The Tadpole and the Whale.

Other directors signed for the series include Gilles Walker, Jimmy Kaufman and Gabriel Pelletier.

Telescene will shoot 22 one-hour episodes of the syndicated cop series this summer and fall, with the completion of principal photography set for February 1995.

Spry says the long-term goal is to produce up to 78 episodes of Sirens, representing total budgets in the $100 million range.

All-American Communications is the series’ first-run syndicator in the u.s. Telescene and All-American are selling Sirens internationally, with some 34 countries and territories already signed.

Sirens executive producers are Ann Lewis-Hamilton, the creator of Sirens and a writer on thirtysomething, and Spry. Co-executive producers are Telescene executive vice-president Paul Painter and L. Travis Clark, president of Telescene USA and producer/writer of the acclaimed Turner Network Television feature, The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson.

Executive story editors are Paul Margolis and Art Monterastelli. David Balkan is the ‘show runner’ or creative consultant, and writers include Alison Hock, Jeff Benjamin, Walter Brough, Todd Trotter, Alphonso Moreno, William Schmidt and Carol Doyle.

‘At least six Canadian writers, the majority based in Quebec, will be named shortly,’ says Anita Simand, Telescene’s director of creative affairs.

Bert Tougas is the shoot’s dop, Micheline Garant is the series’ line producer, Francois Sylvestre is the pm and Jean Bourret (Urban Angel, Lance et compte) is the art director. John Meighen (Hotel New Hampshire, Cry in the Night) is the production designer.

Sirens is being crewed by the stcvq, Quebec’s freelance film technicians union.

Quebec actors Daniel Pilon, Ellen Cohen, Claude Genest and Joel Wyner have been cast in key supporting roles.

Pilon, who’s appeared in more than 700 episodes of Ryan’s Hope and Guiding Light, two major u.s. soaps, has the role of Pittsburgh’s deputy mayor. The bilingual Cohen (Watatatow, Super sans plomb) plays a veteran police training officer, while Claude Genest, son of Emile Genest, is cast as a second training officer. Joel Wyner (The Club), who plays Billy K. in the USA Network tv series Catwalk, is cast in the role of a police detective.

Happenings at Cinar

The lights just never seem to go out at Cinar Films.

This time around, principals Micheline Charest, company chairman and ceo, and president Ron Weinberg have a ticket to travel the world with monster puppets and wonderful, strange folk from the circus.

Cinar has announced a deal with Cirque du Soleil to produce an international primetime drama series and is actively negotiating with u.s. and European parties on 185 half-hour episodes of Wimzie, a major preschool kiddies’ series presold to Radio-Canada and Radio-Quebec.

Filming on Wimzie is slated to begin this fall for delivery in early 1995. In Quebec, the series is a replacement for the hugely popular Passe-Partout and is being produced by Patricia Lavoie, who earlier worked at Productions sda and the National Film Board.

Wimzie is the result of a great deal of pedagogical and market research and is set in the wonderful world of six ‘monster’ puppet characters who live in an enchanted home which doubles as a daycare center.

In this series, Wimzie and her happy band of darling monsters, along with Wimzie’s mom, move in with Yaya, a 150-year-old granny, and Rousso, a young gardener. One look at little Wimzie, and Yaya and Rousso turn the old place into a daycare where other little monsters of varying ages and family backgrounds appear.

As is the company’s practice, Cinar says it will hold on to the back-end rights, particularly for derivative products, an area of enormous commercial potential.

Meanwhile, the Cirque de Soleil project will dramatize the strange and fascinating world of the modern circus. And, like the renowned Quebec performing troupe, the program will also be targeted to world markets.

In other news, Cinar and Nickelodeon have signed an agreement with Viacom New Media to produce a series of cd-rom graphic novels based on the live-action spooky campfire series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?

And finally, production is underway on six episodes of The Little Lulu Show, based on the original 1935 comic strips by the late Marjorie Henderson Buell. The series is licensed in Canada by the CTV Television Network and in the u.s. by hbo.

In her signature red dress and corkscrew curls, Lulu is reincarnated as a standup comic in a pilot cleverly called The Trouble with Boys. The production incorporates special international formatting features called ‘Lulutoons’ and ‘Lulubites.’