Saskatchewan film industry is

booming with variety of projects

While the grain wars are raging, Saskatchewan’s film industry is experiencing its biggest boom in history. Kevin DeWalt, president of Minds Eye Pictures in Regina, has started production on the province’s first major off-shore feature film, Decoy, and he has just signed a $20 million deal with the film’s producer, l.a.-based Gary Kaufman of Buffalo Films, to produce six pictures which will be shot primarily in Saskatchewan.

DeWalt says when the prospect of producing the feature came to him through Saskfilm, he was determined not to do a service deal. DeWalt brought in about 30% of the financing and signed an agreement for joint approval.

‘In order to create economic development for the region, we need more than service deals. Yes, we need foreign investment, but for investment on Canadian-content pictures.’

Decoy, an action adventure starring Peter Weller and Robert Patrick as ex-intelligence officers, has been shooting in Regina and Lac LaRonge since mid-July and continues through to mid-August.

The project came to the province when Mexico, the original location, got caught with a civil uprising last winter. Kaufman was looking for some wilderness locations and a partner to put some money on the table.

DeWalt stresses that Lac LaRonge has not been dressed up as a generic American town. ‘From day one, we wanted to be truly reflective of the region. Twenty percent of the crew is Native and 20% of the talent is Native. I really pushed to see that the community is reflected.’

DeWalt maintains that the lack of facilities in a remote location is not a problem. ‘The rushes go directly to us. It’s not an issue. We brought up our own video machines and the film is being edited in Regina by Frank Irving (The Grey Fox) on a Lightworks.’ Integrated Solutions of Regina is doing the audio post.

While there is no soundstage in the province, DeWalt is working on a deal with the provincial government to utilize a Regina warehouse and retro-fit the space for the six-picture deal with Kaufman. He says hopefully the space will develop into a studio complex over the next two or three years and a soundstage within three years.

The multipicture deal with Kaufman is to produce dramas for tv and video release of the action adventure and futuristic fantasy genres. Kaufman and DeWalt will be exec producers and the projects will meet Cancon standards. Plans are to start production in early 1995.

For culture vultures

Regina’s Heartland Motion Pictures’ newest television series, Utopia Cafe, is a half-hour series for the cbc that puts a global spin on culture.

Producer Stephen Hall says the magazine variety show ‘will reveal a lot of things that would betray the images you see on the evening news.’

Like what? Hall describes a utopian Moscow, as seen through the eyes of a guy who runs a cappuccino stand in the city: ‘You don’t see the usual gray, dreary skies, long lineups at the supermarket and babushkas. You see a hip part of the city where a jazz band is playing in a park on a beautiful spring day.’

The point of all this, says Hall, is ‘to give something more than eye candy’ to the Generation xers; to explore arts, ideas, religion, maybe even weather, as they relate to culture. The 13-part series, which is in post, goes to air in October on Monday evenings.

On a roll at the NFB

The National Film Board Prairie Centre has its own substantial slate of productions underway. nfb producer Joe MacDonald says there are three docs and three animated shorts which are nfb material and three productions with independent producers.

On the animation front are Richard Condie’s (The Big Snit) Playroom; Cordell Barker’s (The Cat Came Back) Strange Invader, an eight-minute film now in line testing about the arrival of a child into a couple’s life and the madness that ensues; and Brad Caslor’s (Get a Job) Remote Control about a kingdom that falls prey to a techno-coup and where revenge comes in the form of a cockroach.

Norma Bailey’s The True Story of Linda, a follow-up to her 1979 documentary, Nose and Tina, is being shot on Hi-8. Bailey’s new film follows Tina (aka Linda) as she tries to battle drug and alcohol addiction. It’s a one-hour for tv and the nfb is in negotiations with CanWest Global for broadcast.

Gail Singer is in preproduction in Winnipeg on a feature documentary, Stories of Violence, which takes up on an international scale where her earlier film Love, Honoured and Bruised, left off. The film will be shot on Super 16 and Hi-8 and the aim is to get a theatrical release.

Bonnie Dickie’s look at the concept of restorative justice (whereby victim and criminal are brought together with the hope of reconciliation), A Question of Justice, is a one-hour for tv. Production will start up in March 1995 in Winnipeg.

Coproductions include Indians of Czechoslovakia, John Pascovitch’s documentary on Natives in Europe; Bob Long’s Seasons of the Eider, a one-hour documentary set to shoot in the fall in Regina (tvontario and Discovery Channel have been approached for broadcast); and Wendy Lill’s feature script, now in final draft, about a woman, Val Orlikow, who took the cia to court in the 1950s after taking part in a cia-sponsored drug trial.

Sex, sex and more sex

Elke’s gone! What, that sexy, sexagenarian fraulein star of Destiny Ridge who gave Zsa Zsa a run for her money in court last year? How could they?

Producer Andy Thomson of Great North Productions in Edmonton, which co-executive produces the CanWest Global tv series with Toronto-based Atlantis Films, says when their German coproduction partner, ard, opted not to commit to another round of production this year because it hadn’t even broadcast the first season yet, there just wasn’t the motivation to keep Elke or all the elk around.

So what have we got this season instead? Well, from the sounds of a recent press release, it’s sex in the forests, sex on the mountains and more sex by those glistening Jasper lakes – even though most of the show is now shot in an Edmonton studio, with only exteriors shot on location in Jasper National Park.

‘We did some extensive focus group research,’ Thomson explains, ‘and there was a strong feeling that the cast was too old, so the cast became quite a bit younger, and when you get a lot of young people togetherÉwell, sex is what happens.’

Among the new cast members are Rebecca Jenkins (Bye Bye Blues) as the ‘alluring’ Linda Hazelton ‘whose relationship with Don is charged with competitive and sexual tension,’ Lorie Holden, a ‘blond bombshell with a libido that just won’t quit,’ and Kavan Smith, as a ‘young, virile ranch hand.’

Pluuueeeze, this sounds like Baywatch of the North.

‘Certainly the show is a lot more relationship-based,’ says Thomson. ‘We also realized that we couldn’t sustain the series by having an adventure-of-the-week in Jasper National Park: poaching one week, a kayaking incident the next, and an avalanche in the third. The action-adventure scenes were very expensive and terminal; we were going to run out of events. We needed to become character-driven and that meant bringing together more of an ensemble cast.’

So if you watched Destiny Ridge last season and thought it was just mountains, forests, trees and Elke – look again.