Gemeaux Award-winning teen

program Zaps a third season

Montreal: Zap, Verseau International’s critically acclaimed series for young teens, has been confirmed for a third season, says Verseau president Aimee Danis. Broadcast on Radio-Quebec where audiences tend to be smaller than on the other Quebec networks, Zap is seen weekly by about 250,000 youngsters. But there’s hope the show will be given a second window on another network and enjoyed by more viewers.

This season, 20 new hours of Zap, produced by Verseau vice-president Lyse Lafontaine, are being videotaped on a budget of $3.8 million.

Winner of the 1994 Gemeaux Award for best dramatic youth series, the show features gritty, realistic storylines and lively performances from its young actors.

Jean-Paul Le Bourhis, the series’ creator, leads the writing team of Joanne Arseneau, Nathalie Petrowski and Rene-Daniel Dubois.

Among the Zap leads are Mathieu Grondin, Antoine Toupin, Maxime Collin and Andy Leblanc. Other cast members include Caroline Dhavernas, Marie-Claude Lefebvre, Tobie Pelletier, Patrice Godin, Corinne Chevarier, Danielle Proulx, Yvan Ponton, Anouk Simard and Michel Forget.

Directors on the series are Yvon Trudel, Regent Bourque and Stephan Joly. Daniel Fournier is the dop, Jean-Marie Benoit wrote the original music and post-production services are supplied by Daniel Arie and Telepoint.

Verseau is also producing Qui Vive, a popular TVA Television Network health show with the emphasis on specialized medicine. Created by Jacques Despins (Flash varicelle, Chambres en Ville), Qui Vive has been drawing spectacular audiences of 750,000 and more each week. Lighter subject matter is on the menu with great topics like: Does country music lead to suicide? and, Why do young girls get the hots for pop stars?

An industry activist and former president of the apftq, Danis has worked hard over the years promoting Quebec exports, but she is discouraged by the present situation because so few Quebec drama programs are being sold to the obvious foreign market, France.

‘They don’t accept our accent, or so they say,’ says Danis.

Looking ahead, Verseau has announced an early spring date for shooting on an $8 million, four-hour miniseries called La riviere rouge (Red River), coproduced with majority partner GMT Video of France for broadcast on TF1, with additional coproducers from Italy, Germany and the u.k.

A turn-of-the-century saga about the settlement of the West, the miniseries is a bonafide double-shoot, with filming taking place near Calgary and in Quebec.

Canadian broadcasters associated with the project are Global Television and Radio-Canada.

On the English side of things, producer Peter Pearson is part of a team at Verseau developing Greed, a drama series proposal for cbc head of series Susan Morgan. The hope is cbc and Telefilm Canada will shortly find the will, and the funding, to shoot a major network series in our highly photogenic city.

Pearson traveled to London last week where he met with people from the bbc for talks on a documentary series called The Learning Game, an examination of the human learning experience. tvontario first pitched the project to its Pacific Rim partners, and pbs has also expressed interest, says Danis.

Raising Caine in Russia

Production wrapped earlier this month after two months of shooting in St. Petersburg, Russia on two movies, Midnight in St. Petersburg and Bullets to Beijing, coproduced in Canada by Andre Link and John Dunning of Cinepix, Montreal.

The films star Michael Caine in a reprisal of the role of police officer Harry Palmer. Coproducers are Harry Palmer Productions in the u.k., and Lenfilms in Russia. Showtime Networks has acquired the u.s. tv rights, but as yet, has no information on a possible release or broadcast date.

Doug Jackson (The Wrong Woman) directed Midnight in St. Petersburg and George Mihalka (Scoop) directed Bullets to Beijing. Mihalka was slated to direct both films but was injured on-set when a ladder broke. Apparently, the popular director is feeling okay, but there was a real scare and a short trip to a hospital in Helsinki.

Canadian actors include Vlasta Vrana, Tatiana Jackson, John Dunhill, Michael Sarrazin and Serge Houde, who plays the crooked art dealer Dr. Vestry. Craft support included cinematographer Peter Benison, second unit director Avde Chiriaeff and makeup artist Penny Lee.

Money in the bank

Close to $5.4 million in refundable production tax credits were injected into certified Quebec production in the past month, representing about 18% of combined budgets of $30 million.

Administered by sogic, the Quebec cultural funding and certification agency, tax credits for the year starting April 1, 1994 totaled $26.7 million by early November. Guaranteed loans to producers, a spin-off of the tax credit, total $16.4 million this year.

The program, introduced as a replacement for the 166% tax shelter four years ago, is very popular with the Quebec industry, and here’s why: the credit on Screamers, Allegro Films’ $14.2 million feature, is $2.5 million; for the soon-to-be-shot $1.5 million feature Nuit Pale from Productions du Lundi Matin, it’s over $274,000; while the new Productions Rapide Blanc documentary International Adoption, to be broadcast on cfcf-tv, tvontario and Vision TV, cost $476,000 and received a Quebec tax credit of just under $71,000.

In television, this month’s list of productions, budgets and (associated credits) includes the $4 million Cinar Productions series Les Nouvelles Aventures des Intrepides ($737,100); L’Equipe Spectra’s $2 million Rock et Belles Oreilles – Series B ($361,000); Avanti Cine Video’s zany comedy La Petite Vue II, the top-rated show on Quebec tv this season, budgeted at $1.36 million ($245,700); the Productions Bibi et Genevieve kids’ series Les Belmines II, budgeted at $204,000 ($36,800); Productions Cleo-Clip’s $3.6 million, 26-hour teleroman Chambres en Ville IV, the second highest-rated show on Quebec tv this season ($647,000); and Productions Prisma’s Pacha et les Chats IV (Kitty Cats), budgeted at $2.3 million, received a tax credit of $418,570 and a guaranteed loan of $313,928.

Testing the waters

K.Films Amerique is returning with a second edition of 30 Jours du Film Europeen, a well-conceived theatrical marketing program for riskier European feature films.

K.Films executive and veteran distributor Louis Dussault says 10 European films from the company’s catalogue will each be screened on three occasions from Feb. 17 to March 16, 1995 at the downtown Cinema Parisien in Montreal. If any of the films show signs of life, they’ll be programmed for theatrical release later in the year. Last year, two of 10 titles, En compagnie D’Antonin Artaud and L’Argent fait le bonheur, made the grade.

The showcase is a way of testing the waters and creating some media attention for films which wouldn’t otherwise merit the investment, says Dussault.

This year’s slate includes Senza Pelle (Italy), Tak Tak (Poland), Movie Days (Iceland), Abracadabra (Belgium), Pandore (Germany), High Boot Benny (Iceland), Allemagne Annee 1990 (France), Epericoloso Sporgersi (Romania), Parano (France), and my own personal choice to make the grade, Tout le monde n’a pas eu la chance d’avoir des parents communistes (France).

The K.Films program includes a Feb. 25 seminar on the state of distribution of foreign (non-u.s.) films, the screening of eight new Canadian short films, and a contest offering a trip for two to the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.