Sci-fi animation spoof in race

for TCN series pickup

Montreal: Local animation director Meinert Hansen and his seven-minute pilot The Adventures of Captain Buzz Cheaply are among some four dozen mainly u.s. cartoon shorts vying for an extended series slot on the Turner Cartoon Network.

Commissioned by Hanna-Barbera, now owned by Atlanta-based Turner, the sci-fi comedy pilot first aired in June as an opening short for a tcn Sunday morning cartoon show.

Hansen is a regular feature at Montreal digital-post and f/x house Groupe Image Buzz.

While keeping his fingers crossed for tcn, the 37-year-old is working on commercial boards. He has several Cinar animation series to his credit, including Young Robin Hood and Bunch of Munsch.

Boffo press for Rozema

Local press reaction to Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling has been altogether positive, with page one covers on two of three cultural weeklies and four-color spreads for the director and her film in the dailies.

Seemingly a far cry from the mainstream reception for the film in the nation’s cultural hq where distributor Alliance Releasing threatened to pull all its advertising in a major daily when the paper yanked the now-familiar lesbian kiss poster after three weeks.

A tale of passionate love between an uptight school marm and a hot lady from the circus, When Night Is Falling earned loads of notoriety here as the opening night film at Claude Chamerlan’s Nouveau Festival. More than 800 attended the Alliance Vivafilm gala, held at the beautifully refurbished Monument National.

La Presse film critic Luc Perreault seemed really enthused about the whole thing, and while he thought the story was a bit ‘thin,’ he added ‘Rozema’s films (are) too infrequent and valuable’ not to be seen.

Louise Blanchard gave the film a grand send-up in the populist tabloid Le Journal de Montreal, while John Griffin, film critic for The Gazette, reported: ‘Rozema’s love triangle is sexy and provocativeÉ.There’s great sex in When Night Is Falling!’ Griffin later said the make-out scenes between Pascale Bussieres and Rachel Crawford, the art direction and cinematography were totally watchable, even if the storyline was strangely ‘naive.’

The only descending or ‘lukewarm’ opinion in this Latin-lovin’ town came from Odile Tremblay, respected critic for Le Devoir.

‘The (film’s) sex is great, it doesn’t seem to matter if the substance is a little thin,’ says Pierre Brousseau, Alliance Vivafilm vp, who adds that as the festival opener, the film got a 90% boost in press coverage.

The box office for When Night Is Falling stood at $54,000 after two weeks at three theaters, ‘well beyond our expectations,’ says Brousseau.

July start-ups

Upcoming Quebec film action includes:

– Director Pierre Gang’s Le Sous-sol, a Max Films feature from producer Roger Frappier that is shooting July 31 to Sept. 6, with Catherine Faucher the pm.

– Veteran documentary director Arthur Lamothe’s latest feature, Le silence des fusils, is a story about Native struggles for ancestral rights from Productions La Fete producer Rock Demers. It shoots July 17 to Sept. 1, with Danielle Champoux on board as pm.

– Jean-Marie Comeau’s Les Cinq dernieres minutes, a Canada/ France coproduction and the first feature film from Productions Pixart and producer Louise Ranger, is set for a four-week shoot starting July 10. Martine Allard is the pm.

– Russel Mulcahy’s The Algonquin Goodbye, a Canada/ u.k. coproduction between Filmline International and London-based Algonquin Productions, is a contemporary action/adventure movie that’s slated to shoot for seven weeks beginning July 21. Nicolas Clermont is producing alongside Sylvio Muraglio of Algonquin. Stewart Harding is supervising producer, Irene Litinsky is pm/line producer, and the film’s leading man is Dolph Lundgren.

Major tv series action starting in July includes Red River, a France/Canada frontier saga miniseries prepping near Calgary. Canadian producers are Nardo Castillo of Productions e.g.m. and Claude Leger of Transfilm.

Also a go this month are the TVA Television Network series Jasmine, produced by Bloom Films and Verseau International, the Television Quatre Saisons miniseries 10-07 from Telefiction, and Urgence, the new Radio-Canada medical drama from Productions Prisma.

Hot and happy

Pity the poor drenched actors garbed in woolly jackets and furry hats on the Mont-Tremblant set of the tv movie series The Adventures of Smoke Bellow, a $13 million frontier/action drama from Cinevideo Plus and producer Justine Heroux that’s shooting mid-April to mid-August.

Word from the set is that the story’s bawdy humor and bar house brawls are keeping cast and crew in a good spirits, with spare time devoted to figuring out how to roll six-foot-eight actor Richard Moll.

In this series, spun from the Jack London Yukon wilderness tales, Wadeck Stanczak stars as French writer Bellow, talented, bilingual actress Michele Barbara Pelletier is the love interest, and Lorne Brass and Serge Houde play the mangy ne’er-do-wells.

Among the international actors on set this week for the third film in the collection, Shorty Dreams, are Barry Morse, who starred in The Fugitive and Space 1999 tv series, and French actress Mylene Demongetot, wife of series’ director Marc Simoneon and, of course, daughter-in-law of the famous French crime writer Georges.

Morse plays a refined military colonel attending an elaborate party.

The Adventures of Smoke Bellow’s French coproducers are Robert Rea of Ellipse Programme and Christian Charret of Gaumont Television. Broadcasters are TMN: The Movie Channel and Super Ecran in Canada and France 3.

Levels up

STCVQ counsel Pierre Lafrance says ’95 film production levels in Quebec could top last year’s benchmark when salary mass for the union’s 980 freelance technicians was $28.2 million.

Salaries for technicians have risen sharply, from $14 million in ’92 to $21 million in ’93, and Lafrance says he hopes the figure will top $30 million this year.

‘This season, we haven’t yet had anything of the order of Transfilm’s $30 million-plus Highlander 3,’ says Lafrance, but several bigger-budget shoots are prepping or waiting for a final financial go.

Among them are Mother Night, a u.s. location feature brought here by Quebec film commissioner France Nadeau. It stars Nick Nolte and is slated to start prepping in mid-July.

Grey Owl is a Canada/u.k. coproduction feature with a rumored budget of $20 million from director Richard Attenborough, Productions du Cerf producer Louise Gendron and distributor Alliance Releasing.

The union expects more feature film and drama series action later in the summer from Filmline International and Telescene Communications.

On a typical Quebec shoot crewed by the stcvq, below-the-line salaries for secondary acting roles and technicians constitute from 18% to 24% of the overall budget, says Lafrance.