Close shave to bring Daroshin

project down to size for TV

Vancouver: Eight years is a long time in a job. That’s how long I’ve been writing for Playback. Yes, I confess my photo has remained the same, but who am I kidding, I’ve grown older, albeit a tad wiser and more insightful. It’s now time for a change. Time to make a move to pursue new opportunities and growth.

To help me do that, writer Ian Edwards will be calling on you for news (please return his calls, he’s not trying to sell you an ad or encyclopedias). Ian can be reached at (604) 689-8801.

But I’m not disappearing entirely. You’ll still see my mug featured in B.C. Scene as I’ll continue to write this column (it’s too darn much fun), scrounging for the dirt and dis on my production prowl. So let’s chat. My new phone number is (604) 980-3730, fax (604) 980-4206.

Cut to the quick

Producer Walter Daroshin’s labor of love, The War Between Us (formerly Hakujin), about the relationship between two women, one Japanese and the other Canadian, during the Japanese internment of wwii has just been completed and delivered to cbc.

Apparently director Anne Wheeler and editor Lenka Svaab had their greatest challenge just trying to cut the film into a workable length for tv.

Says Daroshin: ‘In the end, Anne and Lenka were shaving frames off scenes, not even seconds, just to get the time. We knew we had a lot of material but we didn’t realize there would be so much really great footage.

‘It was disappointing that after spending so much time and money creating elaborate floats and Japanese costumes for all these parade scenes they ultimately ended up on the cutting floor, but there just wasn’t the time for them. (Although) I’m delighted with how the film turned out.’

The film, executive produced by Daroshin and Bill Gray of Toronto-based Atlantis Films with producers Valerie Gray, also from Atlantis, and Gary Harvey of Daroshin’s Troika Films, will be aired as part of a beefed-up Sunday Night Movie series to kick off the fall schedule.

Daroshin is now at work on Hakujin, his half-hour, behind-the-scenes documentary on the ‘making of’ The War Between Us.

Hakujin, the original title of the film, roughly translates into whitey or gringo in Japanese. And apparently while the producers and broadcaster debated the name change for the cbc feature-length film, one serious possibility was Japs! Luckily taste and sense prevailed over the controversial, promotional benefits of such a title.

Other projects in the works with Daroshin’s Troika include WildSide, a 13-part, half-hour series on women and adventure with producer Rosemary Keevil of Relate Communications, and a one-hour primetime performance special on ‘confrontational in-your-face poetry’ in coproduction with Vancouver’s Atomik House of Poetry. At last a forum for ranting, raging, rhythmic rhymers.

Let it snow

Crescent Entertainment producer Harold Tichenor was coping with a meltdown on the set of Miss Scrooge, a Christmas tv movie for Lifetime in the u.s., earlier this month.

It seems trying to manufacture snow during July presented more than the usual set of problems when an extended heat wave pushed Vancouver temperatures to record highs, forcing l.a.-based Canadian director George Kaczender and crew to work at a feverish pace before the mounds of white stuff transformed into a big puddle.

Tichenor is now luxuriating in the air-conditioned environs of a post facility finishing off Miss Scrooge while getting ready for Beauty’s Revenge, a coproduction with Steve White Productions of l.a. for nbc to be directed by Billy Graham (no relation to the evangelist).

Meanwhile, Gordon Mark, another partner in Crescent, has just started three months of production in Vancouver on director Fraser Heston’s next feature, Alaska, for Castle Rock Entertainment.

Then, after the money-making months of summer, it’s back into money-spending development mode on Grave Tales, a new anthology series of ghost stories to be produced by Tichenor, and a feature based on the trial and execution of Leo Mantha, the last man to be hot-wired for murder in b.c. during the late fifties before the demise of the death penalty in Canada. Jayme Pfal will produce.

Fab Foresome

The gals at Forefront Productions are preparing for a very busy summer now that they’ve received final confirmation from WIC Western International Communications regarding the pickup of their teen dramatic series Madison, which was dropped from the CanWest Global schedule earlier this year.

Next month, Mickey Rogers, one of the fab four, heads out on a cross-country check-in with producers to introduce their new distribution arm, Forefront Releasing. The company was established earlier this summer with the assistance of a $250,000 loan from the Federal Business Development Bank and a new British Columbia Film program aimed at creating more locally based distributors.

Says Rogers: ‘We want to provide producers with an alternative, particularly in the West where there needs to be a choice. We want to build relationships and partnerships with producers who have a similar attitude and values rather than taking the usual adversarial approach.’

Although Rogers is looking for all kinds of product, Forefront Releasing will specialize in youth and family dramatic programming.

Snippets

Paramount, obviously encouraged by its new long-term deal with the local unions for The Marshal series, being shot again in Vancouver after threatening to leave town last year, will begin shooting another pilot here in August. It’s entitled The Sentinel and is about a cop with super heightened senses.

– Aerock Fox of First Pacific Pictures is taking a hiatus from his production activities after a few near-go projects hit the skids at the 11th hour to create a new company, Online Film Services.

Online, which will be serving as a consultant to the B.C. Film Commission, has devised an innovative new computer program for location scouting that provides both pictures and text. In addition, Online, which has an office in North Shore Studios, has expanded into talent and services searches as well as a producer database with info on distribution and financing – both public and private.

Fox’s future plans include online q&a forums with celebrity film guests to answer your wildest production or craft questions.

– Director Nick Kendall (Cadillac Girls), quite at home with live-action drama, found it a tad disconcerting that the actors didn’t talk back when he was directing his first episode of the computer-animated series ReBoot for BLT Productions and Toronto-based Alliance Communications this month.

– And word has it Brenda Collins, former business agent for ACFC West, is considering getting back into the production end of the business, possibly with non-union crews, after the union she spent seven years establishing staged a coup that prompted her resignation earlier this spring.