Vancouver: Who’d have thought British actor Hugh Grant’s recent automotive audition with a hooker in l.a. would have a ripple effect all the way to Vancouver. But indeed it has. Grant’s girlfriend, Estee Lauder model/ actress Elizabeth Hurley, who was signed to star in the feature film Intruder, scheduled to be shot in Vancouver this summer, has bowed out due to the upheaval in her personal life.

A very disappointed director Gavin Wilding (The Raffle), who is getting his big break on the film, says, ‘Yes, we could have used all the publicity spin-offs, but now we’re recasting the female lead.’

To accommodate the casting change, production on the psychological ghost story, being coproduced by Jamie Brown of London, Eng.-based Steve Walsh Productions and Westcom Entertainment, has been bumped back to September.

Light years

Did you know Vancouver was once the neon capital of North America? During the 1950s there was one neon sign here for every 18 people, making Las Vegas positively dim by comparison. Billed as an international tourist attraction, Granville Street was ‘festooned with neon’ and travelers from Germany to New Zealand came here to pay homage to our Bow Mac and HoHo Restaurant signage.

Now director and neon aficionado Harry Killas is illuminating our lost heritage and the evolution of this dying art form in a half-hour documentary, Glowing in the Dark, produced by Alan Goldman and executive produced by Cari Green in association with the National Film Board for Knowledge Network and Bravo!. Using extensive archival footage, with additional film shot in Vancouver, Las Vegas and Bellingham, Wash., the film will be completed by late fall.

Reaching teens

While documentaries might be undergoing a resurgence in the international marketplace, they don’t cut it with teenagers, according to Al Parsons, product manager with the National Film Board’s Pacific Centre.

That’s why nfb producer Jennifer Torrance and director Annie O’Donoghue have gone the dramatic route to get their message across in Love Tap, a half-hour drama on the important subject of date rape written by Louise Milner.

‘Teenagers are so media-literate today and accustomed to the high production values and fast-paced action of big-screen dramas, it’s the only way we can reach them,’ says Parsons.

Entirely funded by the nfb, production on Love Tap is set for Aug. 23.

Have you ever been to sea, Billy?

It will be heavy doses of Gravol and Dramamine for the cast and crew of Captains Courageous when Pacific Motion Pictures begins shooting the tv movie for Hallmark this fall.

Produced by pmp’s Matthew O’Connor and directed by l.a.-based Michael Anderson, the film is a remake of the 1935 classic starring Spencer Tracy about a rich boy who falls off an ocean liner and is rescued by a group of fishermen who acquaint him with the realities of life.

The production will spend three weeks at sea, with a possible respite at the University of British Columbia’s popular wave pool to achieve the ocean scenes. The cast has yet to be finalized. Production begins Sept. 11.

In keeping with the water theme, pmp’s first major theatrical feature, Magic In The Water (formerly Glenorky), is gearing up the promotional wheels in anticipation of its Aug. 30 release across North America. The film about a mythical Ogopogo-type creature marks producer Rick Stevenson’s directorial debut.

By late October, pmp will trade water for outer space when it begins production on Target Earth, a miniseries for l.a. producer Merrill Karpf of Davis Entertainment. Categorized as post-apocalyptic sci-fi, the film deals with the aftereffects of an asteroid’s collision with earth and survivors’ tribulations as they try to make their way to safety amid catastrophic confusion. The director and cast have yet to be announced.

Victoria studio?

Five months after David Mills’ appointment as Victoria’s first film commissioner, production activity on Vancouver Island is getting a boost.

Universal Pictures and Alec Beaton Productions have been scouting for a two-hour pilot on pirates set in England during the 1800s. The writers are currently in script revisions while the producers investigate the possibilities of getting a replica of the HMSC Bounty from California to Victoria Harbour in time for production in September.

The folks from Unsolved Mysteries have also been up to Canada again in quest of yet another Ogopogo monster. This block-long, black, humpback creature, which allegedly resides in Cadboro Bay outside Victoria, has had repeated sightings throughout the last century. After several days of filming, the mystery no doubt remains unsolved.

The Victoria film commission is also hoping to entice a senior Disney Studio executive to come to the provincial capital to help promote construction of a studio in the city in a sort of ‘if you build it, we might come’ pitch.

Mills says there are still several serious studio proposals being considered for support by the provincial and municipal governments. With projections that construction of a studio would create 1,000 jobs, to say nothing of the opportunities provided by an enhanced service infrastructure, it’s not surprising the government and community are keen to get this project off the ground.

The Last Connection

For many of us, the biggest challenges in our lives have been career, marriage, parenthood or coping with existential ennui. For Polish-born Vancouver filmmaker Yarek Rombalski, life has dealt tougher choices.

Rombalski spent the first 20 years of his life in Poland, fleeing the country in 1982. He crossed the Berlin Wall into West Germany and spent two years in a refugee camp before emigrating to Canada in 1984. He has now completed a 45-minute film entitled The Last Connection, loosely based on his harrowing real-life experiences.

Produced, written and directed by Rombalski and shot on 16mm, the dramatic film is the story of a Polish refugee and his son who are stuck in a German camp awaiting word on their emigration to Canada. When they are ordered to leave Germany or face deportation back to Poland during a period of martial law, the father, in a fit of desperation, agrees to abandon his son and escape to France with other refugees. The father is double-crossed and deserted by the others, only to find his son has escaped to find his own place in exile, leaving poor papa stranded in the camp.

Gracze about Warsaw

Under the new political climate in Eastern Europe, the artistic community is flourishing once again. Local composer Shane Harvey left for Warsaw earlier this month to record the music score for Toronto director Richard Bugajski’s (Interrogation, Clearcut) latest feature, Gracze, with Poland’s National Orchestra. A political thriller, the film was shot in Warsaw in early spring of this year.

Prague-matic

North American Pictures chose Prague in the Czech Republic again this summer to shoot its next feature, Downdraft (previously entitled Minotaurs).

The action/adventure about a scientist who runs amok when his pet project is about to be mothballed by the u.s. military, is being produced by Vancouver-based Czech native Lloyd Simandl and Prague-based North American S.R.O. as an official Czech/Canada coproduction.

Michael Mazo will direct the $3 million budgeted feature. Principal photography begins July 31, providing a sultry summer in the Paris of Eastern Europe for local actors John Novak, John Ferguson, William Taylor and Sandra Grant, with a cameo by Paul Koslo.

Favorable exchange rates on the Canadian dollar, highly trained crews, an established filmmaking infrastructure, and no union blues to contend with have made Czech the latest location hot spot for filmmakers.