Earlier this month two major studio features were scouting in Ottawa, or as one locations insider puts it, ‘not so much scouting as researching.’

One of the features remains a mystery but the other one’s identity – despite black mask and cape – has been discovered. Batman 4, which will star Mr. Freeze as the villain, may be headed for production in Ontario with the landscape of the demure capital standing in for the home of the evil frosty creature.

While Ottawa is not the most obvious locale for a Batman film (despite parallels between any number of our fearless leaders and the Joker), perhaps it’s appropriate to villainize those cruel bitter days of winter and see the downtrodden civil servants returned to a gentler climate when the action hero wins the day.

Scouting in Toronto is underway for the Bette Midler-starrer directed by Carl Reiner, That Old Feeling, and Atom Egoyan’s Hollywood debut, Dead Sleep, produced by Icon Pictures for Warner Bros.

From bats to the Bard

Move over Babe, the Bard is steppin’ in. Although finalization of the deal is pending, Ottawa-based Lacewood Productions is in preproduction design and layout on a new animated animal version of Romeo and Juliet. In this musical feature film, written by musician Johnny Elkins, the prince is a dog and the Capulet is a cat.

Lacewood president Sheldon Wiseman says the tv and video sell-through project came about when u.s. broadcaster Family Channel approached him with the idea for the property.

The feature follows the basic plot of the Shakespearean play, but ‘by virtue of the fact that it takes place in the animal world, there are a lot of interesting twists,’ says Wiseman.

So far, plans are to make the film for about $3.7 million using traditional animation, possibly with some computer animation and special effects.

Producer is Gerald Tripp. The director hasn’t been appointed yet and Wiseman expects cast and key production positions will be signed later this month.

Lacewood hasn’t made a feature since The Nutcracker Prince in 1990, and Wiseman says the announcement of Romeo and Juliet does not indicate a new emphasis on features for the company.

A Canadian broadcaster and a domestic distributor for Romeo and Juliet have yet to be nailed down. The u.s. video distributor is Family Channel’s sister company, mtm.

The `front-line view’

With what he triumphs as unprecedented access and after eight months of researching the routines, thoughts and experiences of parole officers and parolees, director Barry Greenwald is getting ready to embark on the production of a feature-length documentary tentatively titled Parole.

Greenwald describes the film as ‘a front-line view’ on the decompression process that happens when inmates get out of prison and are reintegrated into society with the guidance of parole officers.

He’s been spending days and nights with the officers and criminals in jails, detention homes, on the streets and in the ritzy palaces of fraud experts, building an ‘observational film’ which will require little, if any, writing. The film is ‘very much a universal narrative,’ he continues, ‘and not a film about the Canadian correctional system.’

‘We’ve been fed on an awesome diet of tv, movies and tabloid press about criminals, and the reality is a number of them are extraordinarily dependent people with minimal living skills,’ says Greenwald. ‘On the other hand, the officers – and many of them are women – are wearing a whole pile of hats. They’re part cop, part social worker, part friend, and they have to consider the safety mandate.’

Greenwald points out all of his films (The Negotiator, Taxi, Between Two Worlds, to name a few) have a recurrent theme: ‘These are access films and you need people with a public spirit, a desire to be open and have a conviction they have something to share with the world.’

Support for the film is coming from Correctional Service of Canada. Greenwald is producing the film. Coproducer is Gerry Flahive of the National Film Board Ontario Centre.

Greenwald plans to start shooting this spring, and pending funding, he will shoot on film. He is in negotiations with u.k. and Australian broadcasters.

Greenwald’s documentary will air on tvontario’s The View From Here sometime in season three.

View from TVO

Speaking of tvo, documentary commissioning editor Rudy Buttignol has a good percentage of season three lined up for The View From Here. He’s also working on season four of From the Heart, the summertime primetime strand devoted to emerging Canadian talent, and he’s buying for the international series, The Human Edge.

Predictions that the public network will be privatized are not slowing him down. ‘I feel pretty confident. I understand that documentaries are a priority in primetime and (Peter) Herrndorf underlined the fact that they are an important contribution to our culture. Canadian social-issue documentaries are always the hardest to fund, they’re often controversial and tvo is still firmly behind its initiative to support them.’

Buttignol is particularly ebullient about the opener for season three of The View From Here – a documentary treatment of Ian Brown’s novel about being a man in the nineties, Man Overboard.

When the book first hit the stands in 1994, Buttignol was skeptical of the novel’s trendy subject matter but bought it ‘out of courtesy’ because Brown is host of all three of his strands.

‘I gave it to my wife and she laughed throughout the whole book,’ Buttignol says. He couldn’t resist after his wife’s endorsement and halfway through, he made calls to director Murray Battle and producer Julia Sereny, asking them to buy the book and promising them that if they decided to make a film, he would commission it.

Buttignol is known for his commitment and support in getting projects off the ground, but this is the first time (as a strand editor) he has instigated one.

The film treatment is not a revisit of the journey (to fatherhood) Brown took in the novel, but an altogether new voyage (which leads eventually to the altar for his baby’s christening). When Playback talked to Buttignol, he sounded a bit like a proud parent himself, and having just seen the fine cut he was nothing short of ‘thrilled.’

Other films lined up for season three include:

– The Great Whale, a five-year effort that has rendered producer Glen Saltzman and director Magnus Isaacson hundreds of hours of footage, is close to completion. Originally about the Cree’s protest to stop the Great Whale damn in Quebec, the film has developed into a profile of Grand Chief Matthew Coon-Come as he has evolved into a political leader;

– An untitled project from Evan Petrie about Canada’s role throughout the holocaust in Rwanda;

– Maureen Judge and Janis Lundman’s new documentary about the relationships between mothers and daughters throughout the development and planning of weddings;

– Erotica, a documentary about the female erotic imagination from Sereny and director Maya Gallus that’s now in development;

– Invisible Nation, a film from Linda Lee Tracey and Peter Raymont, is about immigration cops and their role in Toronto. Buttignol says it’s a cat and mouse film which follows the plight of immigration officials who are out there to enforce our laws and our policies and the immigrants who are seeking a better life in Canada;

– The End Time, Irene Angelico and Abbey Neidik’s look at the secret world of the cult called The Family;

– A feature-length documentary titled Intelligence from the McMahon brothers, Kevin and Michael, about those who have it and those who don’t;

– John Lecuyer’s Confessions of a Rabid Dog is a personal journey back to the heroin world he survived in Montreal. Sereny is producing;

– Cristine Richey’s latest, now titled Tops and Bottoms, about the social influences of the s&m set.