Montreal: Ancient ufos, a science-fiction comic book that comes to life, and teenage heroes who save the planet are the driving elements in Laserhawk, an f/x-intensive feature film from director Jean Pellerin and producers Pieter Kroonenburg and John Curtis.

Penned by Curtis and budgeted at $5.2 million, Laserhawk is the first Quebec/b.c. coproduction.

The production companies are Laserbird Films, a subsidiary of Montreal’s Kingsborough Greenlight Pictures, and Vancouver’s Everest Motion Pictures.

The film’s lead, Jason James Richter, is a bona fide 16-year-old teen idol, who producer Kroonenburg says ‘is a hot commodity at the moment, a gigantic star in the teen mags.’

In this story, Richter plays Zach, a space buff who becomes famous making a home video of a ufo. When it’s discovered he made the whole thing up, with a little bit of cgi inventiveness, Zach and friends head off to uncover a 250-million-year-old enigma – is mankind really descended from an alien race, and have they come back?

Richter is enjoying the break from Hollywood’s ‘heavy machine’ and is slated to do Free Willy iii for Warner Bros. immediately following Laserhawk.

Melissa Galianos, Gordon Currie (Blood and Donuts), Ivan Rogers, Richard Zeman and Susie Almgren also star.

The film’s ‘Star Wars special f/x good-guys-fighting-bad-guys’ budget is over $1 million.

Action includes ufos, helicopter and jet plane skirmishes, and a riveting scene where a mega-sized crane and cgi combine to suck a school bus skyward, only to have it spit out of a spaceship’s deadly radiation vortex.

DHD Postimage’s Suzanna D’Arcy is cgi producer and John Lambert (Batman iii) is the film’s special visual effects co-ordinator. Jacques Godbout is handling mechanical.

Kroonenburg and producer/ partner Julie Allan (Call of the Wild) are among Montreal’s busiest producers this summer, with five Kingsborough feature films planned for the weeks and months ahead.

The day following Laserhawk’s wrap, July 15, filming begins on Hemoglobin, a $7.2 million, 32-day shoot that goes through to early September.

Peter Svatek (Sci-Fighters) will direct this eerie tale of an outcast clan based on a script from Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett. The film will shoot on location off the windswept Maine/New Brunswick coast.

Kingsborough’s feature lineup also includes a remake of the Italian film Bread and Chocolate and To Walk with Lions, a Born Free sequel story and Canada/ South Africa coproduction. The fifth feature is the big-budget Greenpeace saga, Warriors of the Rainbow.

Laserhawk will be distributed by Everest Releasing in Canada. France Film has French-track rights.

‘We think we may have a u.s. deal by the end of the shoot, mainly because of Jason Richter,’ says Kroonenburg.

In Love and War

Lord Richard Attenborough liked what he saw, and so, apparently, did New Line Cinema. As a result, both parties are headed this way for a late July/early August date on the period feature In Love and War.

Produced and directed by Attenborough (Gandhi, Shadowland, Cry Freedom) on behalf of New Line, the film chronicles the life of a young Ernest Hemmingway during the period which inspired his novel, A Farewell to Arms.

Chris O’Donnell (Scent of a Woman, Robin in Batman iii) is Hemmingway and Sandra Bullock (The Net, Speed) plays a loving nurse.

The story chronicles Hemmingway’s experience as an ambulance assistant during wwi. After a brave deed results in serious injury, he falls in love with a Red Cross nurse during convalescence.

The shoot’s line producer, Richard Lalonde, says Attenborough enjoyed his brief stay in Montreal last year prepping on Grey Owl. That project was suspended when the uninsured lead fell ill, but the great British director ‘loved the crew and he loves the town.’ New Line was here for Mother Night.

Montreal stands in for several American cities on this shoot. The week-long leg also picks up a day or two in Sherbrooke, Que. Primary locations include Milan, Venice and London.

The always-busy Lalonde spent last year filming in Europe and has been associated with Max Films on projects that include Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains and Jacques Leduc’s La Vie fantome.

Primal Scream

Filming is underway on Primal Scream, a trilogy of stories involving surprise endings and a strange, closet-bound shut-in who saves newspaper clippings of terrible crimes.

Afraid of what he calls the ‘Out There,’ a world where people prey on one another, the reclusive storyteller unravels three sinister tales to forewarned guests.

Produced by Filmline International and Nicolas Clermont, Primal Scream is based on a John Shirley (The Crow) screenplay and is directed by Doug Jackson (Natural Enemy, Deadbolt).

Jackson was the director of The Paperboy, named 1994 Thriller of the Year by Entertainment Weekly.

Stewart Harding is the film’s line producer and Carole Mondello is the pm.

Key crew credits go to dop Bert Tougas, production designer John Meighen (Sirens), art director David Blanchard and costume designer Francois Barbeau. Louis Craig is special f/x co-ordinator.

In other news from Filmline, shooting started June 24 in Vancouver on Highlander: The Series. Coproduced with Gaumont tv, it’s Highlander’s fifth and final season and brings the one-hour episode total to a rather bankable 106.

Clermont says Filmline will shoot two more features this summer, a period piece and an action film.

Another Filmline feature, Hollow Point, debuts this month on hbo and TMN-The Movie Network.

Primal Scream is budgeted at $4.7 million and will be distributed in Canada and internationally by Astral Distribution.

Purr-fect

Production got underway June 10 for 30 days on Productions La Fete’s $3.3 million feature Whiskers starring Tony Award-winning actor Brent Carver (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Song Spinner) as a man who was a cat. His young and lonely friend is played by talented 10-year-old Montreal actor Michael Caloz, the lost kid in Screamers.

Also featured are Monique Mercure, a Palme d’Or winner, veteran actor Suzanne Cloutier, who starred as Desdemona in Orson Welles’ Othello, and Jacob Tierney, the local teen talent featured in Neon Bible and Josh and Sam.

Jimmy Kaufman is directing and Kevin Tierney is the producer. Showtime has u.s. tv rights, Hallmark has international rights, and Distribution La Fete has Canadian media rights.

Series and MOW action

Major Quebec tv shoots starting in July include Productions sda’s Omerta 2, Productions Prisma’s Urgence 2 and Punch International’s Dogs’ World.

On the mow front, Telescene Communications starts filming on its Jack Higgins collection.

Omerta and Urgence are the season’s two major French-track serial dramas, each budgeted in the $10 million range.

Twenty-six half-hours of Dogs’ World are being filmed on Super 16mm from July 9 to early October, while four Higgins movie installments will be alternately prepped and shot from late July to January 1997. Telescene’s u.k. partner is Visionview.

And while it was a wrap for the marathon Cite-Amerique period series Margeurite Volant on June 21, Sovimage’s Lobby shoots throughout July, as does the Modus TV/Neofilms series Ces Enfants d’ailleurs, a coproduction with Poland.