Montreal: They called him Olivier, an impassioned, Chaplinesque character in a funny hat who became a legend of Quebec stage and screen.

The life and times of Olivier Guimond is the subject of Olivier, Olivier, a four-hour Avanti Cine Video miniseries portrait of the controversial artist whose 40-year career spanned the cabaret era to the early days of the teleroman (1920 to 1971). The man died young, 25 years ago, but in the Quebec collective psyche it’s almost as if he were still alive, says Richard Martin, coproducer with Robert Menard.

Andre Melancon is both writer and director of Olivier, Olivier, with actor and theater director Gilles Latulippe serving as creative consultant.

Olivier opens in the ’20s when as a little boy Guimond spent much of his time in theaters watching his parents perform on stages in Quebec and throughout the u.s. The production delves into the performer’s turbulent relationships with women, the misunderstood mix of professional popularity and an insecure personality, and his painful relationship with a hard-hearted father absolutely opposed to his son’s hopes for a career in show business.

Later, we follow his rise to tv stardom in the early ’60s in the Tele-Metropole teleromans Cre Basile and Le Capitaine Bonhomme, and his famous performance as the sad little soldier in Bye Bye ’70.

Guimond was also known for his drinking, and was a real-life pitchman for Labatt 50 (‘Lui y connait ca’).

Benoit Briere stars as Guimond, Bernard Fortin as his straight man Drouin, the tireless Remy Girard is the father, Annie Dufresne is singer Alys Robi, one of his loves, Martine Francke plays Jeanne d’Arc Charlebois, Guimond’s wife and mother of his two children, and Sonia Vachon is Manda Parent, a close colleague.

Eric Cayla is the shoot’s dop, Jean-Baptiste Tard is art director and Louise Gagne is the costume designer.

PMT Video and Centre de Montage Electronique are handling post.

Investors in the $3.8 million, six-week production include Telefilm Canada, Fonds Maclean Hunter, the Cable Production Fund, both tax credits, the TVA Network and sponsors Bell Canada and La Brasserie Labatt.

Olivier, Olivier will be broadcast during the March sweeps on tva.

MacLachlan stars in Higgins thrillers

Production is underway on the first of four Telescene Communications tv movies, Thunderpoint and The Windsor Protocol, based on the action/spy thrillers of prolific u.k. novelist Jack Higgins.

The films have been presold to Showtime, with George Mihalka (L’Homme Ideal, Bullet to Beijing) directing and Robin Spry executive producing. Paul Painter is co-executive producer and Jim Reeve of Visionview in the u.k. is the coproducer.

The majority Canadian films have two central and continuing characters, former ira terrorist Sean Dillon, played by Kyle MacLachlan (Trigger Effect, Twin Peaks), and a senior British intelligence officer, played by Chris Wiggins (Friday the 13th: The Series, Robocop), who recruits him.

The storyline involves a 50-year-old top-secret document called The Windsor Protocol, signed by England and Germany prior to wwii providing for the return to the throne of the Duke of Windsor in the event of a successful invasion by the Nazis.

Once lost in the deep blue waters of the Caribbean (at a terrifying place called Thunderpoint) in the hold of a sunken German u-boat, the document is found many years later and becomes the focus of an espionage battle and the threat of a resurrected Hitlerian Reich based on stolen Nazi billions stashed in secret Swiss bank accounts.

Anita Simand, head of creative affairs at Telescene, says two more Higgins-based movies will follow this fall and into early ’97.

Macha Grenon is the female lead and Pascale Bussieres plays the endangered daughter of the man who discovers the secret document. Jean Leclerc, Cedric Smith, Michael Sarrazin and John Colicos round out the cast.

Selected craft credits go to veteran dop Peter Benison, Toronto production designer Tony Hall, art director Jean Bourret, costume designer Paul-Andre Guerin, stunt co-ordinator Minor Mustain and special effects co-ordinator Ryal Cosgrove.

Supersuite is doing post entirely in pal including transfer and rushes, online edit and color correction.

Park Entertainment of London, Eng. is handling foreign sales.

Urgence returns

Fans will have to wait till mid-January to pick up the pieces following the terrible explosion that ripped through the emergency ward in the final episode last spring of Urgence, the Prisma Productions medical drama.

Penned by Rejean Tremblay (Le Masque, Scoop) and Fabienne Larouche (Virginie, Paparazzi) and produced by Claude Godbout (Les Ordres, Les Bon Debarras), Urgence is a romanticized take on daily life in a big-city hospital with a storyline that mixes the spell-binding allure of emergency medicine with the intrigues of bureaucrats and politicians and the very private lives of four young doctors.

Leading players include Marina Orsini and Serge Postigo as the principal emergency ward specialists, Sophie Lorain, Luc Guerin, Marc Messier and several newcomers in season two – France Castel, Jacinthe Renee, Tony Conte and Remy Girard as a heart attack victim.

Urgence is broadcast on Radio-Canada and was rated number one on Quebec tv in its first season with a weekly network audience of two million.

Prisma is shooting 13 new hours from July to early February with five medical professionals on the set as authenticators and Francois Bouvier (Urgence i, Les pots casses) and Alain Chartrand (Innocence, Maman last call) as codirectors.

Craft credits go to delegate producer Madeleine Henrie, dop Allen Smith, art director Marc Ricard, sound recordist Normand Mercier, costume designer Ginette Magny, post supervisor Joe Yared, editors Michel Arcand and Yves Chaput, and composer Robert M. Lepage.

Urgence ii features 300 actors, close to 2,000 extras and costs $10.4 million – $800,000 per episode.

Funding sources include Telefilm Canada, Fonds de production des cablodistributeurs, both tax credit programs and sponsor General Motors.

DramaVision is the exporter.

Nazrul, rebel poet

Circus Maximus Films producer Philippe Spurrell is developing a feature based on the life story of Kazi Nazrul Islam, known as Nazrul, rebel poet of Bengal.

Investing sources back East asked Spurrell to develop a western feature film treatment of the life of the West Bengal-born poet and author of countless books, plays, novels and songs in the 1920-40 period.

The project has the backing of R. K. Talukdar, author of the Nazrul biography Gift of the Century, and Canadian director John Pozer (The Grocer’s Wife), who spent a week this summer with Spurrell in Dhaka meeting with scribes and potential investors.

The plan is to shoot a $5 million or $10 million coproduced movie in late ’97 on location in southern India and in-studio in Bangladesh.

‘I do have development funds, about us$100,000, basically private funds from Bangladesh via Singapore,’ says the producer.

The screenplay is far from finalized, but Spurrell already has a vision for the opening, ‘a powerful hurricane of flooding rain, thunder and lightning,’ per chance, the exact conditions on the day of the master’s birth in May of 1899.