Montreal: Productions La Fete has reprised the critically acclaimed Channel 4 drama series Tales of the City and begun principal photography on the six-hour miniseries Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City.

A major breakthrough for the Montreal company and producer Kevin Tierney, producing partners on the $11.5 million production are Showtime Networks, the u.k.’s Channel 4 Television and Working Title/Propaganda. Genie ’97 winner Pierre Gang (Sous-Sol) is the director. Hallmark in the u.s. is among the investors.

More Tales takes up where Tales left off, following the friendships, loves, secrets, betrayals, crimes and passions of a disparate collection of high- and not-so-high-brow San Francisco residents.

Many of the original cast members have returned including Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis, Laura Linney, Thomas Gibson, Barbara Garrick and William Campbell. New faces include talented Canadian actors Jackie Burroughs as Mother Mucca, an aged crone with plenty of secrets of her own, Stratford director and actor Diana LeBlanc, Domini Blythe, Colin Ferguson, Francoise Robertson and Paul Hopkins. Nicholas Wright adapted the series from the second collection of Maupin’s best-selling novels.

‘This is going to be a showcase for great Canadian actors,’ says producer Tierney, adding he was thrilled when he first saw this ‘quintessentially American story set in America and it was totally non-American.’

While pbs subsequently broadcast the original Channel 4 series in ’94, Tierney says a conservative mind set at the u.s. public service now deems the series ‘a little too risque.’ Gang’s sensitivity to the project has been invaluable, he says.

Alan Poul, Tim Bevan, Armistead Maupin and La Fete’s Suzanne Girard are the exec producers.

Key craft positions go to dop Serge Ladouceur, who is shooting on 16mm film, costume designer Denis Sperdouklis, production designer Normand Sarrazin, music composer Richard Gregoire, editor Philippe Raclet and pm Josee Lacelle.

More Tales of the City is slated to wrap Sept. 25.

-The Blouse Man

Quebec location filming on Tony Goldwyn’s The Blouse Man g’es for 35 days over seven weeks, wrapping the last week of August. Set in 1969, the film chronicles the drama and comedy of a Jewish family’s summer camp experience in the Catskills during that year of change and upheaval.

‘It’s the year of the moon landing, it’s the year of Woodstock, and basically this family from Brooklyn is thrown for a loop,’ says line producer Josette Perrotta.

Leads include Diane Lane (Murder at 1600), Viggo Mortensen (G.I. Jane) and Anna Paquin, who movingly portrayed the little girl in The Piano. Tony Richmond is the shoot’s dop and Dan Leigh is the production designer.

The Blouse Man is from New York’s Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman’s company. Hoffman is the film’s executive producer. Goldwyn and Jay Cohen are producing.

-Telescene’s Going to Kansas City

The local portion of filming is underway through to Aug. 18 on the feature film Going to Kansas City, the first-ever Canada/ Finland coproduction.

The $3.2 million majority Canadian production from Montreal’s Telescene and Finland’s Mandart Entertainment is slated to go for five weeks, moving next to small-town Kansas and ultimately Finland sometime in the last week of August.

The film is scripted by Morrie Ruvinsky and stars Michael Ironside as a small-town cop in a story about Mikko, a young Finnish exchange student/musician who sojourns to mid-America where he finds plenty of reasons to sing the blues. Mikko is played by rising Finnish star Mikko Nousiairien. Melissa Galianos plays the local love interest.

Pekka Mandart is the director. Pamela Mandart and Lise Abastado are the producers. Anne Murphy is the first ad, Antti Hellstedt is the dop, John Meighen is art director and Martin Dufour is the pm. Casting is by Elite Productions. Foreign sales are being handled by Park Entertainment.

Listed earlier this month on the tse and mse, Telescene is currently taping the Fox live-action/animation sitcom Student Bodies and is in preproduction on two tv movies, Escape from Wildcat Mountain for Showtime and Nightmare Man.

‘Escape is mainly an exterior location shoot and family adventure and we’re thinking Laurentians,’ says Anita Simand, head of creative affairs at Telescene. A director had not been named at press time but a local helmer was thought to have the edge. It’s slated to go end of August.

Nightmare Man is a tv movie/ pilot shooting in Fiji and New Zealand from Aug. 4 through to Sept. 8. The production is being directed by Jimmy Kaufman (Whiskers) and is a coventure between Telescene and New Zealand’s Isambard.

Per Simand, Nightmare is an action drama about a married police officer who receives a head wound in a shoot-out. He falls into a deep coma and begins to have creepy visions. When his wife suddenly disappears, he and his sons start a dangerous search.

Leads are Lee Horsley and Margot Kidder, who Simand says turned in ‘a wonderful performance’ in ‘The Sloan Man,’ an episode in the Telescene drama anthology The Hunger.

Mandart was established in 1986 as a documentary and tv drama producer. Going to Kansas City is the company’s first feature.

-Fant-Asia ’97 troops

Action film biz types are arriving for Fant-Asia ’97, the second edition of the international fantasy and action film festival sponsored by Montreal post house Vision Globale. The festival features films from Hong Kong and Japan and a new international section with films from the u.s. and Europe. The fest opened July 11 with the Jackie Chan masterpiece Drunken Master 2 and runs through to Aug. 10.

Japanese festival guests include Dentsu’s Takahito Iida, one of the producers of Ultraman Zearth, a film recently sold to Disney; Rex Entertainment’s Hitomi Nakagaki presenting the world premiere of the innovative animation film Perfect Blue; and distributor Hiromi Aihara of be wiz, a leading Japanese supplier.

u.s. producers and distributors attending include Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski of Grindhouse Releasing who are prepping two films here, Cannibal Ferox and The Beyond; Jim Van Bebber of Mercury Films; One Shot Productions producer Kevin Collins, repping Tender Flesh; and A Gun For Jennifer director Todd Morris and producer Deborah Twiss of Conspiracy Films.

Foreign fantasy film festival reps attending include Loris Curci of Italy’s Fanta-Festival, and Guy Delmote and Patrick Matthys of the Brussels Fantasy Films Festival.

-Upcoming film action

STCVQ and Directors Guild of Canada-Quebec film action slated to start in the next month includes Filmline International’s Free Money from director Yves Simoneau and producer Nicolas Clermont, prepping for an Aug. 25 start; the Kingsborough Greenlight Pictures feature remake Treasure Island, directed by Peter Rowe and slated for an Aug. 4 start on the Isle of Man; and Out of Control, another Kingsborough feature from director Richard Trevor, which was slated for a July 26 start.

Also on tap are two sda tv movies, Quai #1 from director Francois Bouvier, producers Andre Picard and Daniele J. Suissa, and Loss of Faith from director Alan Goldstein, producers Suissa and Ann Ditchburn.

The S/R Productions feature The Ultimate Weapon was slated for a July 23 start with John Strong directing, and Snake Eyes, the Paramount Pictures Corp. Canada blockbuster feature from producer Louis Stroller and director/producer Brian DePalma is scheduled to shoot here Aug. 11 to Oct. 31.