Novelist/screenwriter Paul Quarrington is prepping for a four-day summer shoot of a one-hour adaptation of his play Check Out Time, loosely based on the experience of bringing his novel Whale Music to the big screen with Alliance in 1994.

The film is being directed and produced by Quarrington along with Shannon Farr of Moon Dog Films and will reunite the theatrical cast of Check Out Time, which details a hotel-room screenwriting collaboration between a writer, played by Jimmy Jones, and a manic director, played by Whale Music helmsman Richard Lewis. Dorothy Bennie plays a chambermaid with ulterior motives.

While some would suggest that Quarrington might have emerged a tad jaded from the Whale Music campaign, the prolific writer assures that Alliance execs need not worry about the film, which he hopes to hit the festival circuit with.

‘Quite a few of them came to the play when it was on at the Toronto Fringe Festival. If you want to look at it as a roman a clef from my life, then it’s mostly inside jokes or lines from story meetings or something,’ says Quarrington from the production office of the Alliance series Power Play, where he is supervising script editor. (Power Play starts shooting mid-June.)

‘The battle between art and commerce is worth investigating, but this isn’t couched in the `Hollywood bad, novelist good,’ way. At the end of Check Out Time, it’s the director who is unwilling to prostitute the main concept of the piece.’

Cinematographer John Tran will lens the Moon Dog/Fizzy Dreams production, which currently has no broadcaster attached. Quarrington says Check Out Time’s modest budget will be financed in part through investments from Victoria, b.c.-based Cordova Bay Entertainment Group and money he received from the Canadian government earmarked for the arts. ‘And this is art,’ he says.

– Cuppa’s two-pack

Toronto commercial shop Cuppa Coffee Animation’s aspirations to pour its unique guerrilla animation styling ‘ideas that are not traditional Saturday morning’ into the episodic world has been greenlit in back-to-back yeses from hbo and the Cartoon Network.

Jan. 1, 1999, Cuppa will deliver 26 half-hours of Crashbox to hbo, a fully animated game show for the nine-to-12 demo. The idea for an animated brain teaser/psycho puzzle series came from l.a.’s Planet Grande, which approached Cuppa when they were looking for a shop that could helm a variety of styles.

Cuppa head Adam Shaheen says Planet wrote sublime scripts, but they weren’t particularly animation-friendly, so, based on the premise, Shaheen wrote a mini-bible, which interjects a more feasible, somewhat modular element. The show will run daily for six weeks.

The seven-month enterprise has a budget of roughly $3 million. As it is not purely visually driven, Shaheen says the top education minds were trotted in to watch kids test the 24 core games, and a thumbs-up was scored. Episodes will be structured with about eight games per, with random repetition kicking in after the initial outings.

The Cartoon Net optioned Clever Trevor as a multiple series of two-minute shorts, initially 26, comprising stop-motion and cel animation. Shaheen and Jeff Rockburn are the writers/creators of the premise which brings to life (well, animation) the notebook doodlings of Trevor Braithwaite, an English schoolboy transplanted to America.

Geared at tweens to teens, plots take cues from eternal school topics, like ‘When will I ever need to know this stuff?’ and play homage to film and tv classics, with themes such as a Hogan’s Heroes/Great Escape tribute – Stalag summer camp – or the French Lieutenant’s first crush.

In each ep, as Trevor nods off, the doodles and objects in his pocket and schoolbag act out his Walter Mittyesque daydreams, such as an eraser that becomes a space ship, rubbing out everything in its path.

Bible/full character development is underway, with budget and delivery tba, but it ‘will be substantial,’ says Shaheen, who expects the due date to be early next year. New York illustrator David Goldin, known for his talent for bringing everyday objects to cartoony life, is in on the character development.

Shaheen is gearing up and bringing on a huge staff to meet the series’ commitments, as well as the shop’s commercial and broadcast design work, which includes a slew of animation for Anime, a new 24-hour toon station (launching imminently) in Japan.

– Great White Bibble

Polkaroo is going national as cbc will be broadcasting the fifth season of the current installment of Polka Dot Door, which launched back in 1971. tvontario is set to shoot 19 more episodes of Polka Dot Shorts beginning May 4 in Toronto, bringing the total number of episodes in the current series of the perennial kids’ favorite to 130.

Sold to over 44 countries, Polkaroo and his friends will be expanding their horizons this year, according to creator and producer Jed MacKay. ‘We have one episode called ‘The Great White Bibble,’ where Bear dreams he’s Captain Ahab,’ says MacKay. ‘They’ll be great viewing for Ontario kids and parents and for our new national audience on the cbc.

Michael McNamara will be directing the new batch of episodes, budgeted at $29,000 per, which includes titles ‘Polkaroo of the Jungle’ and ‘Show Me The Honey.’

– Recall recalled for now

The Alliance production of Total Recall has been pushed back two months from its scheduled April start due to casting and creative concerns.

– Get festive

A couple of highlights from what is sure to be an exhaustingly crowded festival season.

Forty celebrity guests, including Titanic director James Cameron, and 40 classic films from the ’50s, ’60’s and ’70s hit the Niagara Film Festival June 5-14 in Niagara Falls.

The East York Provincial Film Festival runs May 20-21 and showcases the best film and video works from secondary students across Ontario.

With files from Mary Maddever.