Sitting in his oak office surrounded by a seemingly endless collection of photographs, Maxx Productions executive producer Harve Sherman has a story to go with every picture that graces his walls, and tells them with the same passion he displays when talking about his five-year-old spot shop.

A vet of the Toronto production scene in every sense of the word, Sherman has seen the evolution of the Canadian film and television industry and has produced everything from features (pre-Telefilm Canada) to mows, series, and commercials.

In his late teens, Sherman (then a competitive hand-ball player) got his first taste of the industry as an editor. He hated it.

In the early ’60s, he applied for a position at cfto as a junior production manager. In the right place at the right time (one of the vps and some staff were being squeezed out), Sherman was named head of the film department.

‘I virtually knew nothing about film, I just did it by the seat of my pants,’ he says.

In the early days of Canadian film, John Bassett Jr. (son of Baton Broadcasting cofounder John Bassett) opened Agincourt Productions, the production arm of cfto, and handed Sherman a script, a plane ticket to Vancouver and a cheque for $100,000. Suddenly, he was a producer.

Sherman produced numerous films under Agincourt, including Face Off, the story of a romance between a Canadian hockey player and a rock star, Cool Millions and She Cried Murder, on which he says the Kojak series starring Telly Savalas was based.

Meanwhile, he had fallen in love with a script for The Babysitter (released as Black Christmas), a commercial horror flick which the folks at Agincourt did not want to support.

‘I tried to convince them to do it but they said it didn’t fit the family image, so I quit,’ says Sherman. ‘I mortgaged my house, formed Vision 4 with some other guys, found someone to put up the money, got a director out of Florida, Bob Clark, who did horrors with no money, and we made the film. It was a labor of love for me.’

Shot in 1974 at the University of Toronto and at a large old house on a budget of $650,000, Black Christmas was an eerie killer-in-the-house film featuring local talent Andrea Martin and Margot Kidder. It was a blockbuster.

Sometime after that, Sherman met up with commercial director Bob Schulz, then president of Schulz Productions in Toronto, who lured the film producer into commercial production.

‘I wasn’t on staff yet and Bob said `Try this,’ ‘ recalls Sherman of his inauguration into advertising. ‘It was a Mountain Dew shoot in Hawaii, with Bob directing and Fritz Speiss [on camera]. Putting a shoot together overseas was an awakening, it was an extraordinary experience.’

From Hawaii, he was off to l.a. for a Pontiac campaign, and ‘all of a sudden I was in the business and I loved it because I was producing everyday.’

After 10 years with Schulz, Sherman hooked up with Ousama Rawi to form Rawi Sherman. But just as they began to expand, the recession hit and the new prodco folded.

Sherman then started Maxx, named for his 10-year-old son Max. With a small roster of directors the shop has landed work for Enbridge, Crayola, Casino Rama, and most recently, a job the executive producer is very excited about, an Oscar Mayer ad featuring the famous ‘If I were an Oscar Mayer weiner. . . ‘ song.

‘Maxx became the thing I wanted to do more than anything else in the world, I just didn’t know it until it happened,’ says Sherman. ‘I was, in some ways, driven to this point and I am probably a better producer than I have been my whole life.’