Montreal: Documentary house Poly-Productions and veteran producer Pierre Brochu have joined with Productions Point de Mire, a tv documentary and drama house. With Brochu on board, vp and exec producer Raymond Gauthier says more than 20 doc projects, almost all aimed at primetime, are in development. New projects from Poly-Productions will be produced under the Point de Mire banner.

The merger, says the producer, gives the united houses ‘more clout in the marketplace. Things won’t necessarily move more quickly, but probably more surely.’ Gauthier says there are no cash considerations in the deal.

Current production, contingent on funding from Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Television Fund, includes Virginie Milliere’s Sailing Birds and Birch: A Portrait of Mike Birch and J’ai pour toi un lac/The Lake in Quebec: Death of a Myth.

Gauthier says there are all kinds of second-window offers for the one-hour portrait of Canadian yachtsman Birch, with interest from cfcf-tv Montreal, Global Television, Radio-Canada and Reseau tva. But for now, a main deal is pending.

Scripted by Jacques Couture, The Lake is a one-hour examination of lake management in Quebec. Gauthier says pubcaster Tele-Quebec is increasingly open to polemical, pov-style treatments.

Two one-hour biographies for Canal d are also slated for this spring, one on Camilien Houde, the popular arm-twisting Montreal mayor imprisoned during the Conscription Crisis, and the other on Real Caouette, the much-vilified Social Credit politician who was nonetheless ‘loved by the working poor.’

Point de Mire and producer Lise Payette are prepping a four-hour tva doc series called Trouver le coupable/Wanted. It looks at circumstances and police work surrounding four unusual and unsolved major crime/murder cases, starting with the case of Melanie Cabay, a young Montreal woman murdered in 1994.

Projects in development under producer Brochu’s supervision include Hot Eva, a portrait of pioneer vaudevillian/stripper Eva Tanguay, with development funds from sodec, Telefilm, Bravo! and Canal D; and a six-hour international doc series entitled The World History of Alcohol. The saga of booze is budgeted at $2 million and could end up becoming a coprod with Cafe Productions of the u.k. Such an option immediately adds 20% to the budget, says Gauthier.

Founded in 1981, Poly-Productions has produced the popular musical anthologies Le Vent des annees 60, Connaitre la suite and Les Enfants d’un siecle fou; Olivier, a top-rated bio on pioneer Quebec comedian Olivier Guimond; and Partis pour le gloire, a 13 half-hour series on Quebec emigres.

Point de Mire produced Women: A True Story, a six-hour doc series hosted by American activist/actor Susan Sarandon and sold internationally by The Multimedia Group of Canada.

Founded in 1992 by Payette, Gauthier and producer Jean-Francois Mercier, Point de Mire is projecting top-line revenues of $8 million in 2000.

*Kingsborough preps Ocean Warrior

Preproduction is slated to begin this month on the GFT Kingsborough Films high-seas adventure The Ocean Warrior. The us$48-million film is being produced by Pieter Kroonenburg and Gary Howsam of GFT Entertainment, Toronto, in association with Elie Samaha of Franchise Pictures (The Whole Nine Yards, Battlefield Earth, Art of War), who Kroonenburg says has brought in u.s. distrib Warner Bros. John Badham (Stakeout, War Games) will direct. The shoot is headed for an April 1 start-up, with filming taking place off the rocky coast of Newfoundland as well as in the Netherlands, Germany and Malta. Casting is underway.

The Ocean Warrior tells the story of controversial ecologist Paul Watson, skipper of the famous interceptor The Sea Shepherd.

Kingsborough produced about $15 million in movies in ’99, including Cord, a suspense about an evil couple out to snatch someone else’s baby. The film was shot in Winnipeg and directed by Sidney Furie, with Jennifer Tilly, Daryl Hannah, Vince Gallo and rising (former Montreal) talent Bruce Greenwood in the leading roles. Also shot last year were David Bailey’s The Intruder and the house’s latest, Max Fischer’s Deception, a twist-‘n’-turn thriller in the spirit of Les Diaboliques.

Deception is a Canada/France/ u.k. coproduction with Next Films of Paris and Jaime Brown and Studio 8 of London, Eng. l.a.-based Hilltop is handling international sales. The dop was Vancouver-based Curtis Peterson. Enrique Lani is editing at Global Vision.

Distrib Film Tonic will release Kingsborough’s monumental Kenyan adventure To Walk With Lions nationally later this month. Canadian Keith Ross Leckie (Children of My Heart) wrote the screenplay. ‘Lions didn’t get the immediate major [u.s.] studio pickup we had hoped for,’ says Kroonenburg, adding a u.k. premiere and theatrical run is slated for May.

Recent international production from partner Howsam and GFT Entertainment includes Pilgrim, Road Rage, My 9 Wives, City of Fear, The Silencer, Company Man, A Twist of Faith and High Explosive.

*Keeping up with World Affairs

World Affairs Television can legitimately claim to be Montreal’s most prolific public-affairs production house, and the current slate of renewals and new programs is keeping executive producer Larry Shapiro as busy as ever.

The season’s production lineup includes The Editors, 39 new half-hours broadcast on cbc and pbs. Hosts are Keith Morrison, correspondent for Dateline nbc, and David Johnston, chair of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; and 16 half-hours of the successful mba competition series The Business Challenge, seen on Canadian Learning Television and pbs, with talks underway to sell to cbc.

The show features students from 16 of the top u.s. and Canadian East Coast universities and is sponsored by The Financial Times and The Economist. ‘What I like a lot,’ says the producer, ‘is that [corporate] recruiting centres are calling in and asking for tapes of some of the kids [students] they saw on the show.’

Other shows include Public Policy, a 13-hour debate series of current news and analysis hosted by Morrison and broadcast by cbc, pbs and clt; Literati, broadcast on pbs and clt; and the movie bio series Directors, 10 new hours commissioned by Bravo! and Star! New profiles include the late, great Louis Malle, and two of our leading women directors, Lea Pool (Emporte-moi) and Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park).

World Affairs is also producing 16 hours of a new show called Star! – an exploration of the acting profession – logically commissioned by Bravo! and Star!, while Close-Up is a monthly roundtable special with movie directors reviewing the current state of international cinema.

Of course, there’s more. Shapiro says he’ll meet soon with clt on two additional shows, The Media Business, a behind-the-scenes look at the North American entertainment and media industries, and Media Almanac, which matches profiles of outstanding journalists to a historical take on how the news is produced. Shapiro is pitching the house’s memorable Cold War series, La Guerre Froide with Reseau de l’Information host Pierre Maisonneuve (hosted by David Halton for cbc), to newly launched specialty channel Historia.

Although it hasn’t always been easy producing in English out of Montreal, Shapiro has only the kindest words for Tony Burman, director of cbc television news, current affairs and Newsworld, and Paul Gratton of Bravo! and Star! Shapiro produced and directed at cbc from 1964 to 1973, launching World Affairs Television in 1985.