For the first time in its history, specialty service Showcase Television, which traditionally buys drama already aired on network television, has commissioned an original, two-hour, Canadian movie for exclusive broadcast on its airwaves.

Produced by Arnie Zipursky of Cambium Entertainment and Lawrence Mirkin of Mirkin Creative, and written by Paul Dreskin (Tales From the Longhouse), The Ride is a $2.9-million, cutting-edge mow about the daily lives of cab drivers. ‘It’s a real-life look at an urban cab company, a quality drama comparable to Homicide, with lots of points of view from the cab,’ says Laura Michalchyshyn, vp programming, Showcase.

Shooting in downtown Toronto from April 24 to May 19, The Ride features a stellar ensemble cast headed by Yaphet Kotto (Homicide, Alien), Al Waxman (The Hurricane, Cagney & Lacey), Ron White (Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story) and Rachael Crawford (Traders, Hoop Life).

Steve DiMarco (Due South) is directing.

Cambium has worldwide distribution.

The idea behind The Ride, which was originally pitched as a series, is to premier it as a pilot for a potential one-hour drama series, says Michalchyshyn.

It is also the beginning of a longer-term plan for the specialty service to co-create with producers and combine licences.

Ken Finkleman’s Night and Day, produced by Rhombus Media, and Cite Amerique’s Random Passage are examples of Showcase sharing licences with cbc.

Likewise, the channel’s first-window involvement on Breakthrough Film & Video Productions’ Paradise Falls – 52 episodes of which were recently greenlit with eip and lfp funding – and Cite Amerique’s The Dice – the first six episodes of which were also given the go-ahead – exemplifies Showcase’s commitment to working with the producers throughout the process.

In fact, in the recent eip rounds, Showcase was pretty much the only specialty service whose projects were greenlit.

‘I think it’s a good reflection of the industry where less drama is being pitched by the big networks,’ says Michalchyshyn.

Also, as an edgy broadcaster, Showcase continues to relish provocative new ways of presenting tv.

‘We’re looking for new, fresh, unique ideas from producers and directors, but we’re also thrilled to partner with the networks for bigger profile series that we can’t fund ourselves, like Random Passage,’ she adds.

On the same note, the channel is also making its foray into docudrama with Kink, the real-life stories of a group of sexually alternative folk in Vancouver, produced by David Paperny.

The Ride is set to kick off Showcase’s fall season, in primetime, late August.

*Bright Anvil takes NASCAR to the moon

Introducing Bright Anvil Studios, a not-so-new, but less-than-visible concept and character design/ script creation company involved in some of the most visible animated programs on air today, including Brats of the Lost Nebula (Decode Entertainment/Jim Henson Productions), Beast Machines Transformers (Alliance Atlantis/Mainframe) and Action Man (Mainframe).

The cutting-edge studio also handles toy design, video games, children’s books and comics.

Helmed by Logan Lubera, a former comic-book convention bodyguard turned comic book artist turned animation design studio head, the one-stop shop is about to turn out its first proprietary series and movie, FI The Venus Rally, created and written by Lubera.

Both the series (13 half-hours budgeted at $17 million) and the feature (budgeted at roughly $110 million) catapult nascar racing into a whole new dimension, using cgi animation.

The story revolves around a racing court on the planet Venus, which has been inadvertently turned into a huge rain forest, dangerously filled with giant mutated alligators, massive spiders and other oversized creatures and elements as a result of malfunctioning generators that were put there to create atmosphere. Nonetheless, once a year the planet hosts a race between the best nascar racers in the universe.

Lubera says wb has already offered six figures for the series and DreamWorks has been bidding for the feature.

Hammerhead Productions in Studio City, California, is Bright Anvil’s development partner on the projects, and both the series and the film will be u.s./Canada coventures, says Lubera.

Hammerhead principal Dan Chuba is attached to produce.

Meantime, Lubera stays true to his roots with a comic book line, Monster Fighters, he and partner Craig Yeung have developed for Image Comics. They have also signed on for season two of Transformers and are doing the toy design for a Back Street Boys merchandising campaign.

*Shaftesbury gets go-ahead on two more

Shaftesbury Films just received the green light on the third and fourth installments of its murder-mystery franchise, a series of mows adapted from six books by Regina-based novelist Gail Bowen.

Following the first two films, Love and Murder and Deadly Appearances, directed by George Bloomfield (Jacob Two Two and the Hooded Fang, Due South) and broadcast on ctv last year, the newest productions, Wandering Soul Murders and Colder Kind of Death, will be shot in blocks from June 12 to Aug. 11 in Toronto. Directed by Brad Turner (Must Be Santa, Major Crime) and written by Andrew Wreggitt (The Blue Ground) and R.B. Carney (Due South), the films will be broadcast on ctv sometime in 2001

Starring Wendy Crewson (Piano Man’s Daughter, Better Than Chocolate) as the ongoing character Joanne Kilbourn and Victor Garber (Titanic), Wandering Soul has Kilbourn, an ex-cop whose husband’s murder has yet to be solved, become a reporter with a local tv news station where she investigates the serial murders of young girls in the community.

In Colder Kind of Death, someone is finally arrested for the murder of her husband, six years after the fact, but before much is uncovered the suspect commits suicide, leaving Kilbourn with some new but limited evidence to relaunch her search for the truth behind her husband’s death.

Both mows are produced by Christina Jennings and budgeted at roughly $3 million each.

In addition to eip and lfp funding that just came through, support for the two projects has come from the Cogeco Program Development Fund.

Carlton America has worldwide distribution.

The final two books from the series, Verdict and Blood and A Killing Spring, are next in line.

*Triptych partners with AAC on Lucky Girl

Triptych Media and Alliance Atlantis Communications are in development on Lucky Girl, an mow for ctv about a teenage girl who develops a gambling addiction and lands herself in a heap of debt.

Written by John Frizzell (The Biggest Modern Woman of the World) and produced by Triptych’s Louise Garfield, the coprod, which recently received eip and lfp support, goes to camera this summer in Toronto. A director is yet to be named.

Alliance Atlantis is distributing.

*Distinct Features shoots three films in Ottawa

Ottawa-based Distinct Features is gearing up to shoot three feature films in the nation’s capital this summer.

Produced by company prez Derek Diorio and Sarah Fodey, the three ‘light dramas’ – A Taste of Jupiter, The Kiss of Debt and Punch and Judy – have a combined budget of roughly $2 million and were privately financed.

‘We’re doing all the things you should never do,’ says Diorio. ‘We’re using private money and we’re going ahead without a broadcaster, but if I had sat around waiting for a funding agency, I’d be a very old man by the time any of my films got made.’

All three scripts were written by Dan Lalonde (House of Luk). Diorio, who is set to direct the three films, also cowrote Kiss of Debt, the story of a widowed Irish Canadian who runs a near-bankrupt restaurant in Little Italy and a prisoner’s wife and her lover, all tied together by love, hate, debt and the mob.

A Taste of Jupiter is a sentimental dramedy about the fleeting nature of love, focusing on a young woman, her grandmother and their respective lovers.

Punch and Judy is a lighthearted romantic comedy about an aging rough-and-tumble bouncer and a naive middle-aged student who demonstrate how opposites attract, repel and slam together again.

All three films will be shot in Ottawa from July 3 to Dec. 15 with an entirely Ottawa-based crew and an Ottawa-heavy cast (although casting is still underway). ‘We’re making foreign-style films with an American feel to them,’ says Diorio. ‘They really could have been shot in England or Italy or France.’

Meantime, Distinct’s first film Two’s a Mob, a parody of the gangster movie genre, is slated for broadcast on Citytv this summer, and its second film House of Luk, a whimsical comedy starring Pat Morita (Karate Kid) and Michael Moriarty (Law and Order), is currently in post and will be distributed by Trans World International.

Distinct has distribution on its three new films.