With more than 60 books under option, Toronto-based agency WCA Film and Television, helmed by Michael Levine and Suzanne DePoe, has been closing book-to-film deals like wildfire since its inception in September 1999.

Of the 25 deals wca agent Tina Horwitz (formerly with partner Westwood Creative Artists) has closed in the past 18 months, including Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath, optioned to Cite-Amerique and soon after adapted as Lea Pool’s Lost & Delirious, two-thirds were either brokered with Canadian companies or have a Canadian interest.

Some recent deals include Eileen Whitfield’s Pickford to Muse Entertainment/Jaffe Braunstein, a new spin on Mary Pickford as a feminist, avant courier in film, which is being developed by Canadian writer/director Donald Martin for ctv.

Martin, based in l.a., is also attached as screenwriter to A Hand in the Water by Bill Schiller, optioned to CBS Entertainment/ Andrea Baynes by wca in August. The book tells the story of the infamous Albert Walker and The Rolex Murders. The film will likely shoot in Toronto as l.a.-based producer and Shadow Box associate Baynes tends to migrate north for many of her films.

The agency recently closed three deals with Alliance Atlantis Motion Pictures: Michael Turner’s (Hard Core Logo) Pornographer’s Poem, to be budgeted at roughly $10 million; Brad Smith’s (Rises a Moral Man) One Eyed Jacks, with an estimated budget of $5 million; and Doug Clark’s Unkindest Cut, to be adapted by Keith Ross Leckie (The David Milgaard Story).

The yet-to-be written Susan Musgrave story has been optioned to Cadence and Raincoast Storylines, and the rights to the Jane Doe story have been sold to Indian Grove Productions/Bernie Zukerman. The unwritten Craig Keilburger story was optioned to Showtime, to be produced by Joanne Moore as an mow that will likely shoot in Toronto with Dufferin Gate/Temple Street.

The Friends of Dottie Cobb, a screenplay written by NBC News veterans Kit Fewer and Fred Kennedy (Psi Factor), has been optioned to producer Alex Raffe (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) and her new Toronto-based prodco Savi Media.

Timothy Findley’s Headhunter has been optioned to Shaftesbury Films, with Jeremy Hole attached as screenwriter.

A History of Forgetting by Caroline Anderson has been sold to Coreen Mayrs (A Feeling Called Glory) of Vancouver’s Cracked Pot Films. Mayrs will write and direct the film.

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy (author of the short story on which Kissed was based) has been optioned to Berlin-based Constantin Films (Name of the Rose), which will likely produce the film using animatronics and a $40-million budget. Jean Jacques Annau (Seven Years in Tibet) is set to direct.

wca was also responsible for optioning the film rights of Rare Birds by Ed Riche (Made in Canada) to Janet York of Vancouver’s Big Pictures Entertainment, who is currently coproducing the film with Pope Productions in Newfoundland. The film was written by Riche and is directed by Sturla Gunnarsson.

*TimeLine dissolves,

Clark produces Horror

toronto-based prodco TimeLine Entertainment (Cracked, Comedy Mix, A Tale From the Jack O Lantern) has closed its doors on account of irreconcilable creative differences, according to actor and one principal Joseph Clark (Lindberg: The Lone Eagle.) Producers Joseph Carso and Frank Elsasser (The Slasher) are also principals.

TimeLine has six tv programs in distribution, with educational programming being sold in Canada by Magic Lantern Communications and dramas sold internationally by Iron Rod Motion Pictures.

Clark says all rights and ownership of Cracked, a docudrama on the effects of crack cocaine, are split between Carso and Elsasser. The rights to the company’s five remaining programs, including Comedy Mix, Jack O Lantern and Date Rape, go to Clark.

‘Doing acting gigs for other companies, I was unable to maintain control in the partnership,’ says Clark, who recently returned from making a guest star appearance on Starhunter in New Brunswick. ‘I want to move forward in drama and get out of education,’ he says with his producer hat on.

On Nov. 21, Clark the producer goes to camera on his first feature film, Master of Horror, in which he also stars.

To be shot on digital for international video and tv distribution, the $300,000 film tells the story of a writer who is possessed by the spirit of a dead horror writer.

Clark collaborated on the script with Canadian actor Peter Merhen and is coproducing with exec producer Malak Tabarras of distrib Iron Rod.

The film was privately funded and will shoot for 24 days around Toronto, Durham region and the Upper Ottawa Valley.

*Hiltz, Esperanca ink deal

hiltz Squared Entertainment, last year a fledgling prodco making the move from shorts to features with the low-budget production House of Voices, has expanded into a multi-layered media group equipped with a film festival in development and a recently inked merger deal with Andre Bennett’s Cinema Esperanca.

Signed in mid-October, the deal has Hiltz co-releasing all of Esperanca’s library – which includes five Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) features – in video stores and online on Hiltz’s website, Hiltz2.com.

‘And all of Andre’s new releases we will be co-releasing in theatres,’ says producer Jonathan Hiltz, who co-helms Hiltz with director Naomi Hiltz and producer Myles Shane.

The three partners are also in the process of organizing the first-ever Toronto International Teen Movie Festival, scheduled for October 2001.

A showcase for features, shorts, docs and multimedia productions, the festival, which Shane says will screen 250 films from all over the world, aims to entertain a teenage audience with product exclusively from kids 19 and under.

‘The films will be through the eyes of kids, so kids will relate to them,’ says Shane.

The festival, which will take place annually in Toronto, will close with a grand concert and a Halloween block party.

Gearing up for a mid-November announcement, Hiltz is in negotiations with sponsors, including a mega-theatre chain and some notable media outlets.

The partners also just returned from l.a., where they wrapped on the feature docusoap Jack’s House, in which they filmed a well-known Hollywood screenwriter in his house while he finished a script for a major studio.

Shot on digital for roughly $500,000, the film, directed by Naomi Hiltz and produced by Shane and Jonathan Hiltz, will be co-released in Canada by Hiltz and Esperanca, and has been bought by TMN-The Movie Network.

*Soul Food heads

back to L.A.

after shooting 20 one-hour episodes in Toronto, Showtime’s one-hour sister series Soul Food is set to wrap Nov. 9.

Produced by songwriter Baby Face’s prodco Edmonds Entertainment in association with Paramount Pictures, the series, budgeted at roughly us$1 million per ep, started shooting in April in Toronto, which doubles as Chicago.

Based on the film released four years back, the series follows the lives and relationships of three sisters who lose their sense of direction when their mother dies.

Among the myriad directors on the series, actor Eriq Lasalle (e.r.) directed the pilot and Canadian director Clement Virgo (Love Come Down) directed two recently shot episodes.

Sean Ryerson and Cathy Gibson are attached as producers, with Tracey and Kenny Edmond, and writer/director George Tillman (Soul Food, the movie) of State Street Productions as exec producers.

Writers on the series are all l.a.-based.

Vanessa Williams (Melrose Place), Nicole Ari Parker (Boogie Nights) and Malinda Williams star.

Interstate 60 wraps in T.O.

insterstate 60, the latest project from the imagination of writer/director Bob Gale, creator of the Back to the Future films, has just wrapped shooting in Toronto.

A Fireworks/Seven Arts production, starring James Marsden (X-Men), Gary Oldman (The Contender) and Amy Smart (Varsity Blues), with cameos from Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, the film shot Sept. 18 to Oct. 29. Producers are Peter Bray and Neil Canton.

Described as a Gulliver’s Travels for the new millennium, the film, budgeted at roughly $8 million, is an offbeat road movie about a young man’s search for answers along a highway that doesn’t exist on the map.

Jay Firestone and Adam Haight of Fireworks, and Seven Arts’ Peter Hoffman and Eric Sandys are exec producing.

*CSTA workshop features top Canadian talent

the Canadian Screen Training Centre has signed on some of Canada’s top film and television talents to lead its Taking it to the Screen series, kicking off Nov. 3 and running through to Dec. 3.

The Toronto tv workshops include The Heart of Directing with John L’Ecuyer (Saint Jude), Writing for Television with Don Truckey (Street Legal) and Television Producing with Janis Lundman and Susan Flanders (Drop the Beat).

The focus on film includes Directing with a Creative Eye with John Greyson (The Law of Enclosures), Hard Core Screenwriting with Noel Baker (Hard Core Logo) and Insider’s Edge on Producing with Damon D’Oliveira (Love Come Down).

Among workshops in Ottawa, filmmaker Derek Diorio (Kiss of Debt) conducts Direct This!, producer Merilyn Read (The Tom Green Show) fleshes out the nuts and bolts of producing in Producing 101, Keith Davidson (Route 66) teaches Writing for the Screen and Barry Blake handles Acting for the Camera.

For dates and details go to www.csta.ca