VANCOUVER: As the U.S. networks rolled out their fall schedules earlier this month, B.C. collected a handful of new television series.

The most business will come from WB, which has greenlit the U.S. remake of British comedy A Young Person’s Guide to Becoming a Rock Star, along with the Superman-as-a-boy series Smallville, series Maybe I’m Adopted and Lions Gate Entertainment’s reality series No Boundaries.

CBS will produce the spooky series Wolf Lake, with Lou Diamond Phillips in the lead.

And NBC has booked stages at Vancouver Film Studios to do the super spy series U/C Undercover.

UPN, meanwhile, will be back with The Dead Zone, the Stephen King-inspired series starring Anthony Michael Hall.

Ally Sheedy stars in the syndicated series Strange Frequency (for Viacom), described as a rock ‘n’ roll version of The Twilight Zone, which is also headed to Vancouver.

Disaster zone

DAVID Gullason, the unnamed Vancouver-based producer for the Leo-winning Storm Warning series, has been churning out the information programming since Great North Pacific, now a division of Alliance Atlantis, was opened three years ago.

In all, 39 hours of the-fury-of-Mother Nature show Storm Warning were produced for Discovery U.S. and Canada. In the can, too, are five hours of Without Warning for TLC about what happens when things go wrong. Also produced in the past year is Terror on the Tracks, a one-hour about a London rail crash for Discovery, and Beyond Human Limits, a one-hour about people living in extremes. That’s also for Discovery.

Perhaps less adrenalin-inducing are Alpha Male, a one-hour about the waning power of masculinity in society, made for TLC, and its reverse sequel Alpha Female, a new one-hour for Women’s Entertainment Network.

And production continues until the end of August on Cinema Secrets, 13 half-hours about the behind-the-scenes happenings for Hollywood special effects. Produced for American Movie Classics (on U.S. basic cable) and Movie Central in Canada, the series starts airing in July.

Strike schmike

LOCAL producer Michael Derbas of service producer Avrio Filmworks (affiliated with domestic producer Avrio Stoneridge Entertainment) will gamble on labor stability when he goes into production with The House Next Door June 19 for an 18-day shoot.

Starring Sean Young (Blade Runner), James Russo (Donnie Brasco) and Theresa Russell (Black Widow), House is a kind of homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It’s the story of a newlywed couple that moves into their dream house, only to find that their next-door neighbor isn’t as good-natured as they thought. It’s directed by Joey Travolta (brother of John) and written by actor/writer John Benjamin Martin (Flatliners),

The low-budget production will shoot around Vancouver.

Last year, Avrio Stoneridge Entertainment partners Derbas and Rick Pepin produced Mindstorm, a video release about psychics, cults and the effects of the Cold War experimentation. Eric Roberts and local performer Emmanuelle Vaugier (My 5 Wives) star.

And more indications of optimism about an actor’s contract is I Spy, the long-awaited, big-budget Eddie Murphy feature for Sony, which is getting ready to build its sets at The Bridge Studios in Vancouver. That is, unless the actors walk…

Sausage in the city

PEACE Arch Entertainment of Vancouver is in production on 13 half-hours of The Sausage Factory (though producers would rather it be called Untitled Teen Series until the real name is chosen). The racy series is alternately described as a Sex and the City for teens or American Pie-meets-Dawson’s Creek.

Coproduced with MTV and Nelvana, the series is set in Boulder, CO and explores the coming-of-age stories of a group of high school friends.

‘From an accidental Viagra incident with a pit bull, to a young couple’s struggle with virginity, this series embraces the unique and often hilarious manner in which teenagers deal with emerging issues of loyalty, burgeoning sexuality and class structure,’ states the production’s brief summary.

Adam Brody (Growing Up Brady), Johnny K. Lewis and Kenny Fischer (The Day I Met My Mother) star.

Production runs to June 5. And YTV is set to broadcast the series in Canada.

Featured features

VANCOUVER’S Endless Entertainment is the service producer for Jim Belushi’s third outing in K-9, the dog-and-cop buddy comedy that did the first installment in 1989. Production runs to June 27.

Ed Burns and Angelina Jolie, meanwhile, provide the star power for the romantic comedy Life or Something Like It, in production until June 23. It’s about a reporter and the psychic homeless person she interviews.

And actor Malcolm McDowell will drive a few hours west from Revelstoke and the set of The Barber to start The Mangler II, presumably the sequel to the 1995 film about an evil iron-folding machine. The sequel shoots in Chilliwack until June 17.

Spookumchuck

VETERAN producer/director Gretchen Jordan-Bastow joined Tony Papa at Vancouver’s Avanti Pictures three months ago and brought with her an hour-long documentary pilot for CBC and Space: The Imagination Station.

Ghosts and Ghoulies… West Coast Ghosts, acquaints viewers with B.C.’s most famous hauntings, stretching from the present back into the mid-1800s. Principal photography took place from May 1-10 in Victoria, Quesnel and Barkerville. Jordan-Bastow’s previous credits include The Trials of Eve, Circle of Justice, the six-part series Through the Lens, and Navajo Sandpainting, a Healing Tradition.

Balkan statement

PRODUCER Jodi Callaghan and director Steve Rosenberg (Watching Mrs. Pomerantz) will produce their 20-minute short film Vannica June 4-10. Starring exiled Yugoslavian journalist Zdenka Acin (now living in Toronto) and local actors Max Teishman and Muriel Kauffman, the $59,000 project tells the story of a Serbian housekeeper and the elderly Yiddish women she attends to. Callaghan, who started in documentaries, calls the comedy a Serbian Muriel’s Wedding and says the script boasts dialogue in Yiddish, Serbian, Korean and East Indian.