Despite attempts to appeal it, the letter of the law in the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s rules and regulations has rendered the final two seasons (20 x 1 hour, equating to $25 million of production) of Salter Street Films/Cinar’s Emily of New Moon ineligible for Gemini recognition.

Michael Kennedy, one of the series’ directors, contacted coproducer Salter early in March to inquire about submitting episodes from season three for Gemini consideration. He was shocked when the Academy responded to Salter saying that seasons three and four, which Kennedy as well as other series writers and directors presumed started airing for the first time on CBC this past January, had actually been broadcast more than a year ago on stations belonging to the now-defunct WIC Western International Communications.

Series producer and Salter principal Michael Donovan says his office made a conscious decision not to nominate episodes from seasons three and four based on the WIC broadcast because the regional airing would not have reached a wide enough audience to give Emily’s creators a fair shot at gaining recognition at the Geminis. But the producers, says Donovan, were unaware that this decision would render Emily ineligible for nomination when the larger, national CBC broadcast took place.

‘The first broadcast is always the main broadcast…through very particular circumstances here, that norm was reversed,’ says Donovan.

While CBC had first window for the initial two seasons, Kennedy and other creative talent assumed the same was true for the last two seasons, but in fact it was WIC that held first window for seasons three and four.

Between May 2000 and February 2001, seasons three and four were aired on WIC stations across Canada, but no nominations were made at that time. Because these episodes are now airing on CBC for their second run, Academy rules and regulations render them ineligible for Gemini nomination.

The Academy stipulates that to be considered for nomination a show must be in ‘its first Canadian release within the Qualifying Period on an English-language telecaster licensed by the CRTC’ and, that the production ‘is not a rerun.’

‘There are dozens of artists who made these shows who did nothing wrong, knew nothing about the WIC broadcast, and who enter their work every year,’ argues Kennedy. ‘The shows are being broadcast nationally for the first time by a major network, they have never been entered before. My point to the committee was, when it gets this messy, you rule in favor of the artists.’

An appeal made to the Academy by Kennedy and the creative team behind Emily, backed by the producers and with formal support from ACTRA, the Directors Guild of Canada and the Writers Guild of Canada, was denied on March 22.

‘We feel terrible that folks have fallen through the cracks,’ said Peter Kent, chairman of the Academy’s rules and regulations committee. ‘It is unfortunate, but we get 450 nominations a year. We can’t begin to compensate for honest mistakes made by producers and others by making exceptions to the rules and regulations that all members of the Academy have to live by.’

The Academy places responsibility on the series’ producers, Salter and Cinar, suggesting that the real mistake was made more than a year ago when producers failed to apply for nomination at the appropriate time.

Salter maintains that the Academy’s rules and regulations, intended to create fairness, have done just the opposite in this situation.

‘We have a classic catch-22,’ says Donovan. ‘The artists could not have been recognized if [Emily] had been nominated then, and now they cannot be recognized because [Emily] doesn’t qualify. So they could never have won. This cannot possibly be the intention of the rules.’

And according to Mark Chernin, Cinar VP of business and legal affairs, ‘The broadcaster doesn’t tell us when they broadcast.’

The Cinar producer who worked on the series, Patricia Lavoie, is no longer with the company and could not be reached for comment.

-www.academy.ca

-www.salter.com

-www.cinar.com