Montreal: Cirrus Communications begins taping in HD Sept. 11 on the eight-hour series Les Aventures tumulteuses de Jack Carter, an entirely new kind of cop show for the Quebec TV market, promises producer Jacques Blain.

The series is one of four dramas and two documentary series on the house’s busy fall/winter production slate.

Jack Carter is mostly shooting in Montreal and environs, over three and a half months (nine shooting days per episode) to late December, with additional episode footage to be shot in February 2003.

The broadcaster is Radio-Canada. The budget is $7.5 million.

Carter, played by David La Haye, is a former cop turned private investigator who like any good P.I. isn’t always comfortable with official procedures. He gets the job done, and, of course, has a way with the ladies.

Blain (La Vie, la vie, Asbestos) says the series will feature unique camera angles, a ‘B.D.’ or comic-book design, while the city itself takes on the allure of a character. ‘The investigations are all a little bit weird, like the first one, which is about the disappearance of a tiger.’

Jack Carter is scripted by Sylvie Lussier and Pierre Poirier (4 et demi, Betes pas betes plus) and directed by Louis Choquette (2 Freres, Tabou I). Funding sources include Telefilm Canada and the LFP.

Cirrus is also producing 13 half-hours of the new Series+ drama sitcom Hommes en quarantaine. It portrays three very different fortysomething male types (married, just divorced and an inveterate playboy), played by Pierre Gendron, Andre Robitaille and Sylvain Marcel. Stephane Lapointe is directing. Claude Landry heads the writing team. This is the first season the Astral Media specialty channel has commissioned original Quebec drama, which also includes the spin-off series Le Petit Monde de Laura from Cinemaginaire.

Cirrus and Sphere Media Plus producer Jocelyn Deschenes are coproducing 16 one-hour episodes of the Reseau TVA series Tabou II, starring Louise Portal and Germain Houde. Claude Desrosiers and Lyne Charlebois are directing from an Anne Boyer and Michel d’Astous script. The show, nominated for a best drama series Gemeaux this year, is budgeted in the $500,000 an episode range and tapes from June to December.

Cirrus starts shooting later this fall on Escaping, 13 half-hours produced in English and French (double-shoot, double-casting) and commissioned by SRC and CBC. The show portrays life in a big-city Italian neighborhood.

‘The fantasy is to find actors who speak well in French, English and Italian,’ says the producer.

Patrice Sauve (La Grande Ourse, La Vie, la vie) is the director. The screenplay is by Steve Gallucio (Mambo Italiano) and Emile Gaudreault (Nuit de Noces). It’s the house’s first English-track drama and is budgeted in the $250,000 an episode range.

Cirrus is also producing two doc series, including Des betes et des hommes, six one-hours for Canal D on the many ties between humans and animals. Charles Domingue and screenwriter Marc Roberge are directing.

Psychological violence in the home, the workplace, at school and at play is the subject of L’Ombre d’un doute, 13 half-hours commissioned by Tele-Quebec. Marie Carpentier (Cultive et bien eleve, Histoire a la une) will direct this fall/winter. The writers are Johanne de Bellefeuille and Pierre Couture. The budget is $75,000 an hour.

Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm is set to release the new Louis Choquette mini-DV theatrical thriller Secret de banlieue on Oct. 4. It’s a coproduction between Cirrus and Films Vision 4. Other entries in the low-budget collection include Erik Canuel’s La loi du cochon and Eric Tessier’s feature debut Vendus, shot this summer.

The Producers profiled

World Affairs executive producer and writer Larry Shapiro says the new profile series The Producers was his most exhausting production ever, but the effort has been entirely worthwhile. The Producers, which premiers on Bravo! Oct. 11, profiles 11 prominent production executives over 13 hours, underlying the not-always-glamorous realities of developing, financing, producing and distribution, in a word, the craft of film and TV drama. ‘What I wanted was for them to explain their problems and fears and give us a behind-the-scenes introduction to the role of the producer,’ says Shapiro. A U.S. buyer has expressed interest. A second Canadian window has also signed.

Series hosts are journalist Francine Pelletier and Keith Morrison, host of The Editors and Dateline NBC.

Profiles include Robert Lantos (Sunshine, Men With Brooms) in the opening episode, Denise Robert (Stardom, Nuit de Noces), Lorraine Richard (Un Homme et son peche, Dice), Niv Fichman (32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, The Red Violin) and Lionel Chetwynd (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Varian’s War).

Also profiled are Roger Frappier (La Turbulence des Fluides, Maelstrom), Michael Mailer (Harvard Man, Black and White), Michael Prupas and Irene Litinsky (Savage Messiah, The Stork Derby) and Claudio Luca (The Boys of St. Vincent, The Last Chapter). The Lantos and Chetwynd profiles extend over two hours.

Shapiro has been good friends with two other producers profiled in the series ever since their shared heady days in Montreal in the mid-’60s – Ted Kotcheff (Joshua Then and Now, Law & Order: SVU) and Oscar winner Leonard Stern (The Steve Allen Show, The Honeymooners). ‘I think Ted as a human being was super to do this,’ adds Shapiro. Kotcheff was taped in NYC against a backdrop of the transformed skyline. Most of the profiles were taped in Montreal or Los Angeles.

Tapping went from late March to mid-June. Rights clearance and editing were the toughest parts, as the show incorporates significant amounts of movie and series footage.

World Affairs production slate for 2002/03 includes The Directors, 13 new one-hours for Bravo!, with second windows on The Independent Film Channel and Movie Central; The Playwrights and Screenwriters, 13 new hours hosted by Marilyn Lightstone; and The Actors, 10 new hours also commissioned by Bravo! Shapiro says The Directors has been sold in over 20 markets in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The house will tape the fourth edition of The Economist Business Challenge, hosting MBA students from across North America, Sept. 21-22 at McGill University. It’s commissioned by PBS, Canadian Learning Television and iChannel. The PBS series The Editors, taped in Montreal, is set to begin its 17th season. Shapiro says a major Canadian TV network may license the venerable series.

Chiefs: ‘high-end history’ from Galafilm

Three years in the making, the sprawling six-hour anthology series Chiefs depicts the saga of great First Nations leaders as warriors, diplomats and the real individuals whose lives were central to the drama of Canadian and the North American history.

‘This is high-end history,’ says Galafilm producer Arnie Gelbart, who produced in association with History Television.

Chiefs is narrated by Tom Jackson and Raoul Trujillo and directed and written by Brian McKenna (The War of 1812) and Gil Cardinal (Big Bear).

The films include profiles of Sitting Bull (two hours), Pontiac, Black Hawk, Poundmaker and Joseph Brant and combine documentary footage, dramatic re-enactments based on rare archival documents as well as interviews with living descendants. The series was shot on location in Western Canada, notably Saskatchewan, in the U.S. on the Dakota plains, throughout the Great Lakes region and along the rivers of Eastern Canada.

Gelbart says Chiefs pushes the convergence element, incorporating interactive TV and major multimedia and website installations.

Features include a content-driven quiz, selected biographical sketches, original documents, letters, clothing, battle plans and weapons. Viewers can also access old maps and timelines and e-mail opinions or stories to other viewers or the show’s producers. Following each episode, viewers will be invited to interact in realtime with the directors, the living descendents of the great chiefs as well as present-day First Nations leaders. The initial link is through History’s website at www.historytelevision.ca.

As well as rare photographs, Chiefs is illuminated with stunning samples of Native art, including collections of 19th century Native American ledger art, drawings done with pencils and colored with crayon on the pages of ledger books at agency trading posts. Several thousand of the drawings, recording life and death among the First Nations, have been preserved and provide a documentary record of a vanished way of life as drawn by the Indian people themselves.

Chiefs was produced on a budget of $3.6 million. The two-hour Sitting Bull episode, written and directed by McKenna, had its world premiere at this year’s Montreal Wold Film Festival.

Licencees include History, which premiers the series Sept. 29; Historia, which has scheduled a 2003 broadcast; TFO and TVOntario; and Saskatchewan’s SCN. Funders include Telefilm Canada and the LFP.

Jan Rofekamp of Films Transit International is handling world sales.

New STCVQ film action

Muse Entertainment in association with Hallmark Entertainment began filming on the WWII drama Silent Night Aug. 27 through to Sept. 20. Multiple Golden Globe nominee Linda Hamilton (Dante’s Peak, Terminator) stars with Matthew Harbour (The Growing Pains Reunion Movie) in a true story of peace and refuge set on Christmas Eve 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.

Rodney Gibbons is the director. The producer is Irene Litinsky (The Royal Scandal). Michael Prupas, Steven Hewitt (Thanks of a Grateful Nation) and Steven Jay Rubin (Bleacher Bums) are the exec producers. Roger Aylward (Cut Off) wrote the screenplay and Rory Aylward is creative consultant. The DOP is Eric Cayla. The designer is Jean-Baptiste Tard.

Silent Night will be broadcast on Global Television in Canada and on the Hallmark Channel in the U.S.

Max Films is preparing two feature films from first-time directors. Filming begins Sept. 9 on spot ace Jean-Francois Pouliot’s La Grande Seduction, budgeted at $5.7 million. The screenplay is from Ken Scott (La Vie Apres l’Amour, Le Plateau), with the talented Benoit Briere of Monsieur B. fame starring. A second project, Pere et fils, is a France/Canada coproduction with A.J.O.Z. Films, Little Bear Productions and Gaumont. The extended Quebec portion of Pere et fils, under director Michel Boujenah, goes from Sept. 17 through to Oct. 30. Legendary French actor Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso) stars.

New film action as reported by the STCVQ also includes the big-budget 20th Century Fox production The Day After Tomorrow, a new Ice Age/weather disaster drama set in futuristic New York City. The film, budgeted in the US$100-million range, stars Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenall and is being directed by Roland Emmerich (The Patriot, Independance Day).

Producers are Mark Gordon, Kelly Van Horn, Tom Hammel, Ute Emmerich and director Emmerich. Christina Kontos is the shoot’s PM. Barry Chusid is the designer and Claude Pare (The Score) and Tom Retaare the supervising art directors.

Preproduction on The Day After Tomorrow is underway at Mel’s Cite du Cinema, with filming slated to go from November through to March 2003.