Lunch with Lantos

Serendipity Point Films’ Robert Lantos, whose feature The Statement is currently on screens, will have the ears of his colleagues during a Prime Time luncheon that will tackle the seemingly impenetrable enigma of how to succeed as a film producer in English Canada.

Following an Unikum digestif, Lantos will moderate a session entitled Box Office Blues: Will English Feature Films Ever Break Through? While 2003 was a stellar year for domestic cinema in Quebec, with French-language films grabbing a 20% market share, English-language films could muster no better than 0.9%, according to Telefilm Canada.

Panelists will include Robin Cass, producer with Toronto’s Triptych Media (Falling Angels, The Republic of Love), and Denise ‘Midas touch’ Robert, who last year pulled off the unlikely feat of coproducing a French-language film, Les Invasions barbares, as well as an anglophone film, Mambo Italiano, that both have reaped more than $5 million at the Canadian box office.

Telefilm has stated that in order to boost the box office of domestic English product, auteur-driven films should take a backseat to Hollywood-style genre pictures. Yet the spectacular failure of Alliance Atlantis’ caper flick Foolproof (its box office of under $500,000 representing about one-fifth of its P&A costs) only underlines that there are no simple solutions.

New media showdown

With the industry in a state of contraction, TV and film producers’ initiatives in new media have largely been relegated to the backburner. But the topic will be front and center in a Jan. 30 point-counterpoint session debating the usefulness of interactivity to traditional producers.

It would appear that the pro-new media side is playing with a stacked deck, however, with both the ‘hypester’ and the ‘naysayer’ – Snap Media’s Raja Khanna and Decode Entertainment’s Dan Fill, respectively – working in the interactive field.

The conference’s final panel will see Barry Kiefl, president of Canadian Media Research, moderating a discussion between Nielsen Media Research president Mike Leahy and BBM Canada president Jim MacLeod about methods of measuring audiences. (For more on this, see story, p. 24.)

The event winds down with the closing luncheon, somewhat apprehensively titled Brave New World: The CFTPA’s New Economic Model.

For further Prime Time details, see the CFTPA website.

-www.cftpa.ca