Vancouver – Shavick Entertainment has a full plate this spring, most of it occupied by MOW copros with companies including L.A.’s Regent Entertainment and local ally Insight Film Studios.
Shavick and Insight wrapped the MOW Shock to the System in Vancouver last month. Written for the screen and directed by Ron Oliver (Billable Hours) for CHUM and gay-themed U.S. cablenet Here!TV, Shock is adapted from the second in a series of six mystery novels by Richard Stevenson about detective Donald Strachey. In this story, Strachey – portrayed by Chad Allen (End of the Spear) – has three different clients soliciting him to solve the same murder.
James Shavick shares executive producer credit on the MOW with Insight’s Kirk Shaw (When a Man Falls in a Forest). Shavick and Shaw teamed to produce the first Strachey mystery, Third Man Out, last year, and plan to adapt all six books. Although Shavick would not offer the budget for Shock, he says that most of his MOWs are in the $2-million-or-less range, financed by the partners.
Shavick also shot For All the Right Reasons in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean last month for Lifetime Television. According to Shavick, again serving as executive producer, this is the third Caribbean-shot copro with partner Regent since the beginning of the year. The partners shot Honeymoon with Mom, directed by Paul Kaufman (Surviving Gilligan’s Island) and starring Shelley Long (Cheers), as well as the low-budget indie feature thriller Isolation, starring Alexandra Paul (Baywatch) and directed by Rex Piano (Found). Shavick enjoys the area, saying it feels remarkably like home.
‘There are some 7,000 Canadians living down there,’ says Shavick. ‘They have CBC and CTV on their cable system, and you can get Molson products in the stores. Hopefully, we’ll be doing one more project down there this year, but that’s it, because at a certain point you get into hurricane season and we don’t want to be there for that.’
Brian Trenchard-Smith (Tides of War) directed For All the Right Reasons, with Gabrielle Anwar (Crazy Eights) heading the cast.