People who know producer Christina Jennings joke that she’s a lot like a bulldog terrier.

‘I am,’ agrees the 2006 Crystal Awards Outstanding Achievement Award winner. ‘When I get stuck on your pant leg, I don’t give up.’

By the time Jennings discovered the film and television industry nearly 20 years ago, she’d been an urban planner, owned a restaurant where she made sandwiches by day and bartended at night, and ran a travel agency.

‘I was already a businesswoman,’ says Jennings from her downtown Toronto office at Shaftesbury Films, where she is chair and co-CEO. The company is currently producing sci-fi series ReGenesis for The Movie Network and Movie Central and the Margaret Atwood adaptation The Robber Bride for CBC.

‘Town planning is much like being a producer,’ she notes. ‘I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s why I could get into film so well. I could deal with very different people.’

The sandwich shop, Emilio’s, also happened to be next to Citytv (when it was at Queen and Jarvis). So when a young director came in and said he had $90,000 and a screenplay – and complimented her people skills – she couldn’t say no to producing. Six months later, she’d completed her first feature and sold it to current CHUM president and CEO Jay Switzer, another Emilio’s regular.

‘Christina is a successful producer for many reasons,’ says Switzer. ‘But a big part of her success is that she is driven by results. Lots of producers can help marshal a creative idea or raise some money. Christina has the rare combination of creative and financial skills, all set against a results-oriented, ratings-driven desire for success.’

A few years after her low-budget debut, Jennings had an idea for a feature loosely based on an experience that her sister had in Southampton, Long Island. It would become Camilla, a $10.5-million film starring Jessica Tandy and produced by Miramax.

‘[Camilla] was a baptism by fire,’ she recalls. ‘There’s no question that one experience completely convinced me that I had found my thing. It was magical that some idea could come from my brain, and then I’m standing on a beach in Georgia watching Jessica Tandy play the violin at sunset.’

Jennings took her entire producer’s fee from the project and started Shaftesbury, joined by former Telefilm Canada lawyer Scott Garvie. They went on to make one feature per year for five years, but Jennings knew the model had to change.

‘Every year leading up to ‘would that film get financing?’ I was lying in bed at night thinking I might have to lay off everybody in the company,’ she recalls.

Shaftesbury made the transition to TV movies around 1995 and hasn’t looked back. It has also diversified into children’s programming with Screech Owl and Dark Oracle on YTV, large-format films such as the highly successful Bugs!, half-hours including the family series Life with Derek, which airs on Family Channel, and The Jane Show for Global. Next year could see three one-hour drama series including the Murdoch Mysteries with CHUM, and The Front, an action-adventure series in the tradition of La Femme Nikita.

Shaftesbury has a staff of 22, and Jennings estimates production volume at $75 million-$80 million this year (it was ranked the number nine prodco in Playback’s Independent Production Report for 2005 with $42 million), but it wasn’t until she got the nod from the Crystals that Jennings took time to reflect on her success and that of her company.

‘I was really shocked, because at Shaftesbury we don’t really do a lot of tooting our own horn,’ she says. ‘We’re a pretty low-key company.’

Now that her success story is out in the open, does she have any advice to young female producers?

‘It’s going to sound trite, but stay passionate and stay committed,’ she replies. ‘When I had that script [for Camilla] and I said to people ‘I’m going to get Jessica Tandy to star in my movie,’ they laughed. They looked at me and said, ‘You’ve made a $90,000 feature.”

You can almost see the bulldog in her eye as she pauses. ‘But I absolutely knew that I had a chance. I didn’t think for a minute that I wouldn’t succeed.’