If they play their cards right, George Bloomfield and his friends could make their next movie – Mozart Loves Me, a feature film worth about $5 million – for half price.

The romantic comedy is the first project to be undertaken by The Movie Co-op, a new production outfit that formed last month in Toronto – bringing together a who’s who of Canuck filmmaking talent in a joint effort to make commercial movies on the cheap. Cast, crew and suppliers are providing their services to the shoot for free, in return for shares of the co-op.

Shareholders in the project include Bloomfield (Doc, Emily of New Moon), producer Alyson Feltes (Traders), equipment magnate Bill White, sound editor Jane Tattersall, agents Perry Zimel and Leslie Harrison, and a gaggle of talent including Wendy Crewson, Maury Chaykin, Peter Outerbridge, Paul Gross, Gordon Pinsent and Eugene Levy.

A 20-minute short – shot over three days for $70,000 – was put together earlier this year and shopped to potential backers. Half the budget has been deferred and shooting will resume in the spring, wrapping by the end of June, according to Crewson.

‘I think for so many people, doing something like this is worth the time they put into it,’ she says, adding that general frustration at the state of Canadian film and its funding system spurred many people to sign on. ‘It’s been so long since people saw something they wanted to do.’

Ironically, the co-op has since caught the attention of Telefilm Canada, and exec director Richard Stursberg has expressed interest in backing their projects.

Crewson will star in the picture as an oddball painter who switches careers and becomes a concert pianist. Outerbridge, Chaykin, Emily Hampshire and Martha Burns also star. Bloomfield directs from his own script and composer Christos Hatzis is doing the score.

A capital idea

Producers in and around the nation’s capital toasted their newly hired film commissioner, Ken Korrall, on Oct. 30 at the official opening of the Ottawa-Gatineau Film and Development Corporation. Korrall, a 25-year vet of the movie biz and former key figure at the Montreal Film Office, came on as the new body’s exec director in the summer, concluding a three-year effort to open a film office in Ottawa.

Organizers also trumpeted the arrival of The Last Prime Minister, an $8-million miniseries for CBC set to shoot over 40 days in the spring. The political drama will be coproduced by locals Sound Venture Productions and Whizbang Films, the outfit co-run by Paul Gross and Frank Siracusa. Gross wrote the script and will also star. A director has not yet been named.

Korrall and the OGFT will promote the region, assist producers with tax credits and other red tape, and build up the region’s infrastructure. The corporation is a public-private effort shared by the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, the National Capital Commission and local producers. It will focus on local and Canuck shoots, and will not immediately seek foreign productions, according to interim chair Neil Bregman. Bregman is also president and CEO of Sound Venture.

Dickie Roberts: The Early Years

Busy though he is, we haven’t seen Don McKellar write or direct much since his 1998 one-two punches Last Night and The Red Violin, but he’ll be back behind the camera later this month when his latest, Childstar, gets rolling on location around Toronto. McKellar, who wrote the script and also stars, will be in production until December, possibly wrapping with a few days in Los Angeles.

It’s a comedy about a preteen TV actor, 15-year-old Toronto native Mark Rendall (The Interrogation of Michael Crowe), who’s facing puberty and career oblivion while shooting a movie in Toronto. The cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Dave Foley.

Niv Fichmann, Daniel Iron and Sari Friedland produce for Rhombus Media. Andre Turpin (Un Crabe dans la tete) is DOP and Reg Harkema (Falling Angels) will edit. The $5-million bill is being picked up in part by Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund, Corus Entertainment and by presales to both The Movie Network and Citytv.

The movie is one of three announced last fall by Rhombus as part of a deal with distributor TVA Films. Guy Maddin delivered the first of those, The Saddest Music in the World, to much applause earlier this year, but the third film, Francois Girard’s The Far Road, has been indefinitely ‘back burner-ed,’ according to Rhombus. They wouldn’t say why.

They’re here, they’re queer

Less than a year since it was forced to shut down its Church Street studio, PrideVision TV is edging – oh, so cautiously – back into producing its own shows. The gay and lesbian digichannel is shooting another 26 half-hours of its in-house literary talk show Read Out!, another 13 of The Crystal Lite Show, and has paired with locals Hiltz Squared Media Group to turn out 26 halfs of their new dating show Fairy Tale, which debuted Nov. 2.

Programming boss Wendy Donnan says PrideVision is keeping costs down by splitting production efforts with the producers and shooting either in the channel’s downtown offices or on location around town. Fairy Tale, which runs $30,000 per ep, also has several ‘in kind’ sponsors, and Crystal Lite is shot at, and mostly funded by, a nearby bar.

PrideVision has also ordered another 15 half-hours of the news and current affairs show Jawbreaker from copro partners On the Down Low Productions, makers of the popular sports show Locker Room.

The channel’s subscriber base is up slightly to 24,000, but Donnan admits the numbers are still ‘not anywhere near where we expected.’ She hopes a free preview, on Rogers Cable over the first week of December, and a planned U.S. launch sometime next year, will bring in more viewers.