Big Motion Pictures in Chester, NS is taking on the federal government in the CBC ‘six-pack’ Political Animals. According to Big producer Wayne Grigsby, the 6 x 60 series is a dramatic but tongue-in-cheek look at big politics and office politics in Ottawa as seen through the eyes of a 23-year-old woman, new to the game as a special assistant to a minister.

Grigsby, who is producing along with Big partner David MacLeod, says the idea for the series came to him in 1999, but CBC was reluctant to greenlight it, fearing inevitable comparisons to the start-up American series The West Wing, which peeks inside the U.S. White House.

Grigsby continued to develop the series with a team of writers at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, and now, four years later, with an approving nod from CBC, the series is in preproduction for a fall shoot.

Grigsby says Sturla Gunnarsson (Rare Birds) is attached to direct possibly three of the six episodes, with CFC grad Chris Grismer (Clutch) and others slated to helm the remaining eps. Grigsby says all of the directors who have seen the scripts, penned by Grigsby, Michelle Lovretta and Jenny Duzak-Jones, were interested.

Each episode has a budget of just under $1 million, with funding from the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, Canadian Television Fund and CBC. Grigsby says it’s important, given the big budget he and MacLeod have to work with, to not ‘get greedy’ and spend wisely.

Like Big’s hit biopic Trudeau, also for CBC, Political Animals will shoot in Halifax and Ottawa (mostly for exteriors). The hope is that after the initial six episodes have aired, CBC will want to pick up a full 13-ep season of the show. But that’s later.

Political Animals is scheduled to go to camera sometime in late September/early October.

MacIvor’s Wonderful

Production on Halifax filmmaker Daniel MacIvor’s second feature, Wilby Wonderful, wrapped in late August and is now in post, reports the film’s producer Camelia Frieberg. The producer and director worked together on Past Perfect, part of imX communication’s digital feature series seats 3a & 3c.

Wilby Wonderful, also written by MacIvor, is an ensemble piece that takes place over one day in a small, fictional Maritime island town, where all of the characters’ lives intertwine but each works at cross-purposes to one another.

‘It’s one of these wonderful webs that only Daniel MacIvor could spin,’ says Frieberg.

Frieberg worked with coproducer Sherrie Johnson (a longtime collaborator of MacIvor’s) under the one-off banner of Wonderful Productions and assembled a cast that is a virtual who’s who of Canadian talent, including MacIvor, Paul Gross, Sandra Oh, Maury Chaykin, Callum Keith Rennie, Rebecca Jenkins and Ellen Page.

Wilby Wonderful was produced on a budget of $2.5 million, with funding from the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, South West Shore Development Authority, Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund, CBC, The Movie Network, Super Channel, CHUM and the film’s distributor, Mongrel Media. It was shot in Shelburne, NS at the Shelburne Film Production Centre, a converted military base.

According to Frieberg, Mongrel is expecting delivery in the spring, and the film should be making the rounds during festival season in 2004.

A pet project

One of Charlottetown’s preeminent prodcos, Cellar Door Productions, is coproducing a new, yet-to-be-titled documentary series with Ottawa’s Genuine Pictures about the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of PEI. The 8 x 30 series will surely tug at the heartstrings of Global Television viewers.

Hatched, written, directed and coproduced by Genuine’s Donna Leon (Reluctant Hero: The Donald Marshall Story), the show will take an in-depth look at the AVC, hitting on themes such as the bond between animals and animal lovers, and recovering from loss. Cellar Door promises that while the series won’t be ‘blood and guts’ television, it’s not going to veer away from the operating-room realities of animal care either.

The producers reportedly have access to the college’s staff, students, administrators and faculty.

Cellar Door’s Gretha Rose is coproducing with Leon on a series budget of $699,000. The initial eight eps are being funded through the LFP, EIP, Technology PEI, the P.E.I. labor rebate and Ontario and federal tax credits.

With the first portion of the series already shot, shooting resumes in mid-September at the AVC and will likely wrap at the end of November.

Plans are to split post between Ontario and P.E.I.

More for Morag

ST. John’s, NF-based filmmaker Barbara Doran is in development on a new MOW for CBC called Doctor Olds of Twillingate through her Morag Productions.

The film is an adaptation of the Gary Saunders biography of Dr. John Olds, a Johns Hopkins graduate who came to Newfoundland in the 1930s for a year and stayed for the rest of his life.

Writer Des Walsh is now at work on a second draft. Walsh and Doran worked together on Random Passage, along with director John N. Smith, who will again handle directorial duties on Dr. Olds.

According to Doran, the project has been in the cooker for about a year and a half and she hopes to see it in production by next summer. It will shoot mostly in Newfoundland, but the filmmakers may have to travel to Dr. Olds’ native U.S. for the sake of authenticity.

CBC, Telefilm Canada and the Newfoundland & Labrador Film Development Corporation are on board with development dollars. Doran is producing with Lynne Wilson.

Doran is also developing a pair of one-hour documentaries, Destinies Apart for CBC and The Newfoundlanders? for CTV.

She will be one of five directors working on Where We Stand – a two-hour documentary copro between the CBC, Montreal’s Productions Virage and the National Film Board – which will look at how Americans view Canadians in the post-Sept. 11 world. Plans are to go to camera in the fall.

Open Heart wraps

MOW Open Heart, a New Brunswick/Ontario coproduction between Moncton’s Dreamsmith Entertainment and Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions and Platt Productions, wrapped shooting in Saint John Sept. 14.

The $3 million-plus MOW (formerly The Cradle will Fall) for Movie Central and CBC stars Megan Follows (Anne of Green Gables), Raoul Bhaneja (Ararat) and Vincent Walsh (Hemingway vs. Callaghan). It is directed by Laurie Lynd (I Was a Rat) and produced by Timothy Hogan, Laszlo Barna and Phyllis Platt.