After 12 years, director Richard D’Alessio has left Imported Artists to join director Pete Henderson and executive producer David Cranor as a partner at new Toronto prodco Brown Entertainment, which launched in February.

D’Alessio says the move is an opportunity to help build a shop that will focus on a distinctly Canadian sense of humor and he hopes it will fill a previously vacant niche in the Canadian industry by fixing on a specific comedy identity.

‘The idea behind Brown is to build a Team Canada shop that is focused on comedy,’ says D’Alessio. ‘Pete [Henderson] and I used to bid against one another and there’s always been a like-minded comedic sensibility between the two of us, so we decided to open up a comedy shop, which is very similar to what happened in the States with companies like Hungry Man or The Tractors, known as the places people go to for comedy.’

D’Alessio says he and Henderson have been talking about a distinctively Canadian shop for years and, in fact, they originally thought about opening the company as an offshoot of Imported several years ago, but ‘we felt that for it to really be legitimate, we didn’t want it to feel like a satellite of any other company.’

D’Alessio is the third member to join the Brown team, which intends to remain a small, highly selective company.