Fans of Bruce McDonald’s early hard-rawkin’ hits like Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo are in for a treat with Maximum Rock n Roll, a new feature, due to shoot this fall in Toronto, in the tradition of his gritty and comical breakthroughs of the 1990s.

‘It’s all about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, violence, twin babies in a briefcase,’ says producer Marco Pecota of Veni Vidi Vici Motion Pictures. ‘It’s hard to pigeonhole.’

The script, penned by novelist Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything), follows a half-dozen characters and their crisscrossing stories through one night at a Toronto bar. Shooting, on high-def, is expected to cost in the low seven figures, after which Maximum will hit the festival circuit in early ’04 and theatres that fall.

That’s assuming, of course, that everything goes according to plan – not an entirely safe bet considering the delays that have dogged McDonald’s recent projects. His famously troubled Picture Claire remains unreleased two years after wrapping and his adaptation of Pontypool, which was supposed to shoot this winter, remains in development. Also missing in action is Yummy Fur, the adaptation of the Chester Brown comic penned by Don McKellar (Rub & Tug) and John Frizzell (Twitch City).

Undaunted, Pecota is scouting area bars for a possible location shoot, and expects to bring on five or six DOPs to lens the various storylines simultaneously.

Pecota and coproducers Chris Woodward and Brenton Bentz hope to raise most of the production budget through private investment and branded content. Maximum Rock n Roll is a coproduction between McDonald’s Shadow Shows and Veni Vidi Vici, which debuted last year with the ‘No Regrets’ video for Toronto R&Bers X-quisite.

Gangstas, playas, Coppolas

IT remains to be seen what, if anything, Sofia Coppola knows about the cutthroat world of hip-hop music. But that didn’t stop her from co-creating, with writer John Ridley, the series Platinum, now shooting in Toronto for American Zoetrope Television and The Greenblatt Janollari Studio – with help from local service shop Whizbang Films.

It’s the rags-to-bling-bling story of two brothers and their startup record label Platinum Records. Ridley (Three Kings) and Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) produce along with Francis Ford Coppola, Maira Suro, Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari. The cast includes rapper Sticky Fingaz (Next Friday) and Lalanya Masters (The Players Club). Whizbang’s Frank Siracusa sits in as line producer and Thom Pretak is production manager.

Shooting runs until mid-April. MTV and UPN picked up the first six eps but have not announced airdates.

Deaf becomes her

CTV has added Sue Thomas F.B. Eye, the Toronto-made series about a deaf surveillance expert, to its mid-season schedule. Shooting around town since last summer, the one-hour action drama by creators Gary Johnson and Dave Alan Johnson stars deaf actor Deanne Bray (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) along with Rick Peters (American Virgin) and Montreal’s Yannick Bisson (Undergrads). Marilyn Stonehouse produces for Pebblehut Productions. The series debuted to strong ratings last fall on PAX TV in the U.S., which bought all 22 eps of season one.

CTV struck an unusual deal with PAX – co-financing production of the series, which qualifies as Canadian under CAVCO, in exchange for ‘meaningful’ creative input and second broadcast rights. Both companies had similar arrangements for the miniseries Twice in a Lifetime and the series Mysterious Ways.

Sex and the Cities

Ted Remerowski and Marrin Canell of Paradigm Pictures (Security Threat) will hit the road this spring and summer, shooting three one-hour eps of Sin Cities for CBC. Each ep takes a historical look at vice-ridden hotspots such as 1930s Berlin and Shanghai and Paris in the 1920s.

‘These cities tolerated the bizarre, the unusual and the strange,’ says Remerowski. ‘But it’s more than just sin – this is where freedoms flourished and where ideas came together and fought.’ Eps about Harlem and Montreal are also in the works.

Sin Cities was turned down by Telefilm Canada, so its $1-million budget comes entirely from CBC and Paradigm. Remerowski and Canell direct and produce, and are currently recruiting DOPs. Marie Lyons (Security Threat) edits and Sin Cities will air sometime in 2004.

Murder, he wrote

Private cash is backing most of the Exoneration shoot, now underway in L.A. and Ottawa with director Jonathan Hiltz (Jack’s House). The docudrama follows a failed director, played by Hiltz, as he investigates the 72-year-old case of his great-great uncle’s murder for which, apparently, a man was wrongly convicted and hanged. It is based on a true story from Hiltz’s own family history.

Shooting got underway in December in Montreal and will wrap by the end of February, says Hiltz, who also produces, and with whom DOP Ben Goldberg will hack out a rough edit. Exoneration will then try for the festivals and a theatrical release, quite likely through his Hiltz Squared Entertainment.

Meanwhile, Naomi Hiltz, his sister and partner, is putting in face time with the criminally insane at the asylum in Penetanguishene, ON, where she is shooting the $25,000 pilot for Inside the Mind, a would-be doc series about the mental state of killers, thieves and other unbalanced ne’er-do-wells.

‘We’re not going through what happened, we’re asking why it happened,’ says Jonathan Hiltz, who produces along with Miles Shane. The series will be pitched to networks in the spring. Hiltz Squared is footing the entire bill.