Nicole Demerse

Nicole Demerse has walked a more roundabout path to get into television than most. Her childhood love for TV pointed her towards…marine biology.

‘I grew up watching Nova and Jacques Cousteau and Danger Bay. Whenever parents say, ‘TV is a bad thing for kids,’ I think, ‘It inspired me to get a degree in marine biology.’ ‘

Degree in hand, it became obvious to Demerse that without another several years of study toward a PhD she was not going anywhere in the field.

‘So I thought about what made me want to get into this in the first place. It was television.’

An internship at Discovery Channel proved the perfect meeting of Demerse’s two fields of interest and gave her the opportunity ‘to learn about TV.’

After Discovery, she took a summer course on film and video production at Sheridan College. Then she lucked into a stint as PA/researcher on CBC’s Futureworld with Evan Solomon.

‘I worked my way up the ladder and they started throwing bigger things at me. We used digital cameras and when the opportunity arose I capitalized on it and said, ‘I can do that’ and ‘Let me shoot the B-roll.’ ‘

Her position morphed into a field producer/researcher post on Solomon’s next show, Hot Type. ‘Suddenly we’re not doing science, it’s literature. Meeting these [writers] on Hot Type made me think, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ‘

In ’98, she was off to Ottawa to produce Daytime for Rogers Community TV. ‘My title was producer, but I did everything from directing to lighting to vision switching, you name it.’

Returning to Toronto later that year, she won a three-month place at the Canadian Film Centre, during which time she and five other writers developed a series called Sherpa Love about young ministerial assistants in Ottawa carrying their superiors. ‘It was a completely different field being a producer on a current affairs show and then trying to write for a dramatic program – the two don’t cross over at all,’ she says.

Demerse changed gears again in ’99, securing a job with Back Alley Films that covered script reading, development and assisting the executive producers.

Since winding up that stint, she has dedicated herself to writing full time while pitching her docusoap series The Morning After.

Her first break as a writer came with Pecola, an animated series from Nelvana about an adventurous penguin.

Jobs have followed steadily since, with Demerse writing an episode of animated series Girl Stuff, Boy Stuff for Decode Entertainment and two eps of Nelvana’s animated series Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse. She also has a script accepted for Decode’s Zack Files and two one-hour series in development, Channel Zero and 14th Floor.

‘I love both animation and live action, they offer such completely different things,’ says Demerse. ‘There’s something about being a Canadian writer, you have to do it all.’ -Fiona MacDonald

Karen Walton

For someone who doesn’t even like them, Karen Walton owes a lot to horror movies.

As a theatre student in Edmonton in the mid’80s, Walton, the writer of Ginger Snaps, landed a stunt gig on Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II. Mixing with the crew for the first time had an eye-opening effect.

‘I had been acting ’til that point and had never done anything behind the camera. I thought, ‘These people get it,’ ‘ she says.

Right after this exposure to life behind the camera, Walton joined the local film co-op, the Film and Video Arts Society of Alberta.

‘It was hands-on, practical and collaborative. You do as much or as little as you like. Everyone has a special talent or ability and we helped each other make films. Little films, but films nonetheless.’

Having dipped her toe in the waters of producing, directing, writing and story editing, Walten eventually got a job as executive director at the co-op in 1990 that lasted into the mid-’90s. Around this time, a friend dared her to write a half-hour radio drama script for a CBC competition.

‘If it was selected there was a chance that it would get made, and I’d get paid. I thought, ‘This is an excuse to finish something.’ Money always gets me off the sofa. So I wrote something and entered and won. And I got paid. That’s when I decided that maybe writing was the way to go.’

Next Walton went to ‘where the action is,’ Toronto, applied to the Canadian Film Centre and was accepted.

Her Edmonton past came around again in the shape of Ginger Snaps director John Fawcett, who approached her with the idea of a werewolf movie centred on girls.

‘I was concerned that might not be the smartest thing for me to do. I thought it wouldn’t get made since it was a horror drama and Canada is not known for those.’

Fawcett and Walton made a pact that no script would be shopped around until they both had something they really wanted to do.

The two worked on Ginger Snaps for four years between paying jobs, which for Walton included teen series Straight Up, MOW Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story and a season executive story editing on The City, in part while Ginger Snaps was shooting, but she didn’t miss a day on set during shooting of the film.

Now, Walton is writing another movie, this one about Jane Doe, the woman who sued the police, saying they failed to warn her of an area balcony rapist. Walton is also writing the feature film adaptation of Michael Turner’s novel The Pornographer’s Poem for Alliance Atlantis. And she’s a writer on the TV series Queer as Folk, which she calls ‘a privileged position.’ -Fiona MacDonald

William Zmak

Rare is the child who sits down with a volume of Joyce or Pynchon. Rarer still is the child who takes these notoriously dense, cryptic and nonlinear works and seeks to turn them into screenplays. William Zmak was such a child.

‘Star Wars was the first thing that tipped me off and made me see that movies didn’t spring out of the ground like mushrooms, they were made by people,’ says Zmak. ‘I always wanted to write for movies instead of novels or prose. I adapted the books that I read – if I read Hardy Boys I would adapt it. I was reading strange books for a kid to be reading, like James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. It was easy with those to take one sentence and do two or three scenes out of that sentence. I didn’t understand the depths or levels of it; I would read it for the surface value of it and then I would adapt it. It was hard. They were horrible screenplays.’

Zmak has come a long way from his doodlings with Hardy Boys scripts: right now he is engaged in editing the one-hour CTV sci-fi series The Aladdin Project, coproduced by Shaftesbury Films and CTV-affiliated Landscape Entertainment.

The show, scheduled to go to camera in August in Toronto, ‘is about genetic engineering. It’s about the genetic genie being let out of the bottle and the genetic manipulation of people that is going on around the world and a team of scientists whose job is to investigate these happenings. It’s kind of a hard science drama,’ he explains.

Fittingly, the other projects Zmak has underway are also crime-centred. Stealtown, a feature optioned by Barna-Alper and shopping for funding, is about ‘a team of con men and women who hustle poker in backroom games and descend upon games and try to hustle the local bad guy out of a lot of money.’

Also in development is a planned real-life series, Watching the Detectives, that follows private investigators and tracks their investigations and their lives.

‘For some reason I’ve always been drawn to crime stories, especially those with real depictions of how cops are,’ says Zmak. ‘I fell in love with those and with crime stories in general.’ -Fiona MacDonald