Montreal: Director John Hamilton and producer David Reckziegel, the principals behind Industry Entertainment, have wrapped their latest feature, Perpetrators of the Crime, a wacky dark tale of college kids who plan the perfect kidnapping.

The $1.8-million film was shot over 20 days and wrapped Dec. 20.

Financing includes the tax credits, an international and domestic rights sale to distributor Motion International, a BHVR Equity investment of $300,000, and an investment by the filmmakers themselves of $200,000.

Hamilton and Reckziegel applied to Telefilm Canada for a small investment (10% of the budget), but were turned down.

‘They just decided to go elsewhere, once again,’ says Hamilton. ‘I’m starting to think that it’s because they think we can do it without them. I can’t think of anything else. It’s the fourth feature (including Industry’s first feature The Drive) I’ve been involved in.’

In Montreal, where almost all French-language feature funds are allocated, the federal funding agency manages a very modest English-language feature film envelope, too small to fund even a single ordinary feature film project, according to industry insiders.

‘David and I got to the point where we knew a couple of films ago we weren’t going to be able to depend on them,’ says Hamilton. ‘We weren’t surprised but we certainly were disappointed, because we were doing everything we could including asking them for only a very small percentage of our budget. They were just out of money.’

Perpetrators features William B. Davis, the ‘Cigarette-Smoking Man’ from The X-Files, and the kidnap plot’s hapless coconspirators, Danny Strong (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clueless) and Canadian actors Sean Devine and Mark Burgess.

Tori Spelling (Beverly Hills 90210, The House of Yes) was cast as ‘an off-balance, loony character’ in the movie. Hamilton (Myth of the Male Orgasm, The Kid) reports working with the American tv star was a delight.

Craft credits go to dop Jamie Thompson (Dog Boys) and recent Genie winners costume designer Denis Sperdouklis and art director Normand Sarrazin. Max Sartor wrote the screenplay and Yvan Thibodeau is editing at wgs.

New feature projects for ’98 at Industry include Mister Bigshot, a family comedy; Logan in Overtime, based on a Paul Quarrington (Whale Music) book; and a couple of u.k. coproduction projects including Sticks & Stones, a psychological drama set in a boys’ boarding school.

*Melenny widens slate

Contrary to current thinking, ‘it’s still possible to produce a (Quebec) movie that makes $3 million at the box office,’ says Melenny Productions topper Richard Goudreau.

Goudreau is referring to the $3.4-million Louis Saia hockey-based comedy Les Boys, which set an opening weekend (Dec. 12-14) box-office record for a homegrown movie in Quebec (see Hitting the Screens, p. 8 for box-office figures).

‘Maybe the producer and creators should look more closely at the market that’s right in front of them. Things aren’t the same as they used to be,’ says Goudreau. ‘Out of the six movies that I’ve produced, Les Boys is the only French one and the only one financed with regular Telefilm Canada (Feature Film Fund) funds.’

The producer gets the original story credit for Les Boys. He then fine-tuned the script with tv screenwriter Christian Fournier and the director. A sequel, Les Boys 2, may begin filming as early as this May.

Goudreau’s films include three Robert Tinnell-directed family features – Kids of the Roundtable, Frankenstein and Me and Airspeed, wrapped in late ’97 – and John Hamilton’s The Kid. All the films have been sold to Disney in the u.s. except The Kid, which has been sold to Miramax.

A $2.7-million adventure drama, Airspeed stars 15-year-old Montreal actress Elisha Cuthbert (Popular Mechanics for Kids) as an overly precocious, lonely teen forced to single-handedly pilot and land a private jet after a lightning storm takes out the hapless pilot and navigator. u.s. actor Joe Mantegna plays her all-too-busy but ultimately repentant ceo of a dad.

CFP Distribution has world distribution rights.

Key craft credits on the stcvq shoot, which features extensive blue-screen model and animation sequences, go to animation director Patrice Neveu, busy mechanical f/x specialist Ryal Cosgrove, and Hybride Technologies and Daniel Leduc, who handled the cgi.

Toronto-based Brian Cole was the film’s model builder. Perri Gorrara did the fine production design and Georges Archambault was the cinematographer.

The film will mainly play on video and tv, but Goudreau and cfp harbor hopes a theatrical door might open. Ace actor Roc Lafortune (Free Money) and Goudreau take the screenwriting credit.

‘We have a reputation for our family movies and there’s great demand. But I also want to do movies that excite me,’ says the producer.

Besides Les Boys 2, Goudreau has three other feature projects in development for ’98: writer Seymour Blicker’s family story A Fish out of Water, a new Tinnell entry, a scare flick called Only at Night, and 22-Hour Night, a thriller based on a screenplay from ex-Montrealer Mark Rezyka (South of Reno).

*Nutaaq Media action

One of the city’s leading documentary houses, Nutaaq Media, reports half a dozen projects in production and development as the new year opens, including director Alexander Hausvater’s one-hour docudrama Childhood Robbed. The film is based on Shattered! 50 Years of Silence, Canadian psychologist and author Felicia Steigman Carmelly’s award-winning book on the destruction of Romanian Jews during the Holocaust.

The story dramatizes the experiences of a young Jewish girl from Romania, played by Nathalie Vansier (Lassie, Helen Keller), who survives the horrors of the Ukraine’s Transnistria concentration camp and later emigrates to Canada as an adult.

Just back from a research trip to Romania, the multilingual director says the deportation of close to half a million Romanian Jews was mainly the work of the Romanian fifth columnists, ‘although there is a tremendous sense of denialÉand they blame it all on the Germans.’

The film is being shot in English and versioned in French and Romanian, with a Canada/ Romania coproduction agreement envisioned, says Erica Pomerance (Tabala: Rhythms in the Wind), the film’s coproducer with Nutaaq founder George Hargrave (North to Nowhere, Broken Promises: The High Arctic Relocation).

New work at Nutaaq includes a one-hour drama on the challenges faced by Inuit youth, Devil’s Finger, a drama from Pomerance set on the Magdalen Islands, and Verceremos, a doc about one woman’s fight against the u.s. blockade of Cuba.

In children’s programming, the seven-year-old house is developing A Is For Africa, a visual lexicon of African wildlife, and The Rainbow Road Tour, an eco-friendly musical special featuring Rosie Emery.

Nutaaq has just completed Picturing A People: George Johnston, Tlingit Photographer, a documentary coproduction with the National Film Board chronicling one of the country’s first Native photographers. Directed by Carol Geddes, presale broadcasters on the project include tvontario, scn, Knowledge Network, cfcf-tv Montreal and tvnc.