The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television has switched gears in its approach for the upcoming 18th annual Genie Awards and shepherded six national broadcasters into a collaborative promotional alliance. The awards event will serve as the centerpiece of a broader tv campaign to bolster public awareness of Canadian films and develop audiences for indigenous movies.

BBS, Bravo!, cbc, TMN-The Movie Network, Super Ecran and the Global Television Network, in a show of collective support for the Canadian film industry, have banded together in the two-week windowed Genie initiative. Each broadcaster will program its own specials showcasing the awards while also cross-promoting on-air the Genie lineup of their competitors.

‘The objective is to use the Genies to expand the infrastructure for marketing Canadian films to audiences,’ explains Academy ceo and president Maria Topalovich.

The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television has switched gears in its approach for the upcoming 18th annual Genie Awards and shepherded six national broadcasters into a collaborative promotional alliance. The awards event will serve as the centerpiece of a broader tv campaign to bolster public awareness of Canadian films and develop audiences for indigenous movies.

bbs, Bravo!, cbc, TMN-The Movie Network, Super Ecran and the Global Television Network, in a show of collective support for the Canadian film industry, have banded together in the two-week windowed Genie initiative. Each broadcaster will program its own specials showcasing the awards while also cross-promoting on-air the Genie line-up of their competitors.

‘The objective is to use the Genies to expand the infrastructure for marketing Canadian films to audiences,’ explains Academy ceo and president Maria Topalovich.

The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television has switched gears in its approach for the upcoming 18th annual Genie Awards and shepherded six national broadcasters into a collaborative promotional alliance. The awards event will serve as the centerpiece of a broader tv campaign to bolster public awareness of Canadian films and develop audiences for indigenous movies.

bbs, Bravo!, cbc, TMN-The Movie Network, Super Ecran and the Global Television Network, in a show of collective support for the Canadian film industry, have banded together in the two-week windowed Genie initiative. Each broadcaster will program its own specials showcasing the awards while also cross-promoting on-air the Genie line-up of their competitors.

‘The objective is to use the Genies to expand the infrastructure for marketing Canadian films to audiences,’ explains Academy ceo and president Maria Topalovich.

The broadcast campaign includes an hour-long pre-awards special on cbc and, during the week leading up to the event, a primetime tmn showcase of previous Genie Award-winning films as well as daily profiles of this year’s nominated filmmakers on Global’s noon entertainment magazine First Up.

Instead of the traditional live cbc awards broadcast, Bravo! will air the Dec. 14 awards ceremony the following night and bbs’ flagship entertainment show eNow will follow up a week later with a half-hour post-awards wrap special.

Rather than focusing on the awards ceremony itself, the aim is to rally the industry around a much broader promotion of Canadian filmmakers and their movies and confront some of the obstacles facing the indigenous feature industry.

‘The distribution and promotion of Canadian films has not assisted in the development of audiences,’ says Topalovich. ‘The films are relatively unknown and a star system hasn’t developed, so when we come along once a year with our industrial exercise and say pay attention to these films, the public is not as aware as they should be.’

The genesis of the broadcast alliance sprang from the Academy’s frustration over the media and film industry’s preoccupation with the live awards show and its dwindling ratings. According to Topalovich, numbers have fallen in recent years to the half million range.

‘Everyone was focusing on how many people were watching this one-off special and increasingly there wasn’t enough attention paid to the nominees themselves,’ she explains. ‘We decided this had gone too far. Let’s stop thinking about how many people are watching the awards. Let’s look at how we can give legs to the Canadian films that are out there.

‘When it comes to the marketing of Canadian movies the industry can do a lot more collectively than individually.’

The aligning of a wide range of public, private and specialty broadcasters, each with its own particular niche market, holds the potential of expanding awareness of Canadian filmmaking over a wider audience than the one-off awards special could manage.

Higher overall ratings will likely be pulled in as well, says Bravo! station manager Paul Gratton.

‘Once you accumulate all the ratings, we will hit more eyeballs and the consciousness of audiences far more than we could with just a live show,’ says Gratton. ‘It is time to try something different.’

tmn (and Super Ecran in Quebec) begins the Genie promo push Dec. 8 with a seven-night primetime (9 p.m. Monday to Thursday and 11:15 p.m. or 11:30 p.m. on the weekend) Genie retrospective of the past seven best picture Genie Award-winning movies.

One film will air per night, with a wraparound setting up the filmmaker, the film and its importance to the Canadian industry, says tmn’s Ellen Davidson. As well, the program will promote the upcoming specials other broadcasters are offering as part of the Genie alliance.

During the same time frame, Global’s First Up will feature daily four- to five-minute profiles of the 1997 nominees.

While tmn had rights on John Greyson’s Lilies and Robert Lepage’s Le Confessionnal, cbc held the next window on four other previous Genie-winning films – Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and Francois Girard’s Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, but okayed a one-time tmn broadcast. Distributors Alliance Communications and Film Tonic also agreed to the tmn broadcast without any money or paper exchanging hands.

tmn news segments will provide Genie coverage of the nominated films and draw attention to the program line-ups of the other broadcasters, as will the December issue of tmn’s Feature magazine. tmn has a tie-in with Air Canada, and Davis says a Genie show for broadcast on Air Canada flights during the week prior to the awards is being considered.

In past years, cbc was the home of the live awards broadcast, but this year the pubcaster will instead air a one-hour pre-Genie special Dec. 10 at 7 p.m., produced by Jeff Burman, and hosted by Brian Linehan and Megan Follows who will highlight the year’s best picture nominees via clips, interviews and insider information.

Also during the weeks leading up to the awards, Bravo! and eNow news segments will feature Genie stories and let viewers know where to catch Genie programs on alternate stations. Bravo!’s monthly program guide is featuring the nominated movies on its cover and will highlight the program line-ups of Genie broadcast partners.

High costs and funding cuts to the acct were behind the decision to forego a live broadcast of the awards, to be handed out at Toronto’s Westin Harbour Castle. Cameron Bailey and Jeff Breve, hosts of last year’s off-air show, will do the honors this year. Steve Sloane and Susan Edwards are producing the program.

A live-to-tape broadcast of the Genies airs on Bravo! the following night from 8:30-11 p.m. Each of the broadcasters is pitching in for the production of the show, with cbc providing office space and set pieces; Global supplying mobile facilities to shoot the ceremony; Bravo! donating a sound and tape editor and its facilities; deluxe Toronto coming through with all post-audio; and The Post Group also offering editing facilities. Red Sky Entertainment is hosting a Vancouver Genie nominee reception while the ctcpf is planning a reception prior to the Toronto awards gala.

Supervising producer Mark McInnis says the half-hour special Dec. 20 on bbs’ eNow will put a star treatment spin on the Genies by offering an insider look at the ceremony, with highlights from the show and behind-the-scenes antics aimed at bringing a sense of glamor to the event. Award winners will be profiled via ‘road to the Genies’ segments looking at how the filmmakers managed to bring their movies to the screen.

As the Genie show ratings fell in recent years, Topalovich says securing large corporate sponsors outside the film industry had become more difficult and the Academy has stepped up efforts to seek jury and award funding from inside the ranks of the film biz.

The new approach to sponsorship has paid off. A wide range of companies and associations with a vested interest in Canadian moviemaking have dipped into their own pockets or provided contra to help spread the costs of producing the Genie Awards.

New sponsors include the National Film Board, the Directors Guild of Canada and ACTRA Fraternal. Contributions have also come in from Telefilm Canada, Viacom, Kodak Canada, Famous Players, tmn, kpmg, British Columbia Film, Manitoba Film and Sound Development Corporation, Casablanca Sound Services, IATSE Local 891 and Quantegy International.

Blockbuster Video Canada has moved in as sponsor of the Golden Reel Award, handed out to the film earning top box office revenues, and along with parent company Viacom Canada will be working with the Academy to look at ways to expand the partnership into an ongoing year-round campaign to heighten awareness of Canadian films among audiences across the country.

Options being tossed around include involving the public in voting for their most popular Canadian movie throughout the year, Genie promo displays in the Canadian section of Blockbuster stores, and highlighting award-winning films for special rentals.

The Academy also plans to sit down with distributors and exhibitors after this year’s event to figure out when would be the optimum time to permanently slot the Genies. The consensus is currently split between an early December ceremony, prior to the rush of American Christmas releases, while others prefer waiting until January or February, says Topalovich.

Although the revamped Genie program means the excitement of a live show has been lost, Gratton points out that the taped broadcast relieves the awards ceremony of its past restrictions, namely the focus on generating ratings among a broad range of mainstream viewers.

Focused on Bravo!’s film buff audience, the ceremony will air in its entirety (rather than only the broadcast of high-profile awards); French or English can be spoken as desired (a previous concern was losing audiences if too much French was spoken); and winners will not be cut off in their speeches to keep within the set broadcast slot.

‘Canadian films are not American movies and the Genies are not the Oscars,’ Gratton says, noting that the inevitable lackluster performance of the Canadian show compared to its southern counterpart will no longer be relevant as this year’s event will not aim to be a slick package trying to cater to mainstream viewers.