Vancouver: This city appears to have reverted back to its mowtown roots. According to the B.C. Film Commission, scouting for the big sexy features has nearly ground to a halt.

Word from the studio heavyweights in l.a. has it the studios are sitting tight as they await a decision from the B.C. Labor Relations Board on the Section 41 application to create a single voice for unions bargaining in the province and some kind of resolution to the actors union dispute before sending any more big-budget pics our way.

IATSE Local 891 president Don Ramsden takes a different view of the situation. He thinks the dearth of feature production in Vancouver this summer and fall has more to do with the major changes in ownership at the various u.s. studios.

‘Let’s face it,’ says Ramsden, ‘more than $29 billion changed hands in just over 30 days down there. It’s natural that feature production, the big-ticket items, would be affected.’

Speaking of the film commission, a new director has been named to replace Dianne Neufeld, who departed after 10 years in the position earlier this summer to pursue new interests.

After much industry speculation Pete Mitchell, former business agent for IATSE 669 and partner with Allan Krasnick in the now-defunct consulting firm Compass Communications, came out on top of the heap in a competition which saw 38 high-profile applicants vying for the job. (Boy, money must be getting a lot tighter out here. I never thought I’d see the day when the security of a government job was the hot ticket in town.)

Mitchell took up his new position following Labour Day. How appropriate.

As for Krasnick, he folded Compass earlier this summer to join the law firm of Heenan Blaikie as an entertainment lawyer.

Yes indeed, he’s come a long way since being the business agent for actra’s Vancouver office before becoming the driving force behind the formation of the splinter group, the Union of B.C. Performers.

Everest rising

Rob Straight and John Curtis, partners in Vancouver’s Everest Entertainment, are scaling the heights these days, and they don’t appear to need the help of any Sherpa guides to get them there.

Earlier this summer, Greenlight Communications acquired a controlling interest in Everest. Late last month, a deal was finally signed with Paul Gardner, which saw the merger of his company, Renaissance Pictures Canada, and Everest to form a new entity, Everest Releasing.

Everest Releasing will serve as the Canadian distribution arm of Everest Entertainment, distributing feature films in the Canadian theatrical, home-video and television markets. Straight says the company will focus on acquiring Western-based production companies’ product and increasingly assist in the financing of their productions as well.

As a result of the merger, Everest Releasing has signed a two-year, non-exclusive distribution deal with Hallmark Home Video. The agreement grants Everest Releasing the Canadian home-video distribution rights for up to 20 films from Hallmark, beginning with the release this summer of a Charles Dickens classic, The Old Curiosity Shop starring Peter Ustinov.

On the production front, Everest Entertainment has plans to begin filming another sci-fi/adventure entitled Laser Hawk. The commercially driven film, also scripted by Curtis, is about aliens who return to earth to harvest us poor humans as food. Will that be one patty or two? Production begins in November in Vancouver.

Alberta calls Wheeler

Saltspring Island-based director Anne Wheeler heads back to her native Alberta this month to direct the two-hour season opener of Jake And The Kid, a new series being coproduced by Toronto’s Nelvana and Great North Productions of Edmonton for the CanWest Global System.

Inspired by the popular Canadian radio plays and stories of W.O. Mitchell, Jake And The Kid recalls a Prairie boy’s idyllic childhood during the early fifties. The 13 one-hour episodes, produced by Laura Phillips and Peter Lhotka, with Michael Klein as executive in charge of production for Nelvana, will be filmed in Edmonton through to December.

The series will be distributed internationally by Nelvana Enterprises.

and Wilkinson

Another Vancouver director, Charles Wilkinson (Max, Blood Clan), is getting the chance to work on an Alberta production this month. And it’s a good thing, too, because there’s precious little indigenous production to keep local directors employed. Wilkinson is finishing up principal photography in Alberta this month on The Ruby Silver, a two-hour television movie for abc.

Written by Kaslo, b.c.-based writer Pete White, the film is about four dreamers – a young widow, her 15-year-old son, a shady entrepreneur and a washed-up miner – who set off on the adventure of a lifetime to strike it rich at the legendary Ruby Silver Mine.

Set in b.c.’s Kootenay Mountains, the modern-day family adventure is loosely based on White’s experiences as a teenager ‘gopher-hole’ mining with his stepfather in the Slocan silver mines. While the biggest silver rushes were in the 1890s, the last big surge came in the early 1980s when silver climbed to $50 an ounce.

After nearly five years of putting the deal together with financiers, broadcasters and distributors, Edmonton producer Arvi Liimatainen linked up with l.a.-based executive producers Jim Green and Allan Epstein, who he worked with last year on How The West Was Fun.

Says Liimatainen: ‘It’s a bit unusual to have a wholly Canadian production financed by an American broadcaster, and it ain’t a Western!’

Ruby Silver is being filmed primarily outside of Calgary with Rebecca Jenkins, John Schneider, Jonathan Jackson and Bruce Weitz starring. Production wraps Sept. 22.