Scoop working hard to sustain

quality, numbers for final season

Montreal: Expectations are higher than ever for the fourth and final season of Scoop, the Productions sda newsroom drama which goes to air on Radio-Canada Jan. 12. The 13-hour, $9.1 million series was the top-rated show on Quebec tv last season with an average network audience of 2.7 million. After six months of shooting, the hope is Scoop will do as well this year.

At a press reception marking the end of shooting, some of the principal artisans behind Scoop shared the following thoughts.

Scoop producer and sda president Francois Champagne says producing winners creates enormous pressure to repeat. ‘No other Quebec production company, aside from Cite-Amerique (producer of Les Filles de Caleb and Blanche) has set higher standards in drama,’ he says.

La Presse sports columnist Rejean Tremblay, who wrote and created Scoop with Fabienne Larouche, says: ‘After the success of the third season, the bar has been set very high. We asked ourselves what we could do that was new.’

On Scoop’s evolving storyline, Tremblay says early episodes dealt with flamboyant investigations by journalists, but ‘as the characters became part of the Quebec family we decided to send our journalists off on less spectacular stories and devote more time to their personal and professional lives.’

Tremblay continues: ‘In each series we like to try to undertake two or three major social themes. This year there are two major themes, one we don’t want to mention at all, while the second theme really explores the kind of thing Ralph Klein is doing in Alberta. That is the sort of thing that has to happen in Quebec, after a referendum.’

In the new season, a social democratic pro-sovereignty premier – played by Daniel Pilon – is elected and begins a program of massive budget cuts, which quickly leads to a confrontation with Quebec’s powerful trade unions.

Another central storyline this season concerns Macha Grenon’s character, Stephanie, the editor-in-chief of Scoop who succeeds her father at the head of the family’s huge publishing empire. Tremblay says personal problems arise when Stephanie has a hard time coming to terms with her own wealth and power and the reality she is no longer part of the everyday world of middle-class friends and colleagues.

Other leading players in Scoop are Roy Dupuis, Remy Girard, a level-headed, old-fashioned sort of copy chief with a penchant for booze, composer Claude Leveille who plays Stephanie’s father Francine Ruel, publisher of rival paper L’Express, veteran actor Raymond Bouchard, Andree Lachapelle and the talented Sophie Lorain.

On the two-camera, 16mm shoot, director Alain Chartrand (Les Grands proces; Ding et Dong, le film) says the crew used two to three locations daily, with 30 to 35 setups generating five or six minutes.

The challenge for Chartrand and codirector Pierre Houle was making sure the emotional pitch of the actors was right for each scene. Not easy because the series is shot non-sequentially.

‘The motive (for shooting non-sequentially) is partly economic, but there’s also the fact that there are 268 actors in Scoop (over 60 leading roles and 2,000 extras), and these people have other activities in television or in theater,’ says Chartrand.

Houle (Scoop ii, Scoop iii) feels the toughest part on Scoop ‘is having to work extremely quickly without a safety net. It means working only for the moment, with a minimum of rehearsal time. There’s no real rehearsing, there’s only a kind of staging (mise en place). It’s all about instinct.’

In view of the huge cast and complicated shooting schedule, Houle says preproduction on Scoop was reduced to fine-tuning the script, location scouting, handled by veteran Carole Mondello, and casting, the work of Murielle La Ferriere.

The cast of Scoop is a veritable who’s who of Quebec talent – Rene Gagnon, Germain Houde, Martin Drainville, Louise Marleau, Charlotte Laurier, Micheline Lanctot, Joelle Morin, Ray Coutier, Michel Barette, Paul Savoie, Yves Soutiere, Yvan Canuel, Pierre Chagnon, Catherine Colvey, Andree Champagne (the latter two are new to Scoop this season), Guy Thauvette, Dorothee Berryman, Jacques Godin, Mario St-Amand, Pascale Montpetit, Danielle Proulx, Marcel Sabourin and many others.

Selected craft credits include coproducer Francine Forest, executive producer Daniel Proulx, pm Ginette Hardy, music composer Claude Leveille, dop Louis de Ernsted, art director Ray Dupuis, costume designer Denis Sperdouklis, post supervisor Peter Measroch and sound recordist Dominique Chartrand.

For the new season, Coscient Marketing president Monique Leonard has organized a highly successful sponsorship campaign. Sponsors include Ford du Canada, Bell Quebec and La Presse newspaper. The estimated value of the corporate support for Scoop is $990,000.

‘It’s the largest (Quebec tv) sponsorship deal in dollar terms, and is the one which was signed the quickest,’ says Yves Moquin, chairman of Groupe Coscient, sda’s parent company.

Scoop is produced with the financial participation of Telefilm Canada, the Quebec tax credit program and costs $700,000 per episode.

A devilish plot

In Witchboard III, a Faustian tale of terror, a down-on-his-luck stockbroker comes into possession of an unusual Ouija board. Hot tips from the ether lead to exceeding greed and a deal with the devil in this $1.5 million feature film from Telescene and executive producer Robin Spry.

Peter Svatek is directing Witchboard iii, described by Spry and supervising producer Anita Simand ‘as a horror film with a unique spin.’ Shooting began Dec. 7 in Montreal, with Dec. 30 penned in as the scheduled wrap date.

The film is being distributed by Republic Pictures in the u.s. and Fries/Schultz Film Group internationally. Telescene has the Canadian rights.

Stars include Canadian actor David Nerman as the doomed broker and u.s. actress Elizabeth Lambert as his wife. Nerman has worked on u.s. tv movies and played the Bradshaw character as a regular on Lance et compte. Also cast are Montreal actors Danette McKay and Donna Sarrazin, and Toronto actors Addison Bell and the omnipresent Cedric Smith in the role of Francis, the couple’s strange landlord.

Paul Painter is the producer. Danny Rossner is the supervising producer, Luc Campeau is pm, Barry Gravelle is the dop, Richard Tasse is art director and Jean Lafleur, director Svatek’s longtime creative partner, heads up special effects.

Perrault wins Prix Albert-Tessier

The Prix Albert-Tessier, the highest honor granted by the Quebec government in filmmaking, has been awarded to veteran documentarian Pierre Perrault.

Perrault’s filmmaking career is associated with themes such as rural authenticity and the struggle of minorities. In the ’60s, he began a fascinating trilogy on the people of remote Ile-aux-Coudres – Pour la suite du monde (1962), Le regne du jour (1966) and Les Voitures d’eau (1968).

In the 1970s, Perrault’s work examined the land and people of the rugged Abitibi region of western Quebec, as well as the living conditions of native people.

Perrault made three more films, La bete lumineuse (1982), Les voiles bas en travers (1983) and La grand Allure (1985) before traveling to the Far North to shoot Cournouailles, an intimate and critically acclaimed documentation of the musk ox.

Created in 1977 in honor of Monseignor Albert Tessier, a pioneer documentary filmmaker, the award includes an original artwork and a cash prize of $30,000.

Box office blues

Distributors here are not amused by box office results for Canadian films released following the fall festival season. Most of the films cost between $2.7 million and $4 million to produce and were beneficiaries of a fair share of festival media coverage.

The top Quebec film at the box office this fall is Pierre Falardeau’s October, with receipts of $370,000 after 10 weeks. By early December, the film was on a single Montreal screen with weekend earnings of just over $1,100. A spokesperson for CFP Distribution expressed disappointment in the film’s commercial showing, adding the distributor had hoped to do at least double the business.

Results for other films are much worse.

Andre Forcier’s Le Vent du Wyoming ranked second with receipts of $187,000 after three months. And while it won a couple of festival awards, and by all admissions was a difficult film to market, its performance is a step back from Forcier’s last film, L’Histoire inventee, which garnered $500,000 in theaters. A spokesperson at Malofilm Distribution, distributor of Le Vent du Wyoming, characterized fall 1994 results for Canadian films as ‘simply terrible.’

Other Quebec films released this fall started slowly and sank quickly, including Windigo (Allegro), The Return of Tommy Tricker (Malofilm), La Beaute des femmes (Films 39), Kabloonak (cfp), C’etait le 12 du 12 et Chili avait les blues (Vivafilm), Draghoula (Compagnie France Film) and La Vie d’un heros (Malofilm).

The whole business has distributors and producers pointing fingers at one another and questioning the strategy of bunching up releases at festival time.