deal with Dandelion

It’s official. Paragon International has sealed an exclusive output deal with u.k. producer and distributor Dandelion Distribution. The agreement gives Paragon access to Dandelion’s library (including Home For Christmas and To Catch a Yeti), Hidden City, a 26-episode adventure series set in Africa, and six new tv movies. Half the mows will be coproductions and half Cancon pics. Lionel Shenken’s Toronto-based Visual Productions is coproducing both the movies and the series with London-based Dandelion.

Three earlier mows were coproduced by Shenken and Noel Cronin, managing director of Dandelion, and Dandelion has represented Visual Productions product in the u.k. for the past 12 years.

The first movie in the new package, Shepherd on the Rock, was shot in the u.k.; the remaining five will be produced in Canada. Next up is Romantic Notion, now in preproduction, and The Big Game, which is still in development.

Three movies are still at the scenario stage, and Isme Bennie, head of Paragon International, says Shenken is actively looking for Canadian scripts to round out the six-pack.

Paragon holds world distribution rights for the movies, excluding English Canada (held by Baton Broadcasting) and the u.k. (where the itd network holds rights).

Hidden City will shoot in Africa over a period of a year, beginning in January 1995.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation will air the series in South Africa and Shenken and Cronin are in negotiations with broadcasters in Canada and the u.k.

Also at Paragon, Gary Randall, president of productions, and former director of children’s programming Ken Katsumoto will head up a newly created Family Entertainment Programming division. The unit will operate out of Los Angeles effective immediately with an initial annual budget of us$8 million. Randall and Katsumoto will be looking at developing tv series, mows and family multimedia programming, starting with scripts south of the border and likely producing out of Toronto. Randall says the establishment of the new arm is a natural following the company’s development of the children’s tv series Kratt’s Creatures and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.