Cold enough for you? Vancouver substitutes for the frozen North

ancouver: I’ll bet the Inuit community of Taloyoak, n.w.t., high up in the eastern Arctic, are still shaking their heads and yukking it up over those crazy ‘movie people’ who wrapped production on Frostfire there late last month.

Producer Brian McKeown confesses that after spending almost five weeks in the frozen tundra entombed in snow they had to use a Save-On Meats locker on Hastings Street in Vancouver to shoot the snow house interiors.

‘We needed to get the right light and to see people’s breath,’ McKeown explains. ‘So we had the construction department go up to Mt. Seymour and cut the snow blocks to build (an igloo) here.’

The two Inuit stars of the film, who were flown down for the meat locker shoot, were a tad mystified. ‘Heck,’ said one, as he dodged lamb shanks and dangling turkeys, ‘even our grandfather’s igloos were warmer than this.’

Using a primarily Inuit cast added extra depth to the television movie, says McKeown. ‘Most of the cast could speak fluent Inuktitut (the Inuit’s native language) so we were able to use the language to augment the dramatic texture of the film.’

Frostfire stars newcomer, Iqualuit native Mosha Cote, as a troubled teenager and Wendy Crewson (The Good Son, I’ll Never Get To Heaven) as a journalist whose ambition draws the young Inuit boy into an international environmental conspiracy.

Even though shooting a film in the Far North was a ‘wonderful, challenging experience,’ McKeown was still in a hurry to get back home to springtime in Vancouver where his partner, author/ screenwriter Linda Svendsen (Marine Life, The Diviners), was at work on two new productions, the screen adaptation of Stone Angels and a baby, due any day now.

Frostfire is an Alliance Communications presentation executive produced by Stephen DeNure, produced by McKeown, line produced by Harold Tichenor and lensed by dop Ron Orieux. It will air on the cbc.

A series whose time has come?

it’s been five years in the making, but Vancouver producers Alan Morinis and Leonard Jerhoch think Eye Level will finally get off the ground. The series was originally developed for cbc by Ric Beairsto and Jon Stoddart. Morinis has now picked up the rights and begun packaging it for syndication by six Canadian stations: itv in Edmonton, Alberta’s ACCESS Network, tvontario, cfcf-tv Montreal, scn in Saskatchewan and Knowledge Network in b.c.

Written by Beairsto and Jeff Cohen, who are also directing, this hard-edged reality drama series concerns two brothers who escape their abusive home to live on the streets. Only one brother survives, and he begins the arduous journey of reconciliation with his family.

The producers plan to shoot six episodes in Vancouver June through July.

Sunnyside up

and speaking of years in the making, producers Justis Greene and Stuart Margolin will, for the fourth year in a row, try to get Sunnyside Canal out of dry dock and into the water. Greene, who just wrapped prep work on Disney’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, which is now lying in limbo, says he and actor/director Margolin will once again try to bend their busy schedules to get the feature film done.

Back in 1990 it looked like a go for Sunnyside Canal. They had all the financing in place and and the cast lined up. Then Margolin was offered the lead role in the cbc series Mom p.i., so they decided to delay the project for a year. Since then, says Greene, when they’ve had the financing they haven’t had the cast, and vice versa.

This year their Canadian distributor, Peter Simpson of Toronto-based Norstar Releasing, came on board as executive producer to help round up the last bit of the $4-$5.5 million budget. If all goes well, expect a fall shoot with Margolin at the helm.

Meanwhile, Greene says he’s content to catch up on some long overdue r&r while angling for salmon off the Gulf Islands.

Something for the whole family

michael Parker and Shan Tam of Vancouver’s Maple Ridge Films have their hands full with car chases, explosions and burning houses as they get ready to shoot Rumble In The Bronx, an action/adventure feature from Hong Kong-based Golden Harvest that goes into production later this month in Vancouver.

Parker characterizes this latest Hong Kong flick as ‘family entertainment’ because ‘everyone gets beaten up but no one dies.’

The film, heavy on the martial arts, stars Hong Kong hero Jackie Chan as a young man who comes to the Bronx to visit his uncle who has sold his supermarket to a young widow, played by Hong Kong’s answer to Madonna, Anita Mui. Jackie naturally falls in love with the young widow and tries to help get the business going despite opposition from a punk gang and the Mafia who show up with a big bag of diamonds, until ultimately… Surprise…good triumphs over evil. And all this on a mere $4 million budget.

Maple Ridge, which completed the first official Hong Kong/ Canada coproduction, entitled Young Offenders last year, was able to attract Golden Harvest – Hong Kong’s largest production company – to the city over stiff competition from New York, Chicago, San Francisco, l.a. and Toronto.