Vancouver: Struggling Peace Arch Entertainment of Vancouver has a new CEO after a stock-swap deal to acquire a Toronto film and television producer.

Vancouver: Domestic producers on the West Coast will have to be satisfied with development funding, skills enhancement and distribution support initiatives from British Columbia Film in 2003, unless the provincial government substantially boosts its annual allowance in the next budget beginning April 1 – an unlikely scenario.

Canada’s film and television sector will get a snapshot of the breadth and depth of the industry in September when a new study sponsored by Women in Film & Television Toronto is scheduled for publication.

Vancouver: Producer and festival programmer Michael Ghent is exploring the potential of a new public-private partnership for B.C. documentary filmmakers.
DocWatch, a proposal by the B.C. branch of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, suggests B.C. documentary producers can do more to build their audiences if they pool their financial resources for publicity. For example, if 15 documentary productions ante up $5,000 each toward publicity and hand it over to DocWatch, that’s $75,000. With matching funds or sponsorship from British Columbia Film, Telefilm Canada and other funders, the publicity kitty could grow to $187,000, says Ghent.

Canadian film representatives, at press time, were set to descend on the federal Ministry of Finance in Ottawa for a series of meetings pitching the ‘urgent’ need for expanded tax incentives to preserve jobs and investment.
David McLean, owner of Vancouver Film Studios, members of the Directors Guild of Canada and the CFTPA each booked meetings between Dec. 12 and Dec. 18 to discuss strategies to repair dwindling service production volumes in Canada.

Vancouver: Weird Homes and Weird Wheels information series producer Yaletown Entertainment has signed a new five-year, 50-picture output agreement with genre film producer Lloyd Simandl of North American Pictures.

Vancouver: Canada’s drama industry may not be generating a galaxy of stars yet, but it is helping mayors get elected.

Vancouver: Perhaps the one West Coast production company not feeling the economic pinch of 2002, Dufferin Gate got an early holiday gift from main customer Showtime. Two of the three pilots shot earlier in the fall have been picked up as series and there is a new MOW on the way, also in the new year.
Earthlings, the tentative title for a one-hour series about the lives of lesbians in West Hollywood, will be 15 hours over the season including the two-hour pilot.

Vancouver: Talking geese and gay romantic comedies have the kind of audience appeal that can rescue Canada’s woebegone domestic box office, predicts the man charged with expanding the national cinema’s share of ticket sales.
‘In the past, we may have allowed ourselves to become too preoccupied with auteur filmmaking,’ admits Richard Stursberg, executive director of Telefilm Canada, speaking on the theme of audience development Nov. 13 to members of Vancouver’s branch of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. ‘That resulted in a period when Canadian films won a lot of prizes but not much commercial success. Now, we need to support a range of genres with more comedies, more family movies and kids pictures, more thrillers and more romances.’

Vancouver: The bottom-line impact of budget cuts at British Columbia Film – which opted out of television production funding earlier this year – is starkly outlined in the society’s report for fiscal 2002/03, just released.
Compared to the year before when there were 46 B.C. productions sharing production funding of $3.5 million, fiscal 2002/03 lists only eight projects – all features – sharing $1.3 million. By title, that’s an 83% drop in volume and, by investment dollar, it’s a 63% drop.
Even the lucky features, which were funded through a special feature film fund granted by the previous provincial government, are down 27% by title and 11% by investment in the current year.

Vancouver: Nine Telefilm Canada-supported English-language productions reflect the new focus on explicitly commercial films that still deliver distinctively Canadian content, says Telefilm executive director Richard Stursberg.

In exclusive clubs, the upstart member is almost always dismissed by the elite as a climber who is overreaching his class, a nuisance, or someone to step on to move even higher up the social register. It’s not until the upstart has the momentum to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them that the club elders really have to rally, sometimes unsuccessfully, to keep the order.