CBC has put Larry Sugar and J.B. Sugar of No Equal Entertainment to work on a jPod series, working from the Douglas Coupland novel and the pilot shot in 2006. Working under the banner of I’m Feeling Lucky Productions, the Sugars (The Collector) exec produce with Coupland, looking to take the Vancouver-shot 13 x 60 to air in January. Steph Song (Dragon Boys), seen in the pilot as a sexy office worker, is back alongside David W. Kopp (Freddy vs. Jason) and Emilie Ullerup (Sanctuary).

Insight Film Studios has three new projects shooting in B.C., including its first service shoot, National Lampoon’s Ratko: The Dictator’s Son.

Movie Central and The Movie Network are sending two limited series and a fourth round of ReGenesis to camera this summer.

Back in the 1950s, there was still no such thing as funding for independent movies or TV shows in Canada. There was a national broadcaster in CBC/Radio-Canada and a world-class documentary and animation engine in the National Film Board, but virtually no money for those who wanted to create their own indelible cinematic mark. Indies had no voice.

Norman Jewison’s downtown office overlooks a City of Toronto park that bears his name. The master filmmaker’s single request to the city was to include a dog fountain – named after longtime family pet Barney – with a trigger pedal so that canines could release cool water with a press of their paw.

This one will go down as one of Canadian broadcasting’s great ironies – that Moses Znaimer, a man who long fashioned himself a rebel breaking with ‘old fart television’ – has been inducted into a Hall of Fame.

Gordon Pinsent’s laughter is a thing of beauty – rich, full-spirited and utterly infectious. His broad devilish face is suffused with good humor as he considers the question, ‘How does it feel to become an overnight star in the United States at the age of 76?’

Michael Spencer wrote his spicy memoirs in a book called Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry. It’s the story of the development and evolution of a $3-billion film and television industry that began with an unassuming two-page memo to Cabinet in 1965. Spencer wrote that memo.

Veteran film producer and distributor John Dunning finds the aura of respectability surrounding his career a bit odd.

Harold Greenberg, the legendary former head of Astral Media, embodied qualities that are exceptionally rare in a chief executive officer of a media empire. Greenberg was a charming yet resolute force who fought relentlessly to create a film and television industry in Canada, leading the way by executive producing the country’s first international box-office sensation, Porky’s.

Director Claude Jutra is best known for Mon oncle Antoine (1971), considered by many critics as the greatest Canadian film ever made.