Correction

In this issue, we feature a special report on Production in Ontario (p. 27), tracking the remarkable resurgence that the province’s feature film service sector is currently enjoying. It’s a good news story. We also have a tribute to producer Don Carmody (p. 15), who has enjoyed spectacular success making movies in Toronto and elsewhere.

Vancouver: The comedy feature Everything’s Gone Green, penned by famed West Coast novelist Douglas Coupland, went to camera in early June in and around Vancouver, with delivery scheduled for December. The film marks the scribe’s first feature script written directly for the screen.
A copro between Toronto’s Radke Films and Vancouver’s True West Films, Gone Green stars Ontario native Paulo Costanzo, best known as Michael on the TV sitcom Joey.

Cameras roll on TPB feature

Willis stays on

Toronto: You wake up one day, in what appears to be a hospital bed, and that’s about all you really know. Nothing else. Your name, how you got there, anything about the woman who claims to be your wife – not a clue. You’re tabula rasa on all of it.
Now what?
That is the gist of what happened to CFL star Terry Evanshen after a car wreck wiped his memory clean in 1988, and The Man Who Lost Himself, the CTV MOW now shooting at Sarrazin Couture Entertainment, is the story of his recovery.

Shaftesbury on the road with Terry Fox

Mehta gets loud

* Vancouver’s Bardel Entertainment is about to wrap the CG feature Dragons: Metal Ages, a sequel to its Dragons: Fire & Ice, and will deliver to YTV in time for a fall broadcast.

No producer straddles Hollywood and Hollywood North on the same scale as Don Carmody. On one hand, Carmody can boast of producing the most commercially successful Canadian film ever, Porky’s (along with writer/director Bob Clark), as well as having produced other top Canuck grossers Johnny Mnemonic and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Meanwhile, he has also played gun-for-hire on numerous Hollywood features that have shot north of the 49th, including Gothika, City by the Sea, Lucky Number Slevin, and, most notably, best-picture Oscar winner Chicago.

Every year, it seems, when the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television hands out its Golden Reel Award for the domestic film with the year’s biggest box office, critics dismissively bring up the fact that the raunchy teen comedy Porky’s is this country’s all-time box-office champ. (It hauled in a staggering US$111 million at the North American till, according to Variety.) And Don Carmody, who produced with writer/director Bob Clark, says he is sick of all the carping.

While producer Don Carmody may be best known for his credits on Hollywood productions, he recently got behind the Canada/U.K. copro feature Some Things That Stay.