Stephen Fraser practices entertainment law in Toronto and Los Angeles with the firm of Fraser – Entertainment Law. He is also licensed to practice in the State of New York, where he began his career as a copyright lawyer.

It’s a tough business picking a person of the year. With so many hard-working, worthy candidates in the film and TV biz, how does one narrow the field to select a single individual for the honor?

Toronto: The Movie Network and Movie Central want another season of Slings and Arrows and have sent director Peter Wellington and cast back to work at Toronto Film Studios for another six one-hours of the comic series. Paul Gross reprises his Gemini-winning role as the unhinged theater director who, this time around, struggles to mount a production of Shakespeare’s famously cursed Macbeth.

Tele-Action wraps Rene Lévésque

More Mystery from Apartment 11

Toronto: Twenty years after writing the book, Stuart Samuels has finally made the movie, and later this year will see Midnight Movies, his look back on the cult films of the 1970s, go to air on Movie Central and Moviepix.
‘It’s the story of six films,’ he says – Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead – ‘that were the opening wedge to the age of irony.’

Same sex, different reasons

Eight Canucks vie at Sundance

One year ago, it was largely doom and gloom. Not that it’s sunshine and rainbows today for the Canadian film and television industries, but optimists might say that 2003 was a bottoming out and 2004 showed enough glimmers of hope to keep on keeping on. Yet many in the biz still feel that their corporate viability relies too much on external forces. If good fortune and more of a helping hand don’t come soon, what positive signs came over the past 12 months will not be enough to sustain them.

The following are the results of a web poll in which Playback asked readers: What is the biggest industry story of 2004?

The plight of production…

In 2004, CTV built on the success it enjoyed in 2003, and the credit in large part goes to Susanne Boyce, CTV’s president of programming and chair of the CTV Media Group, whose U.S. acquisitions, Canadian commissions and promotion of both have put the broadcaster ahead of the competition.