It’s been quite a ride these past 16 months for Canadian Television Fund president Sandra Macdonald. From nearly her first day on the job in September 2002, Macdonald, the former government film commissioner and chair of the National Film Board of Canada, had to deal with scores of disgruntled producers and broadcasters complaining of a funding application process too complex, time consuming and unpredictable.

Barry Kiefl is the president of Canadian Media Research. He will be moderating Does Size Matter: Measuring Your Audience, a panel at Prime Time in Ottawa about how audiences are measured and

Lunch with Lantos

Barna-Alper Productions is partway through its latest series, and will soon wrap the six-week shoot of its serio-comic Show Me Yours, an 8 x 30 show slated to air this summer on Showcase.
Rachel Crawford (The Ride, Traders) and Adam Harrington (Out of Order, Jeremiah) star as a psychologist and biologist, respectively, who must overcome their differences to co-author a book about sex.

The news came as a one-two punch. First, on Dec. 10, Alliance Atlantis Communications announced it was cutting its entertainment branch in half, jettisoning some 70 of the 150 people in its entertainment division, including top execs Seaton McLean and Peter Sussman, and that it was ‘reviewing’ the dollars and cents of its production efforts. Ka-pow.
A few days later came the details, that the media giant was shutting down its Oscar-winning Salter Street Films – as well as offices in Vancouver, Edmonton and London – and that, with few exceptions, it was getting out of the film and TV production game altogether. Socko.

Sank like a cinder block. Gone the way of the dodo. Fell off the radar. These are the phrases that spring to mind when one thinks of the Lincoln report. It has been seven months since parliament’s standing committee on Heritage, headed by MP Clifford Lincoln, issued its five-pound, 900-page thinkpiece about the state of this country’s broadcasting system – more than half a year since it made nearly 100 recommendations to Ottawa about what the industry needs and needs to do if it is to serve Canadians through this century.

It took a move away from the Toronto International Film Festival, and in fact a move away from Canada altogether, to make Noah Cowan the perfect candidate for codirector and eventually director of TIFF.

If the sponsorship rates it is charging are any indication, CTV must have very high hopes indeed for Canadian Idol 2, which is seeking ‘through the roof’ prices for the second run of its summer-long talent show, according to media buyers.

The Canadian Media Guild has been chosen as the sole body to represent the interests of most CBC employees, winning over the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union in a hotly contested election last month. The results, announced Dec. 15, showed the CMG with 2,542 votes compared to 1,717 for the CEP.

The fate of Canada’s woebegone film and television sector is in the hands of three new federal cabinet ministers, including an unknown who is now in charge of Canadian culture.

In what should provide a major boost to the Oscar buzz surrounding The Barbarian Invasions, Denys Arcand’s latest was nominated for a Golden Globe on Dec. 18 in the foreign-language film category. The Golden Globes, awarded each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is thought to be a strong indicator of what films will be considered Oscar worthy.

French-language features may dominate the Canadian box office, but not critics’ opinions, at least according to Canada’s Top Ten 2003, announced in December. The alphabetical listing of the year’s best Canuck movies, an initiative of the Toronto International Film Festival, includes seven English-language films and three French.