In its nearly 30 years of existence, the Toronto-based non-profit Alliance for Children and Television has provided industry training, rewarded top achievements and prodded the Canadian TV industry into providing programming that stimulates children’s intelligence and creativity and avoids intellectual laziness.

Tom Perlmutter

Peter Moss on the Internet: ‘I find the notion of what they call ‘two-box’ entertainment – sticking TV together with the Internet because the Internet is there – is not as interesting as doing television better. The more you attempt to look like something else because it might be more popular, the more irrelevant you become.

Camera and gear suppliers in the major centres report a varied shooting season so far, but a few blockbuster Hollywood projects in B.C. are keeping them busy.

There is a little show from Montreal that, if you are in English Canada, you may not be aware of.

The days of fat margins for Canadian systems and software dealers are over. The reason: tight economic times exacerbated by dwindling production funds, as seen in recent cuts to the Canadian Television Fund. And when the film and TV production market suffers, the decline trickles down to post-production houses and, from there, to the companies that supply them.

Before embarking on the second season of Star Academie, MTL Video will be busy with other TV projects, including Ciao Bella, Cirrus Communications’ high-definition comedy/drama that will be shot in English and French for CBC/SRC.

Manitoba appears to be riding a winning wave of late. In addition to scoring the Jennifer Lopez/Richard Gere film Shall We Dance? (in the wake of the film’s producers bailing on Toronto due to SARS anxiety), Carole Vivier, CEO of Manitoba Film & Sound, has announced a new media fund for the province and a new base budget of $1 million per year to help finance indigenous film and recording projects.

Montreal: In the new CineGroupe Images TV movie Student Seduction, Elizabeth Berkley (Showgirls, Any Given Sunday) plays Christie, a young, happily married teacher unjustly accused of sexual harassment.

It’s been several years since we heard anything from Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice, the upstart filmmakers who made a splash at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival with their feature doc Pitch. But the pair is back in the game this summer, hard at work on the reality-ish Kenny vs. Spenny for CBC.

VisionTV has embarked on a joint venture with Toronto’s Ellis Entertainment to produce Canadian programs destined for international distribution. The announcement came on April 29 at the Hot Docs festival, where Vision president and CEO Bill Roberts and Ellis Entertainment president Stephen Ellis introduced the new company, VisionTV International.

Vancouver: With its boffo box office, mutant thriller X2: X-Men United has blown away that niggling West Coast production doubt that you can make a cheap feature in Vancouver, but not one that makes bundles of money.
On May 13, North American box office for 20th Century Fox’s X2 was US$153 million after opening May 2. That doesn’t include the rest of the world, either. Its opening weekend worldwide was more than US$155 million.