Vancouver: It’s right proper that Banff2002 will pay special tribute to the achievements of the British television industry: with the most nominations, the U.K. is the leading country vying for the polished bronze trophies at the 23rd Banff Rockie Awards Show June 10, and British star John Cleese will receive the Sir Peter Ustinov/Comedy Network Award.

Anne Wheeler

Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films begins production in July on Hemingway and Callaghan, a four-hour miniseries for the CBC directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, hot off his Trudeau success. Set in the 1920s, the mini tracks the young Ernest Hemingway and Canadian Morley Callaghan as they transition from Toronto Star correspondents to novelists.
The shoot will take place in Toronto and Paris, where Hemingway was sent as a correspondent and where he met the likes of Fitzgerald, Joyce and Pound, who influenced his career path. The story also centres on how Hemingway helped Callaghan get his stories published and how the two ended up in a famed boxing match.

Montreal: A 15-person crew, including a doctor, skilled underwater divers and filmmakers on board the Sedna leave from the Gulf of St-Lawrence on June 16 for the start of a remarkable six-month scientific and cinematographic adventure through the Arctic Archipelago.
Five films in the Arctic Mission collection will be shot during the voyage, which aims to deepen our understanding of the fragile Arctic ecosystem and the people who live north of the 60th parallel. If all goes as planned, the expedition will arrive in Vancouver in December.

Calgary’s Voice Pictures, launched by Wendy Hill-Tout in 1984 as a small independent focusing on documentary and performing arts productions, is gearing up for one of its busiest years after deciding to work more drama into its business plan.
In the works for CTV is the $3.8-million MOW Windermere, the story of Nancy Eaton’s relationship with a troubled man that ended in her murder. Mario Azzopardi is dircting. Coproduced with Bernard Zukerman of Toronto’s Indian Grove Productions and executive producer Michael Prupas, the film will shoot in Calgary in the fall and receives funding from the EIP, LFP, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit and the CFRN fund.

Don McLean, the caustic and ever-present head of The Partners’ Film Company, will step down in 2004, following a career that has spanned five decades and literally evolved with the commercial production industry in Canada.
In April, the 69-year-old production veteran was on the verge of selling the Toronto company he helped found in 1978 before the deal was pulled off the table by Toronto-based Avion Films.
‘It was a bit of an exit strategy,’ says the Partners’ president of the aborted sale.
‘People my age shouldn’t be around this business. I think if I stay around, I’m probably going to kill some snot-nosed 25-year-old creative guy. It’s just tougher and tougher to relate to the business the way it is now.’

With the Bessies upon us and the focus on the craft of making commercials, it is time for Canada’s top helmers to once again take centre stage. It is no coincidence that the names associated with many of the year’s top spots are ones we know well. They are the directors who have managed their careers for the long haul and continue to find success years after breaking in. But what are their secrets? On The Spot reporter Laura Bracken went directly to the source and asked a few of the nation’s top directors how they have sustained their long and winding careers.
Working in a variety of markets and mediums is a key element to becoming a successful commercial director, but sometimes it’s the work you don’t do that can make or break a career. Canada’s top commercial directors have to be very selective when choosing their spots in order to develop the distinctive styles that generate successful, lasting careers.

After 19 years in operation and producing 863 commercials, one of the longest surviving animation studios in Canada, Toronto’s Animation House, officially closed its doors on April 15 in the wake of poor market conditions and corporate management mishaps.
‘In its heyday it was the pre-eminent commercial production and animation house in Canada,’ says executive producer and general manager Michael Crabtree, who was with Animation House throughout its final years. ‘A lot of people in the animation industry at one point or another passed through the doors of Animation House.’

Vancouver: The Toronto Maple Leafs’ drive to the hockey team’s first Stanley Cup since 1967 has viewers checking into Leafs TV, the number-one-rated digital channel for the week of May 12.
According to Bureau of Broadcast Measurement research supplied independently to Playback, Leafs TV generated a 12 share (the percentage of viewers watching television that week) among viewers aged 2+, while Fox Sportsworld earned a nine share.
Over the week, about 4,400 people watched Leafs TV in an average quarter hour.
Animal Planet (six share), Court TV (six share), Sex TV (five share), MTV Canada (four share), Men TV (four share), Lonestar (four share), Scream (four share) and Showcase Action (four share), round out the top-10-rated digital channels in the 2+ demographic for the week.

This summer a worldwide audience may be able to watch a bevy of TV network broadcasts, including Global Television and CBC, free over the Internet at iCraveTV.biz, the newest incarnation of the controversial retransmitter set to launch June 1.
Although Herbert Becker, president of iCraveTV.biz, says he does not expect any resistance, early indications suggest broadcasters and copyright interests will come down on Becker with the same force as they did on the original iCraveTV.com, which was shut down by the courts just after it launched in 1999.

Montreal: In a two-hour May 9 presentation to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, the CFTPA said bottom-line interests must be tempered by public policy goals and that the independent production sector represents the system’s best resource for quality programming and creative and cultural diversity.
The producers told the parliamentarians the powers accorded the CRTC are ‘adequate and appropriate’ and the language of the 1991 Broadcasting Act is ‘technologically neutral and adaptable to the future,’ and as such, the legislation does not need to be changed.

Montreal: Filming wrapped in mid-May on Sebastien Rose’s feature film debut Comment ma mere acchoucha de moi durant sa menopause, a humorous, but not just funny, next-generation story of relations between the sexes. The film appears to have many ingredients for success at the box office, but it isn’t necessarily light summer fare. There’s a thread of intelligence here, and a deeper, darker side.