Should Vision TV’s Lord Have Mercy get the green light from its funding sources, the new series will be the only true-to-form sitcom – three cameras, studio audiences and only a handful of sets – being produced in Canada.

Two years after leaving her post as CBC network program director, Phyllis Platt has several projects on the go at her new independent prodco, Platt Productions.
Combining her background in news and current affairs with her experience in arts and entertainment, Platt is positioning her company as a production partner to companies with an existing infrastructure, focusing on reality-based programming.
Platt has five MOWs in development, one of which is up for the next round of CTF financing. The tentatively titled Poisoned Waters, a coproduction with Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions and Regina-based Minds Eye Pictures, is a drama mirroring recent contaminated water incidents in Walkerton, ON and North Battleford, SK.

Producers Paul Pope of Pope Productions in St. John’s isn’t resting on the laurels of his feature film Rare Birds, which recently opened in Canadian theatres. He is currently in development on a major television project with the CBC about Gander, NF during World War II.
The six-hour dramatic miniseries takes place during the war when the Royal Canadian Air Force set up camp in Gander in order to fly out from one of Canada’s eastern-most points. ‘They’d never flown anyone across [the Atlantic] in the winter,’ says Pope. ‘The Air Force thought it was a suicide idea. Then, months later when it’s a huge success, the same people [who were opposed to the base] wanted to take it over and take credit for it. It’s [about] pure front-line inventiveness, determination and guts, and a lot of lives taken.’

Regina-based Partners in Motion has a number of new non-fiction projects in the works, reports CEO Ron Goetz. From weather to barbecues to ordinary people, there seems to be something for everyone on PIM’s new slate.
The first project to speak of is Untamed Weather, five one-hours for History Television. According to Goetz, the series will look at weather phenomena in Canada from a historical perspective with a common-interest element, depicting the weather as a character with an ever-changing face. He says the structure of the series is still being fleshed out, even though some elements for various segments have already been produced.

Vancouver: U.S. studios are back in the lab with a number of experiments underway on the West Coast.
Eastwick is for Warner Bros. This is the show for any of you wondering what happened next at the end of the 1987 feature film The Witches of Eastwick with Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfieffer and the satanic Jack Nicholson. The half-hour presentation pilot is about the witches’ sons and wraps 10 days of production March 28.

Montreal: BBR Productions, associated with L’Equipe Spectra, hopes to begin filming this summer on A Taste for Mysteries, a 26 half-hour crime and murder drama with a food critic in the lead investigative role. It’s one of the few new Canadian dramas with support from Global Television and Mystery Channel, says producer Suzanne Girard (Further Tales of the City, Nuremberg).
Taste has a $60,000 an episode price tag and is scripted by Karl Hearn and Kim Segal, with Hearn and Martin Barry slated to direct.

Montreal: Canadian producers are looking for credible ways to build foreign financing, which has come under increased pressure in the past three years. Foreign revenues for Canadian productions as reported by CAVCO (source: CFTPA/APFTQ Profile 2002) has declined to $384 million in 2000/01 from $536 million in 1998/99. In the same period, international presales and distribution advances declined more than 25% to $58 million from $80 million.

George Atis is a partner in the Toronto law firm of McMillan Binch and a member of the firm’s KNOWlaw Group.

The situation for young directors is nearing a crisis point as work in Canada has all but dried up and commercial production companies are forced to focus on channeling what little work there is to their established helmers.
The board flow has in fact become so slow for neophytes that the fate of the 2002 First Cut Awards – presented annually to directors with less than two years in the business – is up in the air.

With the flame extinguished, the athletes safely home and back to their day jobs, you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘If I have to read another story on Olympic advertising, I’m going to stick my last McDonald’s fry in my own eye.’
But while we’ve been inundated with marketing pundits falling over each other to proclaim which ads work and which don’t, the advertising industry itself has been elbowed out of the debate as if by a Japanese short track speed skater.
So, On the Spot – (we’re nothing if not about the advertising biz) – thought we’d give the pros a chance to judge and tell us what worked and what did not in ads created specifically for the Olympics. (Note: There was no pressure or coercion from any French or Russian advertising federations.)

Canadian production studio facilities largely look for longer-term projects to fill their stages, and rarely have trouble doing so. Ongoing television series or feature films are always welcome tenants at virtually any Canadian studio for the security of having something occupying a studio for months at a time.
So where does that leave the indigenous television commercials that need a place to be produced?
For many studio owners, spot production is much like what commercials are to television programming: they fill the gaps and generate much-needed revenue.
According to studio owners and commercial representatives, there are always places within many studios for commercial production; it just may take a bit of digging to find them.

Vancouver: CTV is swapping The Associates for The 11th Hour, the CBC has one new series planned, Global is skewing its focus again to reality TV and, overall, Canadian dramatic series has seen better days.
That’s the quick take on next year’s fall schedule as broadcasters in Canada finalize their commitment memos for producers lined up at the LFP and EIP troughs.