✖
Digital Media: Dancing tops Yahoo list
Canadians love dancing. Or so says Yahoo! Canada’s Buzz Index. The list of the most-searched television shows for the three weeks ending Sept. 26 found Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance Canada leading among ‘top shows overall’ and ‘top new show,’ respectively. Both air on CTV.
Sold!
• Empire Theaters has added two locations in Manitoba to its chain, buying theaters in Brandon and Winkler from co-owner Landmark Cinemas. Effective Oct. 31, the Halifax-based chain will be full owner of the nine-screen Capitol Theatre in Brandon and the five-screen Southland Theatre in Winkler, a small city of some 10,000 people to the southwest of Regina.
People
• David Kines, one of the driving forces behind MuchMusic, has stepped down as SVP of the Much MTV Group at CTVglobemedia. There are no plans to replace Kines. Much MTV Group SVP and GM Brad Schwartz will continue to oversee the channels.
Talent
• Kat Dennings has joined the cast of Defendor, putting the female half of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist on screen with Sandra Oh and Woody Harrelson. The picture, produced by Nicholas Tabarrok of Darius Films and set to start in Toronto next month, casts Dennings as a street kid who befriends a man, Harrelson, who believes he is a superhero called Defendor. Oh plays the man’s psychiatrist. Dennings is represented by Mick Sullivan at CAA. Jeremy Plager at CAA reps Harrelson, while Oh is with Marsha McManus of Principal Entertainment. Feature first-timer Peter Stebbings will direct from his own script.
The Burning Question
Even those of us who watch TV for a living (Jealous? Don’t be) can’t keep up with all the new shows on the air this time of year. So instead of watching them ourselves, we outsourced the job to you, our readers, and asked:
Sonoda shooting Beasts
VANCOUVER: Hot on the heels of the debut of his comedy Coopers’ Camera at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Warren Sonoda is back behind the camera on the fantasy flick Merlin & the Book of Beasts.
CTV to see more Butt
Brent Butt has wrapped the final episode of Corner Gas, just as his next comedy for CTV and The Comedy Network readies to shoot in Vancouver. The next would-be series from the veteran comic, Hiccups, will shoot its pilot later this month, putting Butt’s wife and Gas cohort Nancy Robertson in the role of a children’s author with emotional issues.
Carmody preps Boondock 2
Producers Don Carmody and Chris Brinker are back at work on Boondock Saints – and this month will shoot their long hoped-for sequel to the 1999 cult hit. Shooting on the $8-million Boondock Saints 2 – again about vigilante twins played by Sean Patrick Flanery (Powder, Suicide Kings) and Norman Reedus (Deuces Wild) – will run for seven weeks in Toronto starting Oct. 20, before moving to Boston for four days.
Erica ‘built to compete’
In the works for about two years, CBC’s comedic drama Being Erica started out with a young girl who could go back in time, via her grandma’s paintings, to the 1920s, and morphed into a story about a woman who relives key moments from her own life through time-travelling sessions with a therapist.
Teletoon wants more Total
Teletoon wants a third season of ‘reality’ cartoon Total Drama from Fresh TV plus 52 episodes of its new comedy Stoked, up from an original order of 26.
YTV gets Indie
Heroic Film Company in Toronto starts work this fall on the live-action How to Be Indie for YTV. The Corus Entertainment channel has added the comedic series to its fall lineup for next year, targeting preteens and their parents with the story of a 13-year-old girl trying to balance her family’s South Asian traditions with her Canadian lifestyle.
9 Story nabs Zoë Lama
Kids writer Tish Cohen and 9 Story Entertainment have struck a deal to turn her novel The Invisible Rules of Zoë into a live-action TV series.
Features, reality shoot at Sudden Storm
Sudden Storm Productions (Killing Zelda Sparks) has sent its reality series Ten Angry Chicks to camera with partners Blueprint Entertainment and Barna-Alper Productions. The show, about recently brokenhearted women getting their revenge, will air on Slice and arrives on the company’s slate as principals Jesse Ikeman and Jeff Glickman juggle a number of feature projects.
Volumes on par or down across provinces
As if a strong Canadian dollar, a potential Screen Actors Guild strike stateside and increased competition from U.S. tax-rebate states wasn’t a big enough challenge for the Canadian film and TV industry, the unfolding Wall Street crisis has added another unknown dimension, making it even trickier to predict production volume levels in upcoming months.
B.C. Film Commision turns 30 in competitive world
When the British Columbia Film Commission first set up shop in 1978, the West Coast was emerging as a new frontier for the film, TV and commercial production industry.
The definitive CDN broadcast and production resource.Over 5,000 company listings!
