✖
The Scottish season
Toronto: The Movie Network and Movie Central want another season of Slings and Arrows and have sent director Peter Wellington and cast back to work at Toronto Film Studios for another six one-hours of the comic series. Paul Gross reprises his Gemini-winning role as the unhinged theater director who, this time around, struggles to mount a production of Shakespeare’s famously cursed Macbeth.
Broadcast
Tele-Action wraps Rene Lévésque
Youth
More Mystery from Apartment 11
Pink Flamingos: now more than ever
Toronto: Twenty years after writing the book, Stuart Samuels has finally made the movie, and later this year will see Midnight Movies, his look back on the cult films of the 1970s, go to air on Movie Central and Moviepix.
‘It’s the story of six films,’ he says – Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead – ‘that were the opening wedge to the age of irony.’
Docs
Same sex, different reasons
Jump Cut
Eight Canucks vie at Sundance
Producers and casters ride highs and lows in ’04
One year ago, it was largely doom and gloom. Not that it’s sunshine and rainbows today for the Canadian film and television industries, but optimists might say that 2003 was a bottoming out and 2004 showed enough glimmers of hope to keep on keeping on. Yet many in the biz still feel that their corporate viability relies too much on external forces. If good fortune and more of a helping hand don’t come soon, what positive signs came over the past 12 months will not be enough to sustain them.
Top Stories of 2004
The following are the results of a web poll in which Playback asked readers: What is the biggest industry story of 2004?
Producers and casters ride highs and lows in ’04
The plight of production…
Susanne Boyce Playback’s Person of the Year
In 2004, CTV built on the success it enjoyed in 2003, and the credit in large part goes to Susanne Boyce, CTV’s president of programming and chair of the CTV Media Group, whose U.S. acquisitions, Canadian commissions and promotion of both have put the broadcaster ahead of the competition.
Distrib scoops of the year
The two most unlikely movie blockbusters of 2004 were also the two films that most polarized audiences in the U.S. election year.
Domestic box office closes in on 5%
As unlikely as it may sound, the box office for Canadian features in 2004 moved significantly closer to Telefilm Canada’s goal of domestic productions accounting for 5% of the overall theatrical take. New statistics from Telefilm show Canuck flicks claiming 4.6% of the overall Canadian box office in 2004 as of Dec. 9, compared to 3.8% around this point in 2003.
Can this man save Canadian production?
Wayne Clarkson is already looking for a new apartment. And he will have to look fast, given that he has just over a month before he’s due at Telefilm Canada’s headquarters in Montreal, where he is now set to take over as its new executive director.
Broadcast Act under fire at CAB
Ottawa: The talk around this town got even more political than usual when the Canadian Association of Broadcasters opened its three-day conference in late November – bringing some 600 radio and TV execs together with their small army of lobbyists, just a few blocks from the House of Commons, its minority government and the much-maligned CRTC.
The definitive CDN broadcast and production resource.Over 5,000 company listings!
