It’s been 10 years since veteran Oakland, CA-based director of photography Barry Stone joined forces with Clement Virgo on the director’s breakthrough debut feature Rude. The film garnered eight Genie nominations, including achievement in cinematography for Stone, and made a splash at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Culture may not have featured prominently in Prime Minister Paul Martin’s victory speech, and Minister of Canadian Heritage Helene Chalifour Scherrer will not be returning to Parliament Hill, but when key cultural issues for the film and television industry do come up, they will be hard for the Liberals to ignore this time around, according to industry insiders.
The Liberals’ minority status in the House of Commons may be the best result for industry groups, many of which were concerned about the fate of the film and television industry under a Conservative government.

Toronto is just 18 months away from opening part of its first new megastudio if everything goes according to plan for Toronto Film Studios and The Rose Corporation, the tag team of companies now set to build and operate a multistage lot on the city’s waterfront, a long-delayed and contentious project that promises to breathe new life into the local movie business.

Watching a gaggle of beautiful things wrestle over a single handsome bloke ain’t for everyone, and while younger viewers still flock to reality shows, a slim majority of Canadians seem to have had enough.

Jim Carrey, Denys Arcand and singer John Kay were among the Canucks who saw their names written – not in lights, as per usual – but in hefty slabs of granite at the June 23 gala for Canada’s Walk of Fame. The annual glitter fest added 11 famous names to the sidewalks of Toronto, planting the trio’s stars alongside those of Shirley Douglas, Diana Krall, Mario Lemieux, Helen Shaver and Hollywood pioneers Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett and Jack Warner.

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam, who has rebounded from his unfinished feature The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2001 to direct Good Omens and The Brothers Grimm, will be among the 10 beneficiaries of new money handed out by Telefilm Canada’s Canada Feature Film Fund, June 28.

The age of talking about the Internet revolution – at least as it impacts content distribution in Canada – is over, but the age of dealing with it is well underway, according to the Canadian Cable Television Association.

Istvan Szabo will open the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival with his latest picture Being Julia, a 1930s period piece about sex and lies in the stage world, starring Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.

While many Canadian producers struggle to find funds to make homegrown television, broadcasters are reaping record gains.

Banff, AB: By the time they rolled the credits, the 2004 Banff Television Festival had played out much like it has any other year – a little less pizzazz, sure, and fewer people, true again – but otherwise a productive four days away from the office according to attendees, many of whom, ironically, were pleased with this year’s diminished crowds, noting that it was easier to arrange meetings with ‘the right people’ at the retooled fest, and that the 25th Banff has regained some of the close, casual atmosphere for which it was once famous. More signal, less noise.

?dprophesies about the ascendancy of cable, this year’s upfronts were still mainly a seesaw battle between CTV and Global. Five years ago it was Global’s game, but today, CTV holds the majority of the top-10 and top-20 program slots in most regions.

* Raynald Briere has stepped down as president and CEO of TVA Group, citing health problems, and will be temporarily replaced by Serge Gouin, head of parent outfit Quebecor Media, until a replacement is named.

Corporation opens strong stateside

PETER Vamos’ editorial in the June 7, 2004 edition of Playback (‘Why seven production centers?’) seeds the notion that the creation of a broad and diverse national production sector is clearly undermining the entire national infrastructure now that production has slowed. He suggests that Canada’s film and television industry should be returned to its ‘traditional production centers’ in Vancouver and Toronto since the relative decline of production in those regions, their lack of competitive tax-credit and equity programs, and Canadian and foreign producers electing to film their projects in other provinces have placed these regions under threat.

If progressive cultural policy is good business for the tens of thousands of producers, actors, writers, directors and crew who have en masse been contemplating alternative vocations these past few years while production has staggered, then they must all be cheering the results of the June 28 federal election.