Barna-Alper Productions is partway through its latest series, and will soon wrap the six-week shoot of its serio-comic Show Me Yours, an 8 x 30 show slated to air this summer on Showcase.
Rachel Crawford (The Ride, Traders) and Adam Harrington (Out of Order, Jeremiah) star as a psychologist and biologist, respectively, who must overcome their differences to co-author a book about sex.

The news came as a one-two punch. First, on Dec. 10, Alliance Atlantis Communications announced it was cutting its entertainment branch in half, jettisoning some 70 of the 150 people in its entertainment division, including top execs Seaton McLean and Peter Sussman, and that it was ‘reviewing’ the dollars and cents of its production efforts. Ka-pow.
A few days later came the details, that the media giant was shutting down its Oscar-winning Salter Street Films – as well as offices in Vancouver, Edmonton and London – and that, with few exceptions, it was getting out of the film and TV production game altogether. Socko.

Sank like a cinder block. Gone the way of the dodo. Fell off the radar. These are the phrases that spring to mind when one thinks of the Lincoln report. It has been seven months since parliament’s standing committee on Heritage, headed by MP Clifford Lincoln, issued its five-pound, 900-page thinkpiece about the state of this country’s broadcasting system – more than half a year since it made nearly 100 recommendations to Ottawa about what the industry needs and needs to do if it is to serve Canadians through this century.

It took a move away from the Toronto International Film Festival, and in fact a move away from Canada altogether, to make Noah Cowan the perfect candidate for codirector and eventually director of TIFF.

If the sponsorship rates it is charging are any indication, CTV must have very high hopes indeed for Canadian Idol 2, which is seeking ‘through the roof’ prices for the second run of its summer-long talent show, according to media buyers.

The Canadian Media Guild has been chosen as the sole body to represent the interests of most CBC employees, winning over the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union in a hotly contested election last month. The results, announced Dec. 15, showed the CMG with 2,542 votes compared to 1,717 for the CEP.

The fate of Canada’s woebegone film and television sector is in the hands of three new federal cabinet ministers, including an unknown who is now in charge of Canadian culture.

In what should provide a major boost to the Oscar buzz surrounding The Barbarian Invasions, Denys Arcand’s latest was nominated for a Golden Globe on Dec. 18 in the foreign-language film category. The Golden Globes, awarded each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is thought to be a strong indicator of what films will be considered Oscar worthy.

French-language features may dominate the Canadian box office, but not critics’ opinions, at least according to Canada’s Top Ten 2003, announced in December. The alphabetical listing of the year’s best Canuck movies, an initiative of the Toronto International Film Festival, includes seven English-language films and three French.

Norman Jewison’s The Statement brought in $40,000 in the 10 days following its Dec. 12 release on three Toronto screens.

Spending on Canadian news and information programming was up about 36% between 1998 and 2002, while spending on drama and comedy programming among the English- and French-language private and public broadcasters was up only 11%, according to the fourth annual Broadcasting Policy Monitoring Report from the CRTC.
The 134-page report, designed to measure the effectiveness of CRTC broadcast policy, shows that drama and comedy spending by private English-language television networks dropped 20% between 1998 and 2002 to $58.6 million.

A reduction in the number of active productions underway at Montreal’s CineGroupe means a reduction in the workforce, affecting both contract employees and full-time staff employees.

Telefilm Canada has reorganized its management by language to reflect the fact that in Canada, French-language film and television is far more successful than English.

FilmOntario goes to L.A.

Vancouver: The seven bidders vying to transform B.C.’s Knowledge Network into a self-sustaining public-private partnership will know later this month if they’ve made the short list.