One of the best things about the Banff TV festival is the lunches. Not because the food is good – although it occasionally is – but because guest speakers come and say some very interesting things. This as opposed to Banff breakfast sessions, where guest speakers may be saying interesting things, but I’m still in bed, if only in my mind. This year, the lunches were no different.

Bruiser Dolph Lundgren and director Sidney Furie are expected to wrap the four-week shoot of Direct Action – now underway in Hamilton, ON for GFT Entertainment – by the end of the month, and will soon hand the action feature over to editor Saul Pincus.
It is the second time GFT has paired Lundgren with the Toronto-born helmer, following last fall’s production of the low-budget punch-up Detention, also shot in Steeltown.

More than 12,000 short film lovers came out for the Canadian Film Centre’s 2003 Worldwide Short Film Festival, held June 3-8 in Toronto, an attendance increase of 20% from the 2002 edition.

Montreal: It’s been a more than auspicious first month on the job for Montreal Film Commissioner Daniel Bissonnette. Taking over from Andre Lafond, Bissonnette is overseeing a flurry of U.S. productions, starting with the new Martin Scorsese film The Aviator, a big-budget biopic about eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.
The film is in preprod at Mel’s Cite du Cinema/Technoparc, where four soundstages have been booked, and at the Alstom Canada rail yards. Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, plays Hughes and is one of the film’s producers.

Vancouver: The B.C. Film Commission’s list, at press time, was looking a wee bit thin – given that we are supposed to be in the peak of the production season.
The June 11 roster of productions lists 12 features such as I, Robot and Riddick, one miniseries (10.5), three MOWs, including Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, and eight series, among them the surprise seventh season of CTV’s Cold Squad. That’s 24 titles at a time when Vancouver is usually hosting upwards of 40 titles.

It seems fitting with Canada’s new tolerance for pot smoking that Halifax’s After Dark Productions is currently in development on its first feature, A Bug and a Bag of Weed.
According to After Dark’s Chris Cuthbertson, the film is about three computer store salesmen who inherit a hockey bag full of marijuana from a wild high school friend. Not knowing what else to do with it, they decide to sell the pot using sales tactics learned in their store, and eventually wind up selling it from the store.

CineGroupe’s new Pinocchio ready to fly

‘The death of drama.’ We have all heard of that supposed inevitability. But looking at Playback’s 2003 ’10 to Watch’ – emerging Canuck directors, writers and actors – one would think that aspirations to excellence in audiovisual storytelling have not waned at all. Despite the recent drop in drama and comedy production, the wellspring of talent that emanates from this country evidently can’t be held back.

Canadian television needs $30 million per year, continued political support, better promotion, and looser regulations in order to boost viewership of English-language drama, according to a report by veteran broadcaster Trina McQueen.
The long-awaited study, one of three released late last month by the CRTC, argues that building audiences is the best way to bolster Canuck drama and calls for significant changes to the system, including more public funds and a complete overhaul of the ‘hideous’ Canadian Television Fund. McQueen was commissioned to study the drama slump by the CRTC and Telefilm Canada.

The CRTC will be asked to rethink its 1999 Television Policy in a forthcoming report from parliament’s committee on Canadian Heritage.
‘There is a very strong belief, shared by the committee, that the CRTC has to look very carefully at the TV policy,’ says MP Wendy Lill, one of the 104 committee members. ‘There has to be a change… There has to be a spending requirement on Canadian content.’
The two-year study is expected to be released at the Banff Television Festival and will make ‘very strong recommendations’ about foreign ownership and the controversial CRTC regs, which many blame for the slump in Canadian drama.

Acrobats, sassy hoteliers, plastic surgeons and morticians jockeyed for position with Mafia bosses and killer puppets, as the first of Canada’s major broadcasters announced their fall programming lineups for the ’03/04 season.
In recent weeks, CTV, Alliance Atlantis Communications, CBC and CHUM all revealed their schedules and programming strategies for the coming year. Lineups for CanWest Global, Corus Entertainment and Craig Media were not available before press time.

Despite outpacing the overall growth of Canadian content produced in the last six years and reaching $420 million in production in 2001/02, the Canadian documentary industry is faced with filling more commissioned TV hours on lower budgets. This is the ultimate theme of a report obtained by Playback titled ‘Getting Real,’ to be released at the Banff Television Festival by the Documentary Organization of Canada.

To jumpstart its stalled application to change advertising policy at the CRTC, the Canadian Cable Television Association is sweetening its offer, which could generate up to $10 million per year for the beleaguered Canadian Television Fund.

The deal between Toronto’s Alliance Atlantis Communications and Hollywood-based video and film asset management service Point.360 for the purchase of AAC’s post-production houses Tattersall Casablanca, Salter Digital and Calibre Digital Pictures has been scuttled.

Alliance Atlantis Communications has reason to feel vindicated regarding its two-part miniseries production Hitler: The Rise of Evil, which drew strong ratings on U.S. television.