According to the filmmakers, nothing really compares to Nothing. ‘It has things in it I don’t think anyone’s really done before,’ says director Vincenzo Natali.
The premise of the feature, currently shooting in Toronto, might sound familiar enough: the codependent and anti-social Andrew (Andrew Miller) and David (David Hewlett) room together in a grimy house and their friendship becomes the focal point of their world.

Having had success with the pilot for the political comedy Rideau Hall, which aired on CBC in January, Halifax-based Topsail Entertainment is busy producing the first full season of the series, six half-hours for the public broadcaster.
The series, shooting in Halifax Aug. 5 to Sept. 6 and slated to debut Oct. 11, is penned by Made in Canada writers Ed Macdonald, Alex Ganetakos and Bob Martin. Directors Allan Nicholls (Saturday Night Live), Ron Murphy (Gavin Crawford Show) and Michael Kennedy (Kids in the Hall) will helm two episodes each.

For the first time in its recent history, well-traveled prodco Summerhill Entertainment is staying close to home, and shooting its newest series at a nearby bar. The Toronto company – best known for its Canadian Geographic Presents series on Discovery – begins production this month on 65 half-hour eps of Out of Bounds…with John Oakley.

Vancouver: Local crews can count on dogs and murderers to keep the slow summer from being truly beastly.
Air Bud: Buddy Spikes Back is the fifth installment in the family film franchise. In this one, the golden retriever expands his athletic repertoire – which already includes basketball, football, soccer and baseball – to volleyball. He also gets dognapped, and the kids have to save him and the bumbling crooks are foiled and all that, too.

TVA Films (formerly TVA International) has entered joint ventures with Christal Films Distribution in Quebec to create Topaze Communications and Lions Gate Films in English Canada to create JV Media. Working with its partners, TVA continues to oversee the distribution of theatrical, video/DVD and television product, contrary to a report in the July 22 issue of Playback, ‘Media giants go up and down.’

Bollywood/Hollywood, the latest feature by director Deepa Mehta, will open the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival’s Perspective Canada program, which is marked by healthy numbers of returning filmmakers, directorial debuts, East Coast productions and documentaries.
Bollywood/Hollywood combines elements of Indian and U.S. cinema in a musical comedy about an Indo-Canadian dot-com millionaire (Rahul Khanna) who hires an escort (Lisa Ray) to act as his Indian bride to appease his family. David Hamilton produced the film, reportedly budgeted around $2 million. The film is a departure for Mehta, coming on the heels of dramas Earth and Fire. When production on the third film of that trilogy, Water, ground to a halt in India, Mehta decided to return to Toronto and make the comedy. She insists the decision was neither an about-face following the sometimes-violent reception to her films in her Indian homeland nor a reaction to the global mood following 9/11.

The kitchen and living room bring slacker living to new extremes. The low-ceiling squalor, perfumed with smoke, is adorned with Christmas tree lights, bubble wrap, police tape and computer mouses dangling from the walls. The refrigerator is decorated with fragmented pictures of pinup girls, and the bread in the toaster looks like it’s been there a week. The furniture and greasy, paint-chipped appliances are littered with plastic plates, comics and candy jars. Next to the living room window, a turtle tries vainly to escape the confines of an aquarium.
Welcome to the world of Nothing’s David and Andrew (David Hewlett and Andrew Miller), a pair of outcasts who want to wish the rest of the world away. A calamitous occurrence ensues and they achieve that desire – the world they inhabit becomes an ever-expanding physical void, and at a certain point all the viewer will see is selected body parts against a white background. The producer, Toronto’s 49th Parallel Films, describes the comedic buddy film, budgeted at a reported US$4 million, as ‘Withnail and I in space.’ Director Vincenzo Natali calls it ‘low-end Beckett.’

Playback is scouring the Canadian industry for novel approaches to production financing that sidestep the Canadian Television Fund. Plan B will be a semi-regular, ongoing feature that profiles the people, strategies, ideas, conflicts and successes that prove that Canadian production can thrive without government handouts.

In a business dependent on personal reputation and contacts, Apple Box Productions took a major blow when four core personnel including executive producers J.J. Lyons, Claire (Cash) Cashman and Jane Charles-Shaw resigned in quick succession through the spring.
But ABP’s loss was The Park City Film Company’s gain as the group reemerged this summer as founding partners of the new prodco with offices in Toronto and Vancouver. Park City also includes head of sales Cheryl Munroe.
While conventional thinking may call into question the wisdom of launching such a venture in the midst of a commercial production recession, the new Park City crew also wonders what they were thinking.

Evelyn Arthur, whose Bedlam Films was shelved in the spring after a little over a year in business, has picked up where she left off with a new venture, Wire.
Like her previous prodco, Wire is backed by The Partners’ Film Company head Don McLean. But this time around, Arthur is going it alone, having parted ways with Bedlam partner Jennie Montford.
‘All I’ll say is some things work and some things don’t,’ says Arthur about her former partnership.
Also coming over from Bedlam is helmer Patrick Sherman of Toronto, on the heels of his award-winning spot ‘Recital’ for Panasonic No Skip CD Player.

Stanley Mestel, 65, one of the country’s most distinguished commercial cinematographers, died in a boating accident near his cottage on Lake Couchiching, ON, May 17.

This year Alliance Atlantis weighs in light with only seven Primetime Emmy nominations for two productions, a departure from last year’s showing that saw the Canadian media giant dominate among its American counterparts with 27 noms for six different productions.
‘Last year, about half of our nominations were for the Judy Garland miniseries,’ says Seaton McLean, president, production at Alliance Atlantis. ‘And we didn’t have a miniseries that was eligible this year.’

Vancouver: Citytv’s launch in Vancouver July 22 may not be giving existing stations static today, but could be a real threat in five to 10 years – especially when it comes to news and local programming, says a local analyst.
Formerly CKVU, Citytv caters to Vancouverites aged 18 to 34, viewers not well served by older-skewing stations BCTV Global, BC-CTV and CBC, says David Stanger of DBA Baron, a media buying and planning company.
‘It takes five years for a newscast to mature and an audience to settle in,’ says Stanger, explaining that a station’s personality is defined by local programming like news. ‘[Citytv Vancouver] captures the under-30 crowd that is looking for something to call their own instead of embracing their parents’ newscast. That’s what they did in Toronto 25 years ago. [Citytv] has the opportunity to become tomorrow’s adult newscast.’

Toronto-based director Jordan Patriquin joined Hero earlier this summer. Patriquin rose through the ranks in Toronto’s commercial production industry, starting as a production assistant and working his way up to director. While establishing himself, Patriquin wrote, produced and directed spec spots for Surfline.com, Visa and Kaos High Test Lemonade. Most recently, he completed a spot for Senior Tours Canada, operator of escorted tours for the mature traveler.

After 30 years in advertising, veteran commercial director Bill Irish, 65, has tried to retire a few times, but to the industry’s good fortune, his wife keeps telling him to get out of her kitchen.
In addition to creating a series of four-foot by five-foot paintings and writing a book about Canadian heroes, Irish takes to the director’s chair again with some longtime friends at Avion Films in Toronto.