Canadian Cities

Canadians have long been used to seeing their cities on the big screen as backdrops for Hollywood shoots here.

But with U.S. production in Canada on the wane, Canadian cities increasingly get to play themselves in homegrown theatrical dramas and comedies.

Paul Fox’s “Everything’s Gone Green,” for example, features Vancouver as Vancouver, which sits well with local screenwriter Douglas Coupland.

“So many shoots are always going on in Vancouver. You’ll see four or five in a row, and every time you die inside, as we’re never Vancouver. Instead, we’re Portland, Los Angeles or Seattle,” Coupland says.

He recalls the Vancouver street he lives on doubling in 1999 for a location in Colorado for the thriller “Double Jeopardy,” starring
Tommy Lee Jones and
Ashley Judd.

“It was out of control,” Coupland says of his hometown disguising itself for Hollywood’s benefit. In “Everything’s Gone Green,” Coupland’s ode to Vancouver, the screenwriter uses the city’s sea-to-sky beauty and expensive property market to drive the motivation of characters.

“That helped establish what the characters do, and the embryo of the city itself — real estate, grow-ops, pyramid schemes and the post-industrial economy — anything where you don’t make anything tangible,” he explains.

At the other end of the country, Atlantic Canada is disguising itself less and less as New England. Halifax, for example, plays itself in two goofball comedies: the
Ivan Reitman-produced “Trailer Park Boys: The Movie” and David Gonnella’s “A Bug and a Bag of Weed,” which used the city’s South Center Mall and Q Billiards Hall as locations.

Erik Canuel’s buddy movie “Bon Cop, Bad Cop,” which in early October became the highest-grossing Canadian movie of all time, even used its Toronto and Montreal backdrops to generate laughs. That includes a murder investigation opened after a body is found draped over a highway sign on the border dividing Quebec and Ontario.

And Ross Weber’s “Mount Pleasant” features a derelict, drug-ridden Vancouver neighborhood in which the journey of three separate couples from varying backgrounds intersect when a little girl is accidentally pricked by a poisoned discarded needle.

U.S. production here continues to slide as the rising Canadian dollar makes it too expensive for U.S. producers, who are turning to cheaper foreign locales or just decide to stay in Hollywood. Canadian provinces are fighting back by offering more financial incentives.

Roy Dupuis

Canadian Roy Dupuis has captured the best actor prize at the 19th Annual Tokyo International Film Festival for his portrayal of hockey legend Maurice Richard in the movie The Rocket.

The festival handed out its awards Sunday night, honouring the art house comedy Little Miss Sunshine with two trophies: best directing (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris) and best performance by an actress to its young lead, Abigail Breslin.

The movie, about a dysfunctional family’s trip to a beauty pageant, also won the festival’s Audience Award.

The Rocket, directed by Charles Binamé, had its theatrical release in Canada in April. Dupuis also gets a cash prize of $5,000 US ($5,600 Cdn).

The 43-year-old actor is a mainstay in Quebec television and cinema. He’s appeared in several television series such as La Femme Nikita, Scoop and The Last Chapter. He also played Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire in the 2006 film Shake Hands With The Devil.

The international jury handed the best film prize — worth $100,000 US ($112,000 Cdn) — to the French detective spoof OSS 117 Cairo Nest of Spies, starring comedian Jean Dujardin.

Surprise selection by international jury

It was considered an unexpected choice, even by the film’s director, Michel Hazanavicius.

“It is very rare for a comedy to be chosen for any prize, let alone a high honour from a film festival,” the director said in a press conference.

“I am surprised that we won, but I feel very, very honoured.”

The jury — which was led by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known for films such as Delicatessen and Amélie — defended the decision:

“I am French, I don’t want to hide from that, but I usually hate French cinema. I am a big fan of this film.”

Jury member Bill Mechanic, a former CEO of Fox, concurred.

“It was the film that all of us could join in celebrating … because it was a fun movie to watch.”

Japanese director Mitsuo Yanagimachi said he was the lone dissenter on the six-member jury.

“I do not think this film should have won the grand prize. Of the 16 films in competition that I saw, I think the Chinese, Korean and Hong Kong films were very, very strong.”
Special Jury Prize to Thirteen Princess Trees

A Special Jury Prize was given out to the Chinese movie Thirteen Princess Trees, directed by Lu Yue.

Best Japanese Picture went to the documentary The Cats of Mirikitani, directed by American Linda Hattendorf. The film centres on a homeless 80-year-old Japanese American artist who confronts his past after 9/11.

Best Asian Film went to After This Our Exile, by Patrick Tam of Hong Kong. The movie will have its North American premiere Nov. 15 at Toronto’s Reel Asian Film Festival.

The movie, starring Aaron Kwok and Charlie Yeung, follows the disintegration of a family. It marks the directorial return of Tam, once hailed as one of the pioneers of Hong Kong’s New Wave of cinema during the 1980s. Tam left directing 17 years ago to focus on film editing.

Strike!

A strike threat looms over U.S. film and TV shoots in Canada after local actors said Thursday they could form picket lines to fend off North American producers’ demands for steep pay cuts.

Negotiations on a new Independent Production Agreement between ACTRA, representing 21,000 domestic performers, and Canadian and U.S. producers broke off Wednesday, with workers urging that a mediator help end an apparent impasse.

Stephen Waddell, ACTRA’s national executive director, said the call for formal conciliation was a necessary step before he could legally poll his membership on a possible strike.

“It starts the clock,” Waddell said. “Our contract expires on December 31, and you need conciliation to terminate the contract.”

ACTRA (the Alliance of Canadian Cinema Television and Radio Artists) also has promised labor peace for producers shooting north of the border if they sign a “continuation letter” and agree to pay unionized actors higher minimum daily rates in line with current demands at the bargaining table.

Producers who sign the safe harbor document will be able to continue shooting in Canada after December 31 in the event of a strike or lockout.

A possible strike would not affect British Columbia, where producers have a separate collective agreement with the Union of British Columbia Performers.

Talks on a new production pact got off to a rocky start Monday when actors were asked to take pay cuts of 10%-25% for minimum daily rates paid on film and TV productions shot here.

The North American producers’ opening gambit also included proposed reductions in overtime rates, turnaround times and producer contributions to insurance and retirement accounts, according to ACTRA.

Waddell, whose members sought a 15% raise in minimum rates over three years for homegrown shoots and a 40% jump over five years for U.S. productions in Canada, said they will never accept a rollback agreement. He urged the North American producers to take their “wretched” demands for workplace pay and conditions off the table before negotiations could resume.

But negotiators for the producers urged ACTRA to regroup and resume negotiations, rather than lay the ground for a possible strike by formally calling for labor mediation.

“I don’t see how a mediator here will solve the problem,” said lead negotiator John Barrack, national vp of industrial relations at the Canadian Film and Television Production Assn. (CFTPA)

ACTRA’s Waddell said U.S. producers, including studio representatives from Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney, have threatened to move planned movie shoots to Vancouver or elsewhere internationally, if necessary, to back their wage and workplace demands.

Typically, studios avoid shooting where a strike or lockout is possible to avoid having to duplicate locations elsewhere in the event of disruption.

A New King of Rock

A new king of rock has knocked Elvis Presley off his throne atop Forbes magazine’s annual list of the top-earning dead celebrities.

Former Nirvana frontman and grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain gained the crown for the first time, with his estate having earned $50 million US between October 2005 and October 2006, according to the Forbes.com list revealed on Tuesday.

Cobain’s rise pushed rock ‘n’ roll legend Presley, who earned $42 million US, down to second place. Presley had topped the list since its inception six years ago.

According to Forbes, Cobain’s top ranking was due to widow Courtney Love’s decision to sell a 25 per cent stake of the Nirvana song catalog to New York music publishing company Primary Wave.

The company, “which paid a reported $50 million for its stake, has already struck a deal to feature Nirvana music in an episode of CSI: Miami. Now it is considering licensing the music to certain marketers,” according to Forbes.

Listed at third place is Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, whose estate made $35 million US in 2005 from the popular comic strip’s syndication in 2,400 newspapers worldwide and from licensing Snoopy, Charlie Brown and their friends for everything from T-shirts to stamps.

Altogether, Forbes named 13 iconic celebrities to the list, with the baker’s dozen collectively earning $247 million US in the past six months. This year’s list is:

* Kurt Cobain
* Elvis Presley
* Charles M. Schulz
* John Lennon
* Albert Einstein
* Andy Warhol
* Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
* Ray Charles
* Marilyn Monroe
* Johnny Cash
* J. R. R. Tolkien
* George Harrison
* Bob Marley

To compile the list, the magazine tallied how much a dead celebrity’s estate made in the 12-month period. Typically, revenue comes from continuing sales (e.g. for Johnny Cash’s recent posthumous album), new deals involving their work and rights to use their name or likeness on merchandise or in advertising campaigns.

ThinkFilm

Indie distributor ThinkFilm, the company behind such edgy fare as Oscar-winning documentary “Born into Brothels” and current real-sex release “Shortbus,” has been snapped up by a pair of Los Angeles entrepreneurs for about $25 million.

David Bergstein and Ron Tutor’s holding company Capco Group also assumed several million dollars in debt from ThinkFilm as part of the deal, which had been widely rumored for about five months. ThinkFilm was co-founded five years ago by Jeff Sackman, who will remain CEO. Bergstein will become chairman.

Capco bought London-based film financing and sales outfit Capitol Films in January. Capitol has handled such films as “Gosford Park,” “Ghost World” and the upcoming “Alpha Dog.”

All Capitol films budgeted at less than $20 million will be distributed domestically via ThinkFilm, while most of Capitol’s larger titles will continue to be sold to U.S. studios. ThinkFilm, which has traditionally acquired films for distribution, also will begin producing more projects.

“ThinkFilm was the most inexpensive way into the U.S. market,” Bergstein said.

Executives at ThinkFilm will retain their titles and their New York and Toronto offices for the foreseeable future. The companies might merge to form a new entity, but there are no plans for that at the moment, Sackman said.

Telefilm Canada

Telefilm Canada has announced a number of changes to the Canadian Feature Film Fund, with the hope that the new guideline tweaks will help bolster the homegrown moviemaking industry.

Unveiled on Monday and set to go into effect in 2007-2008, the changes emerged from consultations with two working groups — one for the English-language market and one for the French — who met and discussed the realities in each filmmaking industry.

The two groups included filmmakers, producers, distributors, exhibitors, guild or union representatives, broadcasters and government figures.

The collaboration helped to ensure that Telefilm’s fund “is more efficient and effective, responds to the specific needs of the English- and French-language markets and continues to support a diversity of films,” Wayne Clarkson, the federal funding agency’s executive director, said in a statement.

English, French markets each have own issues

The homegrown movie industry continues to be unbalanced, with English Canadian films still making up only about one per cent of the domestic box office, while French Canadian films account for a bit more than 25 per cent of Quebec’s box office.

Because of the vastly different markets, each side has had its own struggles.

Among the changes to the English CFFF guidelines:

* The top 15 per cent of films earning a minimum of $500,000 at the box office will now be eligible for support from the fund’s production performance envelope system — money set aside specifically to fund movie production. Currently, a movie must hit the $1 million mark before its filmmakers and producers can access the funding envelopes.
* A new development envelope has been created to support moviemakers who are successful at the box office but who are just shy of reaching the requirements for the performance-based funding.
* Feature-length documentaries can now qualify for the performance funding, up to $1 million.
* Distribution companies no longer have to earmark a minimum of $500,000 for marketing before getting support. Qualifying companies with a variety of marketing budgets will receive funding for their efforts.

These changes are intended to spur new players to join the industry.

Funding stretched thin among Quebec successes

On the French side, homegrown films have had much greater success but a major sticking point in the industry is the performance-based funding — where the production company and filmmaker behind a box office success win a large share of funding for subsequent projects.

An assembly of high-profile directors, including Robert Lepage and Léa Pool, signed an open letter this summer criticizing Telefilm for the funding distribution. They charged that too much money was ending up in the hands of just a few blockbuster filmmakers.

Telefilm’s French-language CFFF changes include:

* The reduction of the performance-based envelope from 12 projects to five.
* A pre-company, pre-year cap of $3.5 million to both the performance and selective funding envelopes, so as to promote greater equality in financial distribution.
* The introduction of an as-yet-unspecified cash prize — to be presented as part of Quebec’s annual film honours, the Jutra Awards — to recognize the writer and director of the Quebec film that scores the year’s best box office earnings.

Telefilm’s Clarkson pointed to several recent successes — Deepa Mehta’s Water, the hit bilingual film Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Trailer Park Boys: The Movie — as indicators that Canada’s movie industry is “on a kind of cinematic roll.”

Water is Canada’s official submission for consideration for best foreign language film at the upcoming Academy Awards, while Bon Cop, Bad Cop and the Trailer Park Boys have set new domestic records at the box office.

“The best part is we still have a lot of good movies to come this year,” he said.

Reel Asian International Film Festival

The latest films from Asia and the Asian diaspora worldwide will be featured in Toronto next month during the 10th annual Reel Asian International Film Festival.

This year’s event will unspool 76 contemporary feature-length and short films from 17 different countries around the globe, including China, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines.

After This, Our Exile, director Patrick Tam’s first feature in 17 years, will open this year’s festival. The film premiered earlier this month at film festivals in Rome and South Korea (Pusan International Film Festival).

Starring former pop star and actor Aaron Kwok, the gritty film tells the story of a former playboy turned delinquent father whose gambling addiction slowly tears his family apart.

Other films in this year’s 10th anniversary program include:

* Journey From the Fall, the award-winning U.S.-made drama inspired by the true story of a family whose members, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, are split between prison camps and a new life as refugees in the U.S.
* Little Red Flowers, Chinese director Zhang Yuan’s story about a precocious four-year-old who fights against conformity in his straitlaced boarding school.
* What’s Wrong With Frank Chin?, a documentary about the cantankerous but pioneering Asian-American playwright, writer, lecturer and activist.

Instead of one feature, the closing night gala will be a program of shorts from Canadian directors, including Howe Shiva and Ann Marie Fleming.

The 10th annual Reel Asian International Film Festival runs Nov. 15 through 19 in theatres throughout downtown Toronto.

Rome film festival

A Russian film described as a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has captured the top prize at the inaugural Rome Film Festival.

Playing the Victim, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, centres on a young student who takes the job of playing dead people in police reconstructions at crime scenes. While going about his morbid task, he has a vision in which his late father reveals to him how he died.

“This film is a film for Russia and for Russians because we still believe that cinema can change people’s way of thinking and their consciences,” Serebrennikov said in his acceptance speech.

“I think my film is an artistic portrayal of what is passing through the minds of people in Russia today: terror, hope, insecurity.”

Serebrennikov is a respected theatre director in Russia. His film topped 16 others in contention.

Skinhead film based on director’s life

The special jury prize was handed to British director Shane Meadows for This Is England, about a young boy who becomes involved with skinheads. The story, set in 1983, takes a page from Meadows’s own experience as a troubled teenager who dropped out of school.

“I thank the jury because the subject matter of the film is not something easy to vote for,” said Meadows at the awards ceremony in Rome on Saturday night.

Meadows found lead actor Thomas Turgoose, 13, at a project for disadvantaged children in Grimsby, England. The director said Turgoose had “all the odds stacked up heavily against him.”

“Twelve months ago, the young actor in this film was going through a dramatic period in his life and had no chances. A year later, he is getting a prize … that could change his life.”

Other winners include Ariane Ascaride of France as best actress for her role in the drama Armenia, directed by Robert Guediguian.

Search for ailing father

Armenia, co-written by the actress, follows a young woman from Marseille, France, as she travels to the Caucasus in search of her ailing father who had wanted to see his native Armenia before he died.

Italy’s Giorgio Colangeli was honoured as best actor for the film L’Aria Salata by Alessandro Angelini. The film is about a prison social worker who encounters his estranged father behind bars.

“This award is shared with the director and all the cast. It’s a good sign for new talent,” Colangeli said.

The jury consisted of 50 moviegoers drawn from the public and headed by veteran Italian film director Ettore Scola.

The nine-day festival began with a lifetime achievement award for Sean Connery, best known for his portrayal of James Bond.

Nicole Kidman premiered her movie Fur, loosely based on the life of photographer Diane Arbus, at the festival.

Quebec

The Quebec government is counting on a new deal with big-budget movie producer Joel Silver to kick-start the province’s film industry.

Societe generale de financement du Quebec, the provincial government’s investment arm, is spending $18 million Cdn in a deal with the producer of both The Matrix and Lethal Weapon series on a a project it hopes will bring $170 million in investment back to the province.

The investment is part of a larger $270-million financing deal arranged by Wall Street investor CIT Group to fund 15 movies over six years created by Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures.

Six of these movies will be filmed in Quebec, according to the deal.

“We are pleased to join in the financing of this exciting project for Quebec’s movie sector,” SGF president and general manager Pierre Shedleur said in a release.

“The benefits for Quebec will be significant, in terms of the effect on the economy, technological development and the know-how of our industry’s artists and experts.”

SGF said the project will bring total investment of $170 million for Quebec, or about $28 million per film shot in the province. It will also generate total wages of $53 million and revenues of $12.4 million for the government of Quebec, they said.

The announcement comes less than a week after Quebec Culture Minister Line Beauchamp called on increased involvement from the private sector to help fund film in the province.

“I urge all the principal players in the film industry to join with us in imagining a new business model, which, while being based largely on the public investment, will call upon the private sector more,” Beauchamp said last Thursday.

On June 15, Telefilm announced it had funded just seven films in Quebec this year, two English and five in French.

The new project also signals a change in the way Hollywood producers are doing business, as Silver is the latest to get his funding from Wall Street rather than the Hollywood Studios. The deal gives him creative control over the projects and ownership of the movies outright.

Canadian director Ivan Reitman struck a similar deal worth almost $230 million with Merrill Lynch in August and Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner are reportedly in discussions with potential investors following their split with Paramount Pictures.

The first film under the deal is expected to be an action thriller called Whiteout, according to Hollywood industry publication Variety. The film is based on Greg Rucka’s novel about a U.S. marshal in Antarctica tracking a serial killer.

The Biz

An independent film, by definition, is a film made with money from outside the studio system — which means that so-called independent films produced by the majors are flying under false colors. As far as the studios are concerned, they’re really the B movies of yesteryear packaged for today.

“In this formulation, B pictures are the ones independent producers like me care most about, and this hedged bet works in our favor: fewer executives are meddling because the studio’s risk is lower.” So writes producer Christine Vachon in “A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond.” Vachon’s Killer Films group has nurtured some of the more memorable films of recent years: “The Notorious Bettie Page,” “Mrs. Harris,” “Infamous,” “One Hour Photo,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Kids.”

Killer has made some not-so-memorable films, too, such as “Chelsea Walls” and “Party Monster.” Which just goes to show — well, that things don’t always work out the way they’re planned.

Doubling as a reader-friendly textbook for budding filmmakers, Vachon’s reminiscences spin sobering yarns about all the things that can go wrong in the process of making a movie. Actors attach, detach, reattach. With them, the money comes and goes, but it usually goes. Sympathetic executives wind up moving on or getting fired or getting development deals (“You don’t have to be
Tom Cruise to snag one; even
Seann William Scott has a production company with a bungalow”) before they can do your project the good it needs. Other executives come in and undo their predecessors’ decisions, particularly if they were positive ones. And so on.

The hardest thing to accomplish, Vachon writes, is getting a film greenlighted, especially in Hollywood, where the lights are on perpetual amber. By her account, too, it’s getting harder to get anyone to remember that art is supposed to enter into filmmaking somewhere along the line. After all, even the farm reports print boxoffice figures, though they might not always know what they’re printing: It’s not big news when such studio blockbusters as “The Matrix Reloaded” or “The Hulk” hit 3,600 screens, but it sure is when a quiet little indie film like “Napoleon Dynamite” makes it to 1,000.

Film, Vachon insists, is about process, not margins. It’s supposed to be about making something memorable and worth watching, even when things don’t work out the way they’re planned, even when the results seem strange. (“Left field is where most of us live,” she writes.) Think “Velvet Goldmine,” a Killer film that seemed to baffle viewers but that was definitely worth seeing, even if few filmgoers saw it. Or think “Infamous,” a film about Truman Capote that, for many reasons, got scooped by “Capote”; Vachon’s sometimes funny but mostly excruciating tale of how that happened ought to inspire readers to see both films.

Along the way, Vachon instructs. Professing to be amazed by would-be filmmakers who know almost nothing about filmmaking, she holds that anyone who wants to enter its sphere has to know everything about film, or at least be willing to learn. Among her own specialties is the fine art of staving off financial disaster, so she holds forth on what bond companies do and why it’s a bad thing when they come to the set. Her notes on unapproved overages ought to be required reading in film school, as should her warnings about how awful
Sundance Film Festival parties are.

There are more lessons, on a very human scale. Vachon is not above a little informed gossip, which is, after all, the coin of the realm. She tells tales about the curious ways of movie stars, who are very strange creatures with very strange requirements. She tells still more tales about tantrums and threats and pushes come to shove over such things as who gets the bigger trailer and top billing. Some of those tales involve very well-known directors, actors, agents and studio heads. It’s a terrible thing to see people be so lavishly rewarded for behaving badly, she laments — to which her partner replies, “You are so in the wrong business.”

Not so. Vachon’s book is a valuable primer for anyone wanting to make a place on either side of the camera. Wisely, she knows to laugh at herself, and it’s an entertainment, too.