Great Balls Of Fire!

Sorry Ladies (ed. and sensitive men) but this heat gets to me! If only I could store it up and use it in the winter when the apartment is frigid.

Anyway, as I type in front of the open fridge (ed. He doesn't pay for electricity and there's really only condiments in there anyway), it's time to see what's happening in the neighborhood. The Halifax TV/Film neighborhood, that is. My editor, as usual is my pal Lunchmeat Harold (ed. Howdy)

So Sam Elliot (ed. apparently his moustache has it's own trailer) was/is in town to shoot a film. Along with Karen Allen (ed. Lord, she be the apple in my eye forever!). I'm not sure what they were working on but apparently they were in the valley and drank a lot of coffee.

And Sarah Polley (ed. smart and hot!) is in Louisberg shooting a feature film with Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman. I, I, I never imagined any two of these being in a Louisberg setting shooting a film. What the hell is that? A time machine, foul languaged comedy that will make us cry?

Meanwhile I believe Haven has finished on the south shore, based on the fact it's airing on some Canadian station. Not seen it. And the same company that produced that Big Motion picture has started filming Meet Phil Fitz II after the successful screening of the first series on The Movie Network (ed. Actually they haven't aired yet.) But the always charming and always Canadian Jason Priestly is back, hopefully this time they will assign him a driver and not subject the elderly populace of Wolfville to his NASCAR type shenanigans.

"That's So Weird" was taped in front of a CBC crew this summer. Some kids show with a bunch of Toronto people who will be "Nova Scotian" for a crucial time of their lives. (ed. not puberty, he means the "end of the year" wink, wink)

The South Shore sound stage has apparently imploded (ed. Not literally) From what I can gather the Gov't put a bunch of money into building a soundstage near/in/on Shelburne because that would draw...millionaire producers, somehow. (ed. If you build it, they will come.) But apparently no one came. (ed. Except Virginia's Run and Eternal Kiss).

The story in a nutshell (ed. where it belongs) is this. The gov't put a bunch of money into the soundstage (ed. millions) because everybody would want to make a movie there. No one wanted to make a movie there. (ed. long story short). The gov't put it up for sale. Two CFA's (ed. with no soundstage/film experience) offered to buy it. The gov't said yes, you're American, you must know better than us. They "bought" it but didn't spend a dime of their own money. For several years they didn't pay the mortgage, they didn't pay taxes and they listed the property (ed. cut up in chuncks) on eBay for sale for more than they "paid" for it. (ed. Shout out to Frank for the info.) And now they've declared bankruptcy. Sigh.

Anyway, I went looking over the CMF results for the last Quarter ending March 31, 2010. this is money that you (ed. not us, we don't pay for cable) pays into a fund to help Canadian companies develop and produce Canadian shows. Locally, Halifax Film (DHX) received $1.7 Million dollars for Pirates II (ed. This isn't the paper machee head things, is it?). So my company (ed. the writer owns 1000 shares of DHX) may not have produced much last year but let's look forward, shall we? (ed. rhetorical, but yes, let's!)

For development funds DHX received $54,811 for "That's So Weird", $30,000 for "Boy Comedy" for Teletoon (ed. I'm hoping that's a working title) , "Big Monster Show" $51,910. (ed. I hope that's a - ) Never mind! And there's also "The Nation" for CTV $39,648. (ed. What the - ? ) So good news is that "we've" developed some shows without touching our $70M reserve. And we've cut a lot of the lower level grunt workers to reduce costs, and assigned a lot of salaries and overhead to the CBC. So let's stay in there for the long run people. We're still selling that jungle show to Equador so don't panic and drive the stock price down!

In other CMF results - The Candy Show (APTN) received $183,000, Jonathan Torrens Show received $202,000, and The Halifax Comedy Fest received $137,000 and $194,000. (ed., what the - double dipping?). the Trailer Park Boys, without Mike Clattenburg (ed. Let's see how that goes in the Showcase/Global world), received $853,000. (ed. You know, them boys seem to live high off the hog.)

And in other news, the Picnicface comedy troop which I projected great things of, years ago (go ahead check my archives) (ed. Yeah, guys like you are coming out of the closet now) are filming their first feature film "Rollertown" in the next week or so. But they say they don't have enough money and are raising funds via donations and goofy fundraising things. I thought it was all publicity but one of them was quoted as saying they don't really have enough money to complete the anticipated post-production. But would producer Bill Niven go into production knowing he didn'y have enough money to deliver a finished project? Would Telefilm commit funds knowing that? Ah, who knows. It's too hot.

I'm tired and sweaty. Still have to talk about the Atlantic Film Festival (ed. AFF) Geminis and other stuff soon.