Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 27

Calgary Herald Relocated restaurant more than worth the search Page BIO Vzsr 1 1 A-Channel Drama fund gets Canadian filmmakers '1r Jj '4 X. tart 1" 4 XJ 4 BOB BLAKEY Calgary Herald There's nothing like a treasure chest to help win friends and influence people. Because Joanne Levy controls the $i4-million A-Channel Drama Fund, budding filmmakers and screenwriters bombard her with scripts on average, about 200 a year. "They come from pretty much everywhere in Canada and sometimes they try to sneak a few from Los Angeles into my stack," Levy says, waving towards a new batch of scripts that have come in at her downtown Calgary office. "But quite frankly, unless the writer is Canadian we're in the business of creating Canadian product for televi-sioa We're not into being a branch plant for the Americans.

"We really want good Canadian stories." A-Channel had to promise the federal broadcast regulator it would spend $14 million on Canadian drama, in order to become Calgary's newest television station in 1997. The deal seems to be working. By the end of this year, the A-Channel Drama Fund will have paid out about $4 million over the past three years to produce 13 movies, with many more under consideration. Just for comparison, consider two made-in-Alberta movies that have received A-Channel backing, one recently, the other coming up in the near future. Ebenezer, with a $3-million budget, 'i starred veteran movie actor Jack Palance and reworked the traditional Charles Dickens tale A Christmas Carol It was made in 1997, for huge, prime-time network-TV audiences across North America.

Jet Boy, a still-uncast, film by Calgary screenwriter David Schultz, is about a child prostitute who seeks a better life on a journey to find his father. A risky venture that's unlikely to make U.S. prime time, Jet Boy will begin filming next month in Calgary. These budget numbers are peanuts by the standards of Hollywood, where one movie can run up bills of $100 million US without raising eyebrows. But in Canada, where numerous public and private agencies subsidize domestic movies and television, a cheque from the A-Channel fund is often enough to trigger the needed capital Once A-Channel approves a project, more money can come from Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Television Fund, as well as the CFCN Fund and the Shaw Broadcast Fund.

Of course, A-Channel gets something in payment, known in the trade as a licence fee. In return for the investment, the broadcaster acquires the rights to put the movies on its TV schedule and, in some cases, resell them to other broadcasters. The bigger the licence fee, the more control A-Channel has of the movie's fate. For the most part, A-Channel doesn't show the films first Ebenezer, for example, aired initially in Canada on CTV. Superchannel in Western Canada and The Movie Network in the East will soon debut Bad Faith, a movie by Calgarians Tom Dent-Cox and Randy Bradshaw, about a journalist (Tony Nardi) and a big-city cop (John Kape-los) who unravel a conspiracy involving a criminal (Brian Markinson).

Law Order's Michael Moriarty has a supporting role in the drama. He's also in Children of My Heart, another A-Channel-supported film, about a French-Canadian teacher (Genevieve Desilets) who stirs up controversy when she falls in love with a Metis student (Yani Gellman). See A-CI lANNEL, Page B9 fJ Lrt riJUW 1 i r- -tin 11 1 ill 11 a 1 In November, SuperChannel will air Bad Money, a Canadian film starring Graham Green, Joe Turvey and Murray Spender. The movie tells the story of a group of people who have been downsized and turn to a life of crime. In this scene, Greene takes Helen Sandor hostage.

Genevieve Desilets and Yani Gellman star in Children of my Heart. Mardi Gras for sci-fi fans Colleen's out and guessing continues (1 f1 VALERIE FORTNEY of Phantom Menace, he and his friends lined up for the blockbuster dressed as characters from the movie. He remembers attending his first Con-Version in 1985. "I finally got to meet like-minded people," he said. "Before the Internet, this was the only outlet When you're young and you think Tm the biggest geek in school' and sci-fi people generally are, when you can other like-minded people, it blows your mind.

"Oh my God. I'm not alone." Paul BushelL 28, president of the Con-Version Scciety, said when the convention first started it would draw about 100 people. Now attendance averages around 500, but some years that number rises to around 90a Tickets for Con-Version are $50 for the entire weekend, but day passes and student discounts are also available. The money goes toward the subsequent Con-Version (which costs about $10,000 to mount, Bushell said) and to charity. Last year Con-Version raised over $4,400 for the Calgary In-terfaith Foodbank.

OPINION HEATH JON McCOY Calgary Herald If you find yourself at the Metropolitan Centre in downtown Calgary this weekend, you may come face to face with the DeviL Or Darth MauL Robots. You will almost certainly meet Klingons and Vulcans, and if you're lucky, the hideous slime-drooling beast from the movie Aliens. They're familiar faces at the Conversion Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, now in its 17th year, being held Friday through Sunday. The annual event, put together by fans of sci-fi and fantasy literature, features authors Mike Resnick and Candas Jane Dorsey; fantasy artist Julia Lacquement; and scientists displaying and discussing their work as it relates to sci-fi. There are also art shows and auctions, video games and dealers' rooms where fans can get their hands on rare action figures, toys and comics.

It's a Mardi Gras for "geeks," according to proud sci-fi geek Michael McAdam, the vent's toastmaster and fan guest of honour. "There's an entire sub-culture that is normally invisible," said McAdam, 31, a local actor and a Web designer "It's made up of a high percentage of shy, quiet, people. Closeted people, because we grew up with that stigma: "Shut up, geek." The fact that there's this entire convention dedicated to people who live in their imaginations fascinates me. Tan', to me, is short for fanatic" McAdam, a self-admitted fanatic, has attended several comic book and Trekkie conventions. For the premiere could use the experience of watching Survivor to learn something about ourselves.

Using the tried-and-true science of astrology (LaToya and Dionne can't be both wrong, can here's what your choice of million-dollar winner says about your own personality: Kelly. You dont like pulling weeds, but you sure like smokin' it Your body is your temple, and it's also your canvas. You have a copy of the Kama Sutra in your nightstand, and wore Birken-stocks to your high school prom. Richard: Kids made fun of you when you were growing up, but now you're having the last laugh. You have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibralter.

But you have nice teeth. You're also a lying rat Rudy: You shop at Army Navy, and you starch your underwear. You think Gloria Steinem is a "cute chick" and your hero is Charlton Heston. Your car sports a bumper sticker that reads "Old Age and Treachery will beat out youth and skill every time." Sue: You smoke a pack a day and your closet holds several flannel shirts. You also starch your underwear.

In elementary school, you extorted lunch money from the weaker kids. You were also the champion shot-putter for your region. You too are a lying rat Sean: You have an inability to pick up social cues from others, such as rolling eyes and raspberries. You possess the sexual appeal of Jack Benny. You have a poster of Magnum Rl over your bed You shave your back hair.

If you won $1 million, you'd buy a bigger Range Rover, this one with cup whether he or any of the other sorry souls left on the island wins North America's all-time weirdest game show. I mean, it's not like after watching The Price is Right (one of my closet vices as a teenager), I would lie in bed at night and wonder, "Dear God, why did you have to let the skinny obnoxious guy from Pasadena win that washer dryer set?" Still, I find consolation in the fact that along with some of my close friends, office colleagues and e-mail correspondents, it seems that a good chunk of North America also cares very deeply about who's going to head home with the big purse. Survivorsucks.com, possibly the most popular Web site devoted to ostensibly knocking the show (they're probably sponsored by CBS), has gotten so desperate to try and help us know ahead of time who wins that they've turned to everyone from psychic LaToya Jackson and Mattel's Magic 8 Ball to some little terror described as "10-year-old Mandy Strem-pel of Whidbey Island, Washington" for help. They offer up informal polls from such well-informed sources as Mandy and a police officer named Mike Stone from North Carolina, whose guesses in the dark will somehow make the agony of uncertainty go away. Some newspapers have even gone so far as to trumpet the so-called winner, Gervase which turned out to be more likely a prank from CBS than a computer glitch on their Web site on their front page.

Since it looks like we're not going to be placated with the true answer before Aug. 23, 1 thought we as viewers Watching the third-last episode of Survivor egads, has it already been 10 weeks? I had the most horrifying thought What if Sean wins? Mr. Tm no mama's boy," the alleged doctor who uses words like "self-preservative" and who, when given a night on a yacht with a scantily-clad masseuse, can only think to ask her, "Does my ass look as bony as it feels?" But after last night's latest dispatch from Pulau Tiga, in which cute-as-a-kitten Colleen got the heave ho, it seems that the unthinkable is morph-ing into the possible. As much as I liked Colleen, it was her time to go. Thanks to an alarming weight loss and festering leg sores, she was looking less like a possible Playboy bunny and more like a candidate for an Oxfam commercial There was only one thing more horrifying for me than thinking about Sean, a proud owner of a Range Rover, having an extra mill in the bank.

It was the realization that I care at all Graot Black. Calgary Herald Michael McAdam wants you to come to this weekend's Con-Version Sci-Fi Fantasy convention..