The Leader-Post from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada • 31

Cl The Leader-Post Regina Oct. 6, 1988 Entertainment 9 Filming to resume on Bethune NBC loses on coverage of Olympics ning News was second with a 9.8 and 20. NBC Nightly News, pre-empted on the West Coast by Olympics had a 9.6 and 21. Jmf day, as did ABCs made-for-TV movie Liberace. Those four shows made up the rest of the top 10.

ABCs World News Tonight won in the news Nielsens with a rating of 10.0 and a 20 share. The CBS Eve- THISWEEfy lC ta Home of the Blues" JOE KELLEY from Chicago I Jf L- 1 i i 3 li XX i 'i NEW YORK (AP) NBCs coverage of the Summer Olympics dominated two weeks of prime time but concluded Sunday with an average rating below the guarantee NBC gave advertisers, and that will cost the TV network millions. NBC, which paid more than $300 million US for the rights to the Olympics, wont comment on the loss, but the Wall Street Journal reported the network will have to give as much as $70 million in commercial time to advertisers who didnt get as high a rating as they were promised. The 15 nights of Olympics coverage from Seoul not counting the opening and closing ceremonies averaged a 17.9 rating. NBC had promised advertisers 21.2.

The 1984 summer games on ABC had averaged 23.2. Each rating point represents 904,000 U.S. households with televisions. NBC began giving advertisers free spots during the second week of the Olympics. A 30-second spot during prime-time coverage cost $330,000.

Nevertheless, six nights of Olympics coverage took up six places in the top 10 in the A.C. Nielsen ratings for the week ending Oct. 2 and gave NBC a decisive win for the week with a 17.5 rating to ABCs 12.3 and CBSs 11.2. CBS and ABC rebounded against the Olympics on Sunday when the closing ceremonies had a lowly 12.3 rating. NBC had expected closer to 20.0.

CBSs 60 Minutes, Murder, She Wrote and the theatrical movie Cocoon out-rated the Olympics on Sun r' jOBE teatre 1801 Scarth Street, Regina Presents ROMEO and JULIET by William Shakespeare OCTOBER 15-29 Sun. thru Thurs. 7:30 p.m. Fri. Sat.

8:00 p.m. Oct. 23 Matinee 2:00 p.m. Sponsored by Hoechst LsJ BOX OFFICE 525-9553 CP Laserphoto Weekend Special $48oo per night (single or double) INDOOR POOL WHIRLPOOL SAUNA FINE DINING Close to Winnipeg StadiumArena Polo Park Shopping Centre Airliner Inn 1740 Ellice Avenue Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (204) 775-7131 Donald Sutherland will soon return to his lead role in the production of Bethune: The Making of a Hero By The Canadian Press Saved from production limbo where it has floated for a year, Bethune: The Making of a Hero is scheduled to resume filming in Montreal later this month. The star, Donald Sutherland, and the director, Phillip Borsos, remain the same, but the delay has meant that French actress Jane Birkin will not be available to play Frances Campbell Penney, whom Bethune thrice married and twice divorced.

But finding an English-speaking actress from a European country on short notice should be a cinch compared with what the Bethune project has already survived. The $16-million movie and miniseries, based on the life of the Canadian surgeon who became a hero of the Chinese Revolution, hit major snags during its four-month shoot in China last year, and it could not resume filming because the budget was overspent. The Canada-China-France co-production was plagued by a bitter dispute between Sutherland and writer Ted Allan over the personality of Bethune, and by differences between the Canadians and the Chinese in historical interpretation. At the nadir of this troubled movie-making saga, it seemed that Filmlines Nicolas Clermont and Pieter Kroonenberg, the Canadian producers who led the co-production, might even lose the project. But additional money has been found, and a calm and almost buoyant Clermont is preparing to resume work.

Ahead is a four-week shoot to recreate Bethunes early days in Montreal, followed by two weeks of filming in Spain for some Spanish Civil War footage. Clermont foresees a mid-December wrap and is talking confidently about having the movie ready for the Cannes Film Festival in May. The producers had to show a rough-cut of the China footage to distributors to raise extra capital for the project. They were quite surprised, said Clermont, because with all those rumors, people were expecting to see nothing. And they came up to us saying, This is incredible.

This has to be finished. Filmline says it cannot disclose where the additional investment came from. Canadians, meanwhile, will be able to see a documentary about the beleaguered Bethune shoot in China before they see the completed movie or mini-series. In 1987, Bob McKeown, host of It shows director Borsos chafing as Chinese officials urge him to portray their revolution in a more positive light. There are even disagreements over just how blood-stained and dirty the Chinese field doctors operating gowns should be.

The Chinese wanted the film to show that they were not incompetent in medicine before Bethunes arrival, while writer Allan criticized Sutherland for wanting to portray the Canadian doctor as some kind of white savior going among the natives. Watching McKeowns film, one senses that the Chinese felt they were treated as water-carriers. Of course, all this tension was more fodder for McKeowns camera. The worse it got for them, he said in a telephone interview, the better it got for us. At least we had the consolation of knowing that all this human misery was going to make ours a better film.

Still, McKeown, who watched rushes of the China footage for the Bethune film, says frankly: It looked wonderful. Despite all the problems, you got the sense visually they were getting what they wanted. CBCs Fifth Estate and an independent film-maker, took his own documentary film crew to China to capture the Bethune project. One of the conditions of the CBCs involvement was that a film about the project would be aired the night before the mini-series was telecast. The delays have changed that timetable, and no date has been set for showing the documentary.

McKeown arrived after the Canadian film crew staged a one-day work stoppage (adding another $50,000 to the budget) to protest conditions. So the resulting documentary, Strangers in a Strange Land, captures the mood when tensions were simmering, not boiling over, on the set. As McKeown observes in his narration: Food is the single most emotional issue. To appease the crew in the remote Wutai mountains, the Canadian producers had to fly in a chef and doctor from Montreal, as well as bring a catering van from Beijing. Strangers in a Strange Land, shown at the recent Festival of Festivals in Toronto, chronicles the mounting tension between the Chinese and the Canadians.

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