As Salter Streets Films Ltd. co-founder Paul Donovan says, he's in "an incredibly good mood" as the small Halifax production company prepares to close it doors only a few months after winning an Academy Award.
The closing will allow him to return to independent filmmaking and ends months of uncertainty about the future of the two-decade-old company that popularized the East Coast film industry with series such as Codco , Blackfly, Made in Canada and This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Parent Alliance Atlantis said yesterday the Halifax office is among four production operations that will close. Alliance has said it will continue to produce This Hour Has 22 Minutes, but the future of projects such as a documentary on controversial Canadian military figure Lieutenant Colonel Roméo Dallaire is still up in the air.
Toronto-based Alliance, which purchased Salter Street in April, 2001, is also shutting down production offices in Vancouver, Edmonton and London as it focuses its efforts on money-making prime-time dramas such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Donovan, a producer who founded Salter Street with his brother Michael in the early 1980s, said in an interview yesterday the closing was not a surprise to anyone at the Halifax office.
When the company was purchased in 2001, about 85 people worked for Salter Street but the numbers were reduced gradually so that only about 10 people were still on the payroll when the closing was announced.
Donovan said he and several other producers at Alliance Atlantis realized that their projects were going to take a back seat as CSI became popular and profitable.
Even as the company won an Academy Award for its work on Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine earlier this year, Salter Street's few remaining employees wondered when the axe would fall on the company the Donovans had made into a poster child for the Atlantic film industry.
"Now there is a quality of certainty. People feel their fate is under their control," Donovan said in a telephone interview.
Donovan said he believes Alliance Atlantis made the right move for its shareholders in closing the small production offices that operated on low profit margins. Industry analysts have also hailed the decision, even as Halifax film fans mourn the passing of the founder of the Nova Scotia industry.
The closing will also enable the Donovan brothers, whose company has produced films such as Life with Billy and Shattered City and science-fiction series Lexx, to go back to the business of putting out their own work. Salter Street paved the way for many small film companies now operating in Nova Scotia, Ann MacKenzie, head of the Nova Scotia Film Development Corp., said yesterday.
What Salter Street showed, Donovan said, was that it could produce commercially successful shows and sell them across Canada and internationally, he said.
"What I feel good about was that this wasn't about the low Canadian dollar or getting a subsidy for this or that," Donovan said. "We created shows that people wanted to see and I hope that's what I can do going forward."