

WHO WE ARE
We are a Writers’ Motion Picture Studio. Our primary goal is to produce engaging and compelling screenplays that will attract Canadian and international audiences. From the advent of cinema, studios has yearned for product and went out of their way to create an environment that would attract writers and nurture their work, and even built Writers Blocks to have them on site. The studio system and the power behind them changed often. When Irving Thalberg, in his early twenties, fired the formidable director Erich von Stroheim during the production of "Foolish Wives", MGM became known as The Producers Studio. United Artists, founded by film stars and other major talent, was for a time an Actors Studio. Paramount became known as a Directors Studio. And during the 1960s, Hollywood was largely controlled by the big agencies who would package projects with their own clients, making studio heads dependent on the judgment of entities outside their control, and with a different profit motive. Nevertheless, within this changing environment Hollywood created a legacy of movies with every kind of budget from “Ben-Hur” to “Blue Velvet”, all capable of being viable financially, and reaching a wide audience. None of that exists today. Following the considerable success of “Star Wars” (1977) and “ET” (1982), Hollywood has had an empowering obsession with the winner-takes-all dynamic that has created a bleak-looking landscape for the movie goer. The journey has been to make mega-budget movies which make more and more money. Now it would seem that Independent Cinema has been decimated. And worse still, though many national and regional governments support indigenous production there is no infrastructure for writers to create commercially viable independent films. Casablanca, as a Writers Studio, seeks to nurture independent cinema and attract the ever-increasing new sources of finance.