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Canwest News Service
BELIEVE IT: Being named Canada's fourth-richest man, with $5.07 billion in personal assets, didn't make the week any slower for Jim Pattison. It began with dinner in Victoria with Charles, Prince of Wales and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Charles, who should inherit a fraction of Queen Elizabeth II's estimated $700 million, returned to Britain, via Quebec, on a Canadian Armed Forces CC-150 Polaris, which began life in the 1980s as one of Max Ward's five Airbus A310-300 airliners.
Pattison flew straight to Britain in his own plane. It was a Dassault Falcon 900 business jet, which has one more engine than its predecessor twin-jet Bombardier Challenger. It cost maybe $45 million, depending on whether Dassault's salesman was as persistent as Pattison when he flogged used cars here 60 years ago.
Hitting London after an overnight flight, Pattison took meetings. One was at No. 1 Piccadilly Circus. That's where his year-old Ripley's Believe It Or Not operation, one of 70 in a worldwide chain, displays Ecuadorian shrunken heads, a moon rock, a Marilyn Monroe sweater, and a portrait of Prince Charles's late first wife, Princess Diana, crafted from laundry-dryer lint.
London done, Pattison overnighted to Barbados for meetings between his Great Pacific Capital firm, which has operations on the island, and bankers, insurers and suchlike. That night, he and the Falcon 900 took off for Harrisonburg, Va., for discussions following the Pattison Group's 2008 acquisition of the pharmaceutical-packaging IntraPac firm there.
The following morning he landed in Kelowna to powwow with staff from his News Group's 36 distribution and 148 service centres. Then it was a quick hop home to escort wife Mary to the VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation's Night of 1,000 Stars gala, where Pattison stuck to the diet that saw him shed 35 pounds this year.
Asked if a week on the wing warranted a stay-home day, Pattison said: “Tomorrow's Saturday. I'm going to work.” That would be after a pre-dawn run to prepare for the 2010 Olympics torch relay.
The guy's 81, remember.
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READY FOR TAKEOFF II: Intercontinental flights aren't in the cards for the antique aircraft that are Omni Film Productions' vice-president Gabriela Schonbach's daily concern. But two of them still provide scheduled service between base-station Yellowknife and Hay River, N.W.T.
They are twin-engine Douglas DC-3s, a type that first flew in 1935. Buffalo's other planes include a four-engine DC-4 that dates back to 1938, a twin-engine Curtiss C-46 (first flew 1940), four like-era Consolidated Vultee Cansos, and a blisteringly modern four-turboprop Lockheed Electra from the late 1950s.
Handled by 65-year-old Buffalo president Joe McBryan and a characterful staff, the vintage airliners are core performers in Ice Pilots NWT. Developed and produced by Gastown-based Omni Films' David Gullason in association with Canwest, the 13-episode documentary-reality series premiered on History Television last week. It cleared the runway handily, too. Although the channel is unavailable to many Canadian viewers, 450,000 tuned in — half again above The Jay Leno Show's score that night.
Argentina-born, Virginia-raised executive producer Schonbach's job is to keep the show climbing. That means getting it aired by U.S. and international broadcasters, and raising the funds to produce a second season. Fifteen-year Omni veteran (and three-year partner) Schonbach wouldn't disclose what the first season cost. But by extrapolating from the Canadian Television Fund's $800,000-and-change contribution, it should be close to $5 million.
What we do know is that Schonbach will pitch the show at February's Realscreen Summit convention for non-fiction television in Washington, D.C. She'll also fly to Cannes for the global MIPTV powwow in April. Already interested, she said, are Germany's RTL Television network and the SVT public broadcaster in Sweden.
Still, “it's hard to make a pre-sale to a foreign broadcaster without a proven hit,” said Schonbach, whose models include the U.S.-produced, globally aired high-north crab-fishing series, Deadliest Catch. Omni president Michael Chechik set an example, too, with Champions Of The Wild, that ran for five seasons on the Discovery channel.
What Schonbach claims she and other Omni brass have already learned — mostly through social networking — is that Ice Pilots NWT “is reaching a huge community of people who have aviation interests or work in aviation.”
Heck, I could have told her that.
Still, “Never, ever think that season two is any easier [to fund] than season one,” said Schonbach, who has two other potential first seasons demanding her attention. They're the yet-unnamed comedy series she has under development, one for CBC and the other for Showcase.
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GIMME THAT BULL: Good times must be rolling for condo marketers. Why else would Bob Rennie prodigy Michael Braun's new daily driver be a V10-powered, 500-horsepower Lamborghini Gallardo coupe that, when optioned, can cost $300,000 — 10 times more than the ecologist's-darling Toyota Prius he traded in?
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DREAMERS' BOAT: For a mere $42,500, though, you could bargain on former Elle fabric merchant and city mayor Philip Owen's mint, ruby-red Chrysler New Yorker sedan that cost $1,500 new in 1939.
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RED, BLACK, BROWN:
Back on Oct. 23, 1993, Howe Street feted since-deceased promoter Murray Pezim in the Hyatt Regency hotel. The ballroom then was decorated like a Vegas showroom, with Frankie Laine singing to Tex Beneke's band on stage, while movie star Anthony Quinn lounged at a red-and-black-swagged table alongside.
There was no such folderol Monday when a similar crowd paid tribute to Canaccord Capital chair Peter Brown, who also knows a thing or two about having a good time.
Nor is it the worst of times for the firm he founded.
According to its second-quarter report Sept. 30, Canaccord took in $123.7 million, up 11.6 per cent from the same period last year, although down 10 per cent from first-quarter results. Net income of $6.7 million was cheerier than 2008's $5.4 million loss. And most everybody at the Hyatt knew that Canaccord's $0.05 quarterly dividend is due Dec. 10 after being recorded Friday.
Brown accepted the T. Patrick Boyle Founder's Award at the Fraser Institute's 35th gala dinner. “He's made half the people in this room a lot of money,” said Marion Reid Dixon, who now resides principally in Calgary. “And lost it for the other half,” a nameless publisher quipped.
As for publishing-trade heavies, Douglas & McIntyre founder Scott McIntyre, president Mark Scott and principal David Rowntree all attended. If that means Brown has an insider's memoir coming for D&M, the news is as good — or bad for some — as Pezim ever brought to Howe Street.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
