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Season 8 is scheduled to air on January 17th, 2010! Can’t wait

She was also spotted getting into the studio! You wouldn’t want to miss her ofcourse!

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The gorgeous actress is taking a break from work and soaking up the rays with new boyfriend – ice hockey player DION PHANEUF.

The lucky laddie, who plays for the Calgary Flames, is in Maui, Hawaii with Elisha.

She must have a thing for ice hockey because she has also pulled National Hockey League stars SEAN AVERY and MIKE KOMISAREK.

Source: thesun.co.uk

David ‘Sudz’ Sutherland’s latest TV production dramatizes gun culture in Canada’s larger cities.

Jul 15, 2007 04:30 AM

HAMILTON–The stripper with the faux fur white bikini bottom glides languidly up and down the centre pole as her few customers leer and smirk.

One of her associates obliges by trying to wrap herself around a particularly chubby customer in a lap dance that will not quit. Yet another struts by asking for tips for which she’ll take off her top.

Then I realize I’m not in some dank low-ceilinged suburban watering hole. A guard of some sort is shaking his head and asking me to leave. And he points to the sign.

It simply reads “Guns!” I’ve wandered onto the closed set of David “Sudz” Sutherland’s latest TV production, a two-part, four-hour CBC-TV miniseries dramatizing the gun culture that is slowly but surely emerging in Canada’s larger cities. And then I hear Sutherland say “Cut!” And the strippers slither into their robes and the customers turn out to be grinning actors.

Week one of a nine-week shoot and already Guns is causing controversy. The genial Sutherland says he wants to expose the expanding trafficking in guns that is proving so unsettling to Toronto residents.

“We’ve had drug trafficking, trafficking in humans, now it’s guns and it is already out of control,” Sutherland says. He took enormous chances last season with his CTV TV movie Doomstown that dramatized the mounting violence and heavy illegal drug deals going on in Toronto’s inner city housing developments.

“Now, we’re onto something ever bigger,” he says pointing to wife Jennifer Holness, who co-wrote the screenplay and was the one to pull in the star names to back up the project.

“Colm Feore took a look at the script and was the first to say he wanted to come aboard,” she says. “Then I got it to Elisha Cuthbert (24) and she had to do it. Then I got Gregory Smith (Everwood) and he wanted in. Then Shawn Doyle . . .”

“All we want to do is tell the truth. Why is that so unsettling for some people?” Sutherland later asks as he has a hasty dinner in the lunch room. “It is fiction, yes, but based on true stories. I did my research with the police to find where thousands of guns are coming from.

“But who is bringing them in? They’re people you wouldn’t expect: Seniors returning from Florida, either knowingly or unknowingly. Customs rarely stops them. I was told of cases being parachuted into the country. Boats are becoming more popular – guns are right in there with the cigarettes and bananas. Reservations are another stopoff point.”

Holness, who says she’s a product of Toronto urban housing, says it’s become part of the culture of Caribbean blacks. “In my day we didn’t hear of guns. Knives, yes, but today if a kid is a member of a gang, he must have the gun as necessary paraphernalia.”

How violent is Guns going to be? Sutherland says, “Well, it is called Guns. There are a lot of guns in it. There is shooting. People die. It’s life today for many young people.” And Holness adds, “We had it all passed by CBC. In one scene where a car is hit, they were the ones who suggested it blow up into a fireball.”

In Doomstown, Sutherland walked up to a problem and examined it dramatically, without attempting to explain it away. He wanted viewers to understand the roots of that violence, where it stemmed from. And it’s the same with Guns.

“In that particular black society there are few fathers around. I always had my father there to guide me. So I survived. I’ve heard that charge I’m not promoting black society. Not true. But I can’t sugarcoat very real problems. I can’t explain it away, the violence. As a writer I can only dramatize it, offer some solutions. If I can’t be completely truthful why do it?”

Sitting by herself, waiting for her scene is Elisha Cuthbert, who is working around Guns. “I had to fly to L.A. for two days of press for the film Captivity. Then it’s back here for more scenes, then I’ll be away again. I was only too happy this all worked out for me, the script just hit me, I had to do it.”

Later on at lunch, she showed off the whole Cuthbert family – dad, mom and siblings had driven in from Montreal to be with her. I reminded Cuthbert of the first time we’d met: her TV film Lucky Girl was coming on CTV and I predicted she’d win awards for it – and she did indeed cop a Gemini. At 18, she moved to L.A., hit it big in the first season of 24 as the daughter of Keifer Sutherland and Leslie Hope (“two more Canadians!”), then went the theatrical route with The Girl Next Door and House of Wax. Now a surprisingly mature 25-year-old, she says making independent films back in Canada is certainly part of her game plan.

“I play a seemingly nice girl, a philosophy major, who hooks up with a bad boy (Smith) and really loses her way … The way it was written grabbed me, there was a lot of insight there.”

Later at lunch, mama Cuthbert gave Sutherland permission to slap her back if she wasn’t co-operating – does this family know how popular their film star daughter is?

Just as different in temperament is Gregory Smith, another young Canadian find, who plated Ephram so affectingly for four seasons on the prime time WB soap Everwood. He last visited Toronto during the CTV launch as a gangly 18-year-old. Says Smith: “A lot happened to me in those four years. Look! I grew facial hair, which I thought would never come. I’m not that angst-ridden teen although it’s hard convincing others because the reruns are on. So this part, mixed up Bobby, he’s a real step to maturity. The bad guy, yes, but you’ll understand why.”

One of the few holdovers from Doomstown is KC Collins (as Derek), the black youth trying to escape his past. He’s studying journalism, trying ever so slowly to leave the gang and forge new roots.

“But his past keeps intruding on me.” Another Canadian who also works in L.A., Collins says “You go where the work is. I’m hoping there’ll be more projects for black Canadians. Sudz is opening a lot of doors for us, a whole lot of doors.”

Some scenes will later be filmed in Toronto including a key shooting scene at Yonge and Gould, plus scenes at Old City Hall and the Mayor’s office. But for now, the Sutherland family has moved to rented quarters in Hamilton – where lower expenses and higher tax credits have lured the shoot – to escape the two-hour commute endured by other cast and crew members.

Known as a perfectionist, Sutherland was heard to mutter at one point, as darkness closed on the night club setting, “I’ll retire before we get this scene right.”

He later said he thought the project was over when a new regime came to power at CBC. “Then they asked us to stay right at it and we breathed easier again.”

Sutherland says about the violence in his films: “Might as well blame it on hip hop. It’s so entrancing. I was walking along the street listening with my iPod and I bought this Muslim paper just to see what was happening. A white guy across the street started hassling me and with the hip hop on I almost challenged him although he was twice my size.

“So on that day I blamed it all on hip hop.”