Paradise Falls–you can’t kill it with a stick.
The steamy Canadian prime time soap returns for a third season tonight, but few shows have had such an on-again, off-again production schedule. Set in Ontario’s cottage country, Paradise Falls began in mid-2001 and lurches into this season with 26 new episodes that were shot two years ago and have already aired in the U.S. on the gay and lesbian cable network here! The new batch brings the series total to over 100 episodes, spread out over eight years.
Art Hindle (above right, with Cameron Graham) has been in all of them as unscrupulous town mayor Pete Braga. Spoke with him on the phone last week and wrote a story on the return of Paradise Falls that was picked up in various places off The Canadian Press wire. You can read it here.
Hindle, who has acted on everything from Dallas to E.N.G. (he’s coming up this season on an episode of The Border), is always fun to talk to and has plenty of stories. Some date back to his Can-Con classic Face Off, the 1971 movie where he played fictional Toronto Maple Leaf star Billy Duke (opposite Trudy Young, above). Former Bud Jim McKenny doubled for Hindle on the ice and then-rookie Leaf Daryl Sittler also snuck into the film, as did former Leaf captain George Armstrong and even wacky team owner Harold Ballard.
Hindle says you could never get that kind of movie making co-operation from the Leaf team or the NHL (or the NHL Players Association) today. “We had Jean Beliveau going by the cameras, Bobby Orr,” says Hindle, who says he has a garage full of Face Off videos from fans who keep sending them to him.
Hindle used to play a lot of hockey and was in on the first wave of Hollywood power plays on skates. Recently, CSI boss Jerry Bruckheimer talked about how he cast Christian Slater in his new drama The Forgotten after Slater’s agent skated up to him after the two were scrimmaging in a game. Hindle says he used to play with the likes of Ally McBeal boss David E. Kelley, who grew up in the Boston area and was a big Bruins’ fan. “There were a whole bunch of names playing down there,” says Hindle.
Paradise Falls returns tonight at 9:30 p.m. on Showcase.
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