Rose & Ruby Productions, also known as Rose and Ruby Pictures,[3] was a Canadian sports promotion and film production company founded in 1977. It was one of the country's notable producers of televised sports programming before establishing itself as a purveyor of genre movies in the 1980s and early 1990s. For much of its history, the company was anchored by directors Damian Lee and David Mitchell.[4][5][6]
History
Rose & Ruby Productions' originally specialized in the organization of competitions for "everyman" athletes, which it placed on television for the benefit of a corporate sponsor, a concept that Lee had popularized in the Canadian market shortly before the creation of Rose & Ruby itself.[7] Many of these programs were seen on the Canadian version of Wide World of Sports broadcast on the CTV network.[7] The company later graduated to sports featuring professional or established amateur athletes, often for CTV as well.[8][9] In 1977, Rose & Ruby tried to set up a professional tennis tournament for the following March at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens to replace the dormant Rothmans International, but the event did not proceed.[10] In 1983, the company also applied to the CRTC for a license to operate a pay sports television channel.[11]
While it did not get its own channel, the emergence of premium cable outlets looking to satisfy Canadian content obligations, such as First Choice, opened the door to branch out into fiction content.[12][13] Rose & Ruby also took advantage of the tax shelter opportunities that were synonymous with Canadian film financing at the time[14][15] although, according to Lee, the boom of international pre-sales during the second half of the 1980s allowed the company to distance itself from that sometimes stigmatized model.[5] Bodybuilder Franco Columbu, who contributed to several of Rose & Ruby's mid- to late 1980s features, was a partner in the company and was listed as its American representative at the time.[3] In later years, Rose & Ruby also named veteran cameraman and director of photography Curtis Petersen as its Vice President of Production.[16]
In 1993, Rose & Ruby entered a multi-picture financing partnership with Menahem Golan's 21st Century Films, which was struggling to find banking support. It included National Lampoon's Last Resort (21st Century was initially mentioned as co-producer but later only as international distributor), Death Wish V: The Face of Death and the less commercial Crime and Punishment.[17][18] However, Lee was not credited in the final version of Crime and Punishment, and although he remained on board as producer of the other films, the Rose & Ruby label was phased out from them as well.[19] After that batch of Golan collaborations, Lee focused his efforts on another outfit headquartered on the same premises, called Richmond House, to whom former Rose & Ruby associate David Mitchell briefly collaborated early on.[20][21]
Filmography
Sports (select list)
Year
Title
Broadcaster/Distributor
1978–1984
The Great Canadian Challenge/The Gillette Challenge
^ abcdefBidd, Donald, ed. (1990). "Directory of producers and distributors". Film/Video Canadiana 1987–1988. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada; National Archives of Canada; National Library of Canada; La Cinémathèque québécoise. p. 682. ISSN0836-1002.
