This was my first Long Form. I was working at TVOntario at the time and the sense that a TV studio was a solid-walled sealed container with sound proof doors got me thinking about what would happen if a bomb went off inside. At the same time I was trying to come up with a low budget storyline and realized that a drama set in a TV studio wouldn’t cost much more than studio time.
That script got me hired to direct something else, Deadly Pursuit, after which I got to make Hijacking. I confess I used the pseudonym, Joseph Williams as the writing credit because I wanted to direct it but wasn’t getting proper WGC rates for the script.
The studio scenes were all shot live with 6 cameras recording at once. We did several passes for each scene.
Shooting went smoothly enough until Lionel Shenken’s cameo role. He played the studio head. Lionel was as tight-fisted with his time as he was with his money. He had not prepared his lines. Neither had the actor working with him. - JAG.
THE HIJACKING OF STUDIO 4
When his estranged daughter is imprisoned in the African nation of Kanzaal, her desperate father devises a scheme to take Kanzaal’s dictator hostage during a North American TV tour.
He interrupts the interview with a gun and a bomb holding everyone in the studio hostage until he has proof his daughter has been released.
When he discovers the studio cameras are live, he begins detailing the collusion between the owners of the TV station and the Kanzaal dictator.
What he doesn’t know is that his daughter died in jail and the police can only stall him for a few hours while they devise a way to rescue the innocents in the studio.