It’s no secret that Ottawa’s Funbag Animation has been keeping company with Sullivan Entertainment in attempts to forge a distribution agreement, but it’s looking like the two companies may team up on the production and direction of an animation property.

Funbag’s co-owner Rick Morrison says the property has been chosen and Sullivan is working on securing the rights. ‘They (Sullivan) are looking at animation opportunities, and obviously they realize the financial rewards, but in the conversations we’ve had with Kevin Sullivan it seems he’s willing to put in all the time it takes to make a good project.’

How’s the weather up there?

Although most of us (the sane, reasonable portion of us without a death wish anyway) would never walk up to a big, fat guy and say, ‘Hey, you’re really fat. How much do you weigh?’ people have fewer qualms about walking up to a tall woman and saying, ‘Whoa! How tall are you?’ Issues like these have inspired Amazons – The Joys and Perils of Being a Tall Woman by Megan Smith’s Pyewackitt Productions.

Six feet tall since the tender age of 12, Smith turns heads all over, but at the Banff Television Festival she was getting attention for something other than her stature. Support for her doc was over the top.

A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, Smith has been producing, performing, writing and directing for 16 years and has produced short docs on Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Tomson Highway, to name but an illustrious few. But she’d never been to Banff. And now, thanks to a ctv fellowship, she’s a true believer in the power of schmingling. (‘It’s a combination of schmoozing and mingling.’)

The idea of a campy yet compelling feature-length doc on the plight of that 1% of the world’s female population over six feet tall came to Smith – at the risk of sounding ‘flaky’ – in a dream. On the advice of others, she had scaled it down to an hour for tv, but Banff-based enthusiasm for her original idea changed her mind back.

Fortunately, the outcome of her Alberta odyssey wasn’t predestined by how it began. Her printed materials weren’t ready when she left, and a courier car en route to the market with copies of the Amazon Admirer, the key item in her presentation, blew up. Actually blew up. But once she managed to get them in the cubby holes of selected big cheeses, the messages came back fast and furious and she had a rip-snorting good time. ‘I felt like the most popular girl at the dance.’

Smith says international interest in the project helped kick start the Canadians. a&e, BBC Scotland and wdr in Germany expressed interest as did cbc and the nfb. Telefilm was showing enthusiasm, and Rhombus Media, Investigative Productions and Mick Csaky of Antelope expressed interest in executive producing.

One thing’s for certain though. It’s definitely ‘a project with legs – long, long legs.’

Above and beyond the call of duty

Two years and 18 cable features later, Dufferin Gate president Patrick Whitley has decided the time is ripe to take on work above and beyond projects for Showtime Network, the second largest American cable network. The company has had an exclusive arrangement with Showtime since its establishment in 1994, and expects to produce at least another 10-12 features for the net this year.

The first non-Showtime project is Holiday Affair, a romance from rko for USA Network based on the 1949 rko film starring Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum. This version stars Cynthia Stevenson as a struggling widowed mother being pursued by two men. Alan Myerson will direct a screenplay by Isobel Lennart.

While Whitley says the company may begin actively pursuing outside work – right now the work is coming to them – Showtime projects will remain top priority. Two Showtime features are already slated for mid-summer. North Shore Fish, directed by Steve Zuckerman and starring Mercedes Ruehl, Peter Riegert and Tony Danza, shoots July 12 to Aug. 2 and The Clinic, directed by Claudia Weill and starring Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, shoots July 15 to Aug. 9.

Triptych catches Falling Angels

Wanted: screenwriter to sit down with acclaimed Canadian novelist Barbara Goudy of Mr. Sandman and We So Seldom Look On Love fame and plot the screenplay version of her novel Falling Angels. Must have an appreciation for strong, young women and dark, suburban humor.

After ‘quietly and persistently’ pursuing Falling Angels for six years, Robin Cass of Triptych Media finally got his wish. The film rights to the novel, the coming-of-age tale of the Field sisters during the tumultuous ’60s, are better traveled than a Samsonite, having been in Sweden and Germany before coming back home. Now Cass is looking for a coproduction partner and a distributor while searching for just the right writer to adapt the novel. Goudy herself will consult on the script.

While the most realistic production schedule for Falling Angels is spring/summer 1998, Triptych hopes to be shooting in Halifax late this summer on The Hanging Garden, the first feature from Nova Scotia writer/director Thom Fitzgerald. An announcement on a distributor for the feature, described as ‘a coming home story built around a wedding in Nova Scotia,’ is imminent as is the name of ‘a star of certain proportions’ to be attached to the project.

New Big Wigs

Hewon Yang might still have voicemail at Atlantis (she’ll be continuing to consult the sales department there), but she’s out on her own with a new children’s entertainment company called Little Big Wig Entertainment.

While the company is still pretty much a newborn, Yang is about to put pen to paper on a development agreement with a London, Eng.-based distribution company with ties to Time-Warner. She’ll be structuring the company as an affiliation of production companies, starting with Calibre Digital Design in Toronto and Studio B in Vancouver.

There are at least six projects in the development larder, including one property from u.s. comic strip artist Jim Benton whose strip Spy Dogs is now in development at Dream Works. First out of the gate may be a children’s series based on Sherry Fitch’s book Sleeping Dragons All Around. The series will be a combination of 3D and 2D animation and Yang’s partners are Calibre and Larry Peloso’s Giant Productions. The project has gone to series treatment and Yang is taking it on the broadcaster tour.

More on the new company front. While her seat at tvontario, where she was creative head of independent productions, is barely cold, Elke Town is already into negotiations with her new company, Carnelian Films.

Beyond production and development of her own projects, Town’s company will also do script analysis and project development consultation. Town says she’s in the midst of discussions to secure two original screenplays and one adaptation for both feature and tv work.