Despite what you may have heard about the Banff Television Festival (that it’s a big, beautiful and relaxing hoo-ha in the mountains, I know, I’ve heard it too) it’s not an entirely tranquil period for all involved.

Take, for example, the participants in the 13th Banff International Market Simulation, an exercise talked up by the festival itself as the flagship event. It g’es something like this: you beg and plead to be given the opportunity to pitch your project to a roomful of buyers and a panel of three devil’s advocates while Pat Ferns combs the room trying to convince the right people to toss in some cash. Fun, yes. Exciting, yes. Stressful, oh yes.

One of two Ontario producers joining the fray this year is Megan Smith of Pyewackitt Productions, who attended the festival as a ctv fellow last year to drum up interest in a doc project called Amazons.

She’s back to push a three-part, one-hour doc project on eccentrics based on the 1995 book A Study of Sanity & Strangeness by Dr. David Weeks and Jamie James. Findings of the study indicate that many gifted children grow up to become eccentrics, that eccentrics are usually in the top 10% to 15% of the i.q. scale, and that they tend to live longer, happier, healthier lives, most likely because they’re immunized to everyday stress.

The project, which will feature both garden variety oddballs and historically relevant kooks, is tentatively budgeted at about $400,000 per hour, and Smith intends to collaborate with Larry Bauman and Don Copeman of Camera West.

Peter Raymont of Investigative Productions is pitching a coproduction with Leslie Wiener of Gedeon in France. To be shot on film, Sacred Places is a six-part one-hour documentary series about revered sites around the world which predate organized religion, like Easter Island and the Celtic stone circles. Raymont envisions the series falling somewhere between ‘new-age spirituality and hard-nosed science.’

As a side note, Raymont and u.k. producer Ralph Christian won last year’s Two in a Room challenge at Banff with a project entitled Where Have All The Hippies Gone?

Two in a Room is an exercise which brings together two commissioning bodies and has them hammer out parameters for a project which would suit them both. Then delegates have the rest of the week to submit proposals, and a select few are chosen to pitch.

Last year, Channel 4 in the u.k. and the cbc picked Hippies, but after the legwork had been done on the part of the producers the broadcasters declined.

One more Banff note. Evergreen Releasing, a joint venture of Toronto’s The Film Works and Regina’s Minds Eye Pictures, will be celebrating its first anniversary up in the mountains and managing director Dean Oros will be on hand. New for year two, the company will be looking at acquiring full film and tv libraries.

-Indies, get your reels

The second screening of the Canadian Independent Film Series is set for the Bloor Cinema in Toronto on Saturday, June 14. The series, helmed by Robert Cosgrove and Chris Dwyer, is intended as a venue for Canadian indies ‘who dare to challenge conventional narrative film structure.’

Two films had been selected at press time: Barbara Mainguy’s short The Front Seat and Someone To Love, a short from Shawn Goldberg. The series is actively seeking more material, the criteria being Canadian films with a narrative focus.

Festival Cinemas, William F. White and Ryerson Polytechnic University’s Rogers Communications Centre are on board as sponsors, and the series will continue on the second Saturday of each month at the Bloor. The first screening of the series brought out an audience of 300. The cifs is online at cifs@sympatico.ca

-Sphinx lends a hand to first-timers

Ron Mann of Sphinx Films, in a continuing effort to affiliate himself with first-time feature documentary filmmakers, is executive producing a project for producer Alexa-Frances Shaw and director Jim Shedden on American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shedden (who’s the film curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario) and Shaw previously collaborated on a one-hour doc for Bravo! called Michael Snow: Up Close.

Brakhage, based on a man many consider the ‘godfather of rock videos,’ is budgeted in the $500,000 range and the producers are hoping for some cash from the ctcpf. Bravo! is in for ‘a substantial licence fee’ and is also the Canadian distrib. Films Transit is the international sales agent. Shooting begins in Boulder, Colorado in June.

Meanwhile, while Mann is finishing his feature Grass with an eye on Sundance, he’s also helping New Yorker Rick Prelinger with a feature doc project for Citytv.

-Coming upŠ

Exec producers Terence Chang and John Woo are negotiating a mid-July to mid-September Toronto shoot for TriStar’s The Big Hit, no doubt a pastoral coming-of-age story. Kirk Wong is hooked to direct. Also in negotiation is Civil Action, a Steve Zaillian Disney flick to start in July.

-Update

Green Couch Productions ­ you may remember them as the young’uns who had a few bones to pick with actra ­ has sold worldwide rights for Variety, their first feature, to Toronto’s Film One Distribution. The company ­ formed by York University film grads Aaron Barnett, Scott Carman and Michael Shayne ­ is now looking to secure a place for Variety in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival lineup, hopefully to premier.

-May I addŠ?

In the May 19 column, David Barlow was pegged as the screenwriter on the Sullivan project B Movie. Barlow wrote the first adaptation, but Steve Westren’s agent has kindly pointed out that Westren is responsible for the current version.

In the same column it was indicated that Stan Mackiw of Mat Films is the executive producer of Open Door Productions’ feature Short for Nothing. He is, indeed, the executive producer but he is in no way affiliated with MAAT (correct spelling) Films. maat, a Toronto-based prodco, optioned A Black Mark, another script from Open Door’s Siona Ankrah.