One by one five young ladies quietly and cautiously file out of a linen closet, their secret meeting place at their home-away-from-home, Miss Godard’s School For Girls, the setting for the Alliance Communications/ Redeemable Features production The Hairy Bird.

Being shot over eight weeks in and around Toronto, the $5 million movie marks the feature film directorial debut of writer/director and Academy Award winner Sarah Kernochan.

Although Kernochan’s experience in directing may be limited it has been successful; she took home an Oscar in 1973 for Marj’e, a feature documentary about an evangelist with a double life.

As for The Hairy Bird, Kernochan and dop Tony Jannelli began the shoot in mid-June by diving right into the deep end, and although it may have made for a stressful first week of shooting she has no regrets.

‘We shot an enormous protest scene with extras and horses and all our leads. In any other schedule it would have been a two- or three-day shoot, but we did it in one,’ says Kernochan. ‘We had to pull together immediately and rise to the challenge, which I think bonded us really tightly for the rest of the schedule. It was a hell of a send-off.’

While Kernochan spent the last six years writing the script for The Hairy Bird, it was not until about a year and a half ago that she teamed up with Redeemable producers Peter Newman and Ira Deutchman who immediately fell in love with it.

‘It was so different from anything we had ever seen before. It made us laugh and cry which as far as we were concerned were two of the most important things,’ says Deutchman, who’s producing the film with Newman.

After packaging and fine tuning Kernochan’s work and getting the right actors connected, producers Deutchman and Newman decided they had a project which was ready to market at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Alliance, which will be distributing the picture worldwide, was one of the first financiers to see the script, and after Alliance Pictures president Andras Hamori read it and ‘fell off the chair laughing,’ he too was hooked.

‘It is a very smart, classy teenage comedy,’ says Hamori, who is executive producing with Alliance chairman Robert Lantos and Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle). ‘It is a mix between American Graffiti, Animal House and Mystic Pizza.’

Kernochan, who wrote the script based on her experiences as a young girl at a private school in Connecticut, says each character in the film has a piece of her in them.

The movie is set in 1963 when five smart, independent, aggressive young women, founders of a secret club, set out to sabotage their school’s plan to merge with a boys’ school and become co-ed.

The present cast are not the originals, as those they had first selected fell through while deals were being closed and the shooting schedule was postponed ­ which meant starting the process all over again with more meetings, readings and auditions.

According to the director, the casting issue was perceived to be soft. ‘It’s all young girls and one older woman, it’s not what they call sexy casting.’

Among the budding young feminists of Miss Godard’s School For Girls are Gaby Hoffman (Volcano), Kirsten Dunst (Interview with the Vampire), Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Doll House), Rachel Leigh Cook (Tom and Huck) and Monica Keena (Ripe). The school’s head mistress Miss McVane is played by Lynn Redgrave (Shine).

With costumes inspired by Kernochan’s fashion flashbacks, the girls of Miss Godard’s sport conservative burgundy school uniforms with matching knee socks, tams, bouffant hairdos and braids, keeping the look as realistic as possible.

‘There is a lot of very funny stuff in this and yet it is also a very intelligent movie and I think that is a particular balance that we have to reach throughout the entire production process,’ says Deutchman. ‘We don’t want it to slip over into slapstick.’

The director has a very clear and strong vision of the kind of movie it is, which has kept everyone involved on the right course.

So far Kernochan is happy that no one has tried to talk her out of the rather strange title for the film, and although it d’esn’t make much sense right now, once the theater lights dim and the projector starts rolling it will.

‘We are going to run a dictionary definition at the beginning of the movie. It says, ‘Hairy Bird, the male genitalia boarding school circa 1963… ‘ When you see it it will make sense.’