Prince Edward Island’s Cellar Door Productions’ president Gretha Rose reports a wide variety of projects currently in the works. The first is a feature film coproduction with Thom Fitzgerald’s Emotion Films called Wild Mustard, which Fitzgerald is set to direct.

According to Rose, Wild Mustard is ‘a character-driven drama dealing with a vicious cycle of pain and anger transmitted from one generation to the next.’ The project is set in the 1950s in Little Harbour, p.e.i., where a young fiddle player is blamed by his father for the death of his brother. The father tries to destroy the two things that mean the most to his son – his music and his relationship with his girlfriend.

The screenplay was penned by David Weale, who also wrote the script for the Cellar Door and Catalyst Entertainment coproduction The True Meaning of Crumbfest. Wild Mustard will be distributed by Seville Pictures, which according to Rose, has put up a substantial amount of the $4 million budget.

‘We’ve been very fortunate,’ says Rose of the deal with Seville. ‘The owners [of Seville] are very passionate about the film and want to be sure it gets made.’

Other sources of funding for the film in development are the P.E.I Business Development Corporation, broadcast licences and the Canadian Television Fund’s Licence Fee Program. Rose is also looking to the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, the Equity Investment Program and tax credits to round out the funding.

The next step for the film, says Rose, is a good Canadian cast, with faces that can appeal to the worldwide film-going community.

‘We are working hard to make this a truly strong Canadian picture that can win in the international marketplace,’ says Rose.

Another project coming soon from Cellar Door is Mary 2 1/2 D. The half-animated, half-live action series is being developed with writer Tricia Fish (New Waterford Girl), who has already completed the series bible and two scripts for it, with John Davie (This Hour Has 22 Minutes Online) having written a third. Each episode, says Rose, has a projected budget of $450,000.

The story focuses on Mary, a beloved talk-show host, who is really the alter-ego of an animated character named Mirilla. Mirilla is a past-her-prime animated star who offers a hologram image of what the audience perceives to be a real person in Mary.

In other Cellar Door news, the company has just been licensed to produce another 13 episodes of its series Eckhart. Eckhart is a coproduction between Cellar Door and Toronto’s Catalyst, based on the aforementioned Christmas special, The True Meaning of Crumbfest.

*Christmas feature and art films for imX

Halifax’s imX communications has been sitting in an eerie silence for quite some time. But now thanks to imX producer Geoff Le Boutillier, we have learned imX is nearly ready to explode with a collection of new series and films.

The Other Side of the Pole is a production Le Boutillier brought with him from his Alberta-based company Split Hoof. Based on a stage play by Stephen and Mary Heatley, and composer Ed Connell, this Christmas tale was developed by Le Boutillier and Split Hoof partner Michael Sulyma.

‘We were developing it as a live-action Christmas movie-of-the-week,’ explains Le Boutillier. ‘We finished the development stage and shopped it around and everyone came back to us, Chris Zimmer [imX head] included, saying, ‘Why don’t you do this animated?’ ‘

And it was done.

The Other Side of the Pole, budgeted at $4.6 million, is a coproduction between imX, Funbag Animation Studios of Ottawa and Split Hoof. The script was adapted for the screen by Le Boutillier and Conni Massing.

The Other Side of the Pole is about a town in Saskatchewan where Christmas has been outlawed by the mayor. The mayor, incidentally, is the son of the one-and-only Santa Claus, who is estranged from his dad, bitter over him leaving town ‘on business’ every Christmas Eve. To make matters worse, the mayor eloped with one of Santa’s prized elves. Their daughter writes to Santa, unaware he is actually her grandfather, hoping to gain some insight into why Christmas doesn’t come to her town.

The film has been developed with money from wic, the CFCN Production Fund, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, Skippy (Shaw’s children’s programming initiative) and Telefilm. Le Boutillier is excited by the broadcast deal imX has hammered out with TMN-The Movie Network, Superchannel and Super Ecran, which will air the film while it is still in theatrical release.

‘The theatrical release will happen on the American Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, 2001,’ explains Le Boutillier. ‘The theatrical window will continue up to Christmas, but the tv window will start on Dec. 21, 2001. It’ll be this exclusive, high-profile tv event on the Canadian pay channels, capitalizing on the theatrical promotion.’

Voice talent tentatively includes Leslie Nielsen, Bernadette Peters and Albert Schultz.

Another script from the word processors of Le Boutillier and Massing will also come to pass in the very near future, much to the delight of the producer. Stargazing, a feature coproduction between imX and Regina-based Minds Eye Pictures is slated to begin filming this summer in Mortlach, Sask.

Set in the early 1960s, the romantic comedy is about a local hairdresser who has the uncanny ability to make herself up to look the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe. She disappears the night of Monroe’s death and returns one year later, when she must convince the townspeople she is not the reincarnation of the star.

Budgeted at $4.5 million, Le Boutillier says the project is being funded with the help of Telefilm, the Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan tax credits, and the ctf. Polly Walker (Detox, Restoration) is slated to star and Vic Sarin is on board to direct. Executive producers for the project are imX’s Zimmer and Minds Eye’s Kevin DeWalt.

Stargazing goes to camera July 15.

Another interesting development from within the imX walls is a project called seats 3a & 3c. According to imX vp operations and development Jan Miller, seats 3a & 3c is a package of five low-budget features, shot digitally, all to be made by auteur filmmakers.

The premise behind seats 3a & 3c is that on five different occasions, two people who have never met before end up sitting in the mentioned seats and over the period of 90 minutes the lives of the two characters are changed forever by their meeting.

Miller says Citytv has come aboard to help develop the project.

*The NFB on LSD

The National Film Board’s Atlantic office has a pair of new documentary projects to boast about. Director Donna Davies (who heads up Halifax-based Sorcery Films) is lending her directorial services to the nfb to help create a documentary about the late Nova Scotia anthropologist Helen Creighton.

‘Helen Creighton was probably the quintessential lady of Canadian folklore,’ says Davies. ‘In her lifetime, she published 12 or 13 books of folklore and stories and published over 4,000 traditional songs. She made culture in the Maritimes accessible to people all over the world.’

With Kent Martin producing, the project will not only look at Creighton’s life but her legacy as well. Davies plans to use recorded songs, nfb- and cbc-shot film footage, Creighton’s personal diary excerpts and anything else available to help tell the tale.

Shooting began in late March.

A second project backed by the nfb is Hofmann’s Potion. This documentary, to be directed by Connie Littlefield, will take an historical look at lsd before it ‘hit the streets.’

‘People don’t realize it was used in therapeutic circles and medical circles for many years before it became part of the counterculture,’ says Littlefield. ‘People like Timothy Leary popularized it to such an extent that the research was shut down and a lot of people think this is a great shame because they were making such great strides with it. A lot of the progress was made in Canada.’

For the doc, Littlefield is hoping to travel to Switzerland to interview lsd’s inventor, Albert Hofmann. She is also looking to speak with experts in b.c. and California, among other locales.

She projects shooting will be underway in the summer.