Cannes, France: It is another in a string of hot, beautiful days in Cannes. W. Paterson (Pat) Ferns sits across the street from the Palais des Festivals where nearly 11,000 TV producers and broadcasters are hunkered down dealing in the broadcast equivalent of an Egyptian spice market.

Having doffed the always-present tie, Ferns cuts a notable contrast to his former incarnation as the face of the Banff Television Festival.

In an exclusive interview with Playback, Ferns wants to give his version of what happened earlier this year that led to his sudden departure from Banff where he worked for nine years, eight as president and CEO. For one thing, he questions whether bankruptcy proceedings last April were really the only option open to the fest’s board of directors.

But what he really wants to talk about this day are new beginnings.

Ferns is here at MIPCOM 2004 to announce a new venture which has turned his attention to the financing of international and Canadian productions and program packages in addition to presenting media events.

‘[The new production company] will be whatever the market decides it should be,’ Ferns says, sipping an espresso. ‘I will probably be doing some production, but I see my role more as an executive producer helping to find money for Canadian and other, international, producers.

‘The factual market is an intensely international market and therefore, I think, some Canadian producers will appreciate help bringing in funds from other jurisdictions.’

Ferns, now based in Victoria, BC, already has a two-year strategic partnership with Towers Productions, Chicago. As a top supplier of nonfiction programming, Towers is pushing aggressively into the international market and is looking to Ferns for his network of global contacts.

Ferns, who had a decades-long career as a producer before Banff, most successfully as an executive at Primedia Productions until 1994, will also be collaborating with Toronto-based Norflicks Productions’ Richard Nielsen and with producer John McGreevy. There’s also a deal in place with Vancouver drama producer Novalis Entertainment.

Meanwhile, Ferns will continue to produce his signature pitching sessions at media festivals and markets around the world, including those he built up at Banff. He is also partnering with former Banff colleagues Doug Macnamara and Jim Byrd to develop media executive leadership programs in Asia, Australia and Europe. The three collaborated to create the Alliance Atlantis Banff Television Executive Program.

‘I feel that I’m well positioned with the partners that I need internationally. I’ve got my own network around the world of people I’ve dealt with in production and through various festivals, pitching forums and things. I’m well positioned for the future,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to create a large company and an overhead. I want to work with others and I’ve had a lot of people approach me who want to collaborate with me in different ways.’

To say that Ferns’ feelings toward Banff, which he ran from 1996 until April of this year, are complex is an understatement. While he speaks appreciatively of his ongoing relationship with the festival, there is obvious frustration over how his departure was handled by Banff’s board.

Just weeks before the June 13-17 festival, Ferns announced that he was resigning. A few days later, Playback reported that the Banff Television Foundation had filed for bankruptcy protection in a Calgary court and that Toronto-based Achilles Partners had stepped in under a 10-year licence to run the festival. Achilles principal Robert Montgomery was to be the fest’s new CEO.

The bombshell left many questioning the future viability of the festival and the aftermath found some closely associated with the festival fingering Ferns as the fall guy. Court documents filed by the board put the blame squarely on Ferns’ shoulders and also accused him of poor relations with staff, which, one document said, contributed to Banff’s problems.

For his part, Ferns remained conspicuously silent.

‘I honored an undertaking not to speak during the bankruptcy proceedings and I was disappointed that a couple of individuals chose to take advantage of that and speak about management in a disparaging way that I don’t think was appropriate,’ Ferns says, now ready to break that silence. ‘This was a management that brought the festival to be the best in the world. All our business plans and all our budgets were approved by the board.’

Looking back over his years leading Banff, Ferns notes that under his guidance the festival doubled in size and doubled its fundraising.

But by the early part of the decade, seeing the festival’s income under pressure due to a combination of media consolidation, declines in international production and funding cuts, Ferns and the board developed a strategy to generate revenue through expansion.

This plan ultimately saw the creation of the World Congress of History Producers and World Congress of Arts Producers and Performance, along with taking on the management of events such as the World Congress of Science Producers, nextMEDIA and current-events fest Newsworld. These were to be developed as profit revenue streams separate from Banff, which out of necessity was a not-for-profit.

‘I think the vision we had was the right vision. We were being highly entrepreneurial in what was a toughening marketplace. SARS hit us much more profoundly than we’d anticipated. It’s difficult to finance expansion with no working capital. That is why we had begun conversations, and I had a strategy to add a private dimension to the foundation. So the foundation, as a not-for-profit, would run Banff, but then we would try to create for-profit ventures that could attract working capital and that would be revenue streams to fund the festival,’ Ferns says.

In the end, Ferns blames his downfall on the failure of one event: Newsworld, which lost $400,000. ‘We misread the market and we didn’t have the room to make one mistake. We put on six or seven events in a three-month period. All of them were good events. One of them didn’t make money and that was enough to push us to the edge of the cliff.’

By spring, according to bankruptcy documents, Banff was down $800,000, and with the struggling TV festival just around the corner, the not-for-profit foundation was eyeing total potential losses around $2 million.

But Ferns also says that he does not believe bankruptcy was the only option available to the board. ‘I obviously disagreed with the strategy that was taken,’ he says. ‘I thought that the board and Robert [Montgomery] were going to go in a slightly different route than they took. They will say that theirs was the only route. I would probably beg to differ.’

That said, Ferns maintains that he feels ‘nothing but love for the institution’ and is happy to have an ongoing connection to the festival. ‘I think I made a big contribution to grow it into an international event and I don’t want to do anything to prejudice its future growth. If I can be a contributor to its growth then that is what I’d like to do.’

In terms of his own growth, Ferns says the time was right for a change. For now, Ferns Productions is a one-man show with a fax machine, telephone, Internet connection and Rolodex full of names of international producers and broadcasters who know Ferns well from his years at Primedia and, more significantly, Banff.

‘I’m excited to be back in hurly-burly,’ he says. ‘I’m glad I did the nine years at Banff. I think I gave something back to the industry while there. And I think what I’m doing now will give back in another way. But it’ll probably be more lucrative for me than working for a not-for-profit.

‘I’m a happy camper.’