Five Winnipeg screenwriters have been selected to take part in The National Screen Institute – Canada’s inaugural National Writers Roundtable.

From among 36 feature film or half-hour tv scripts from Manitoba writers, a jury, culled from the local filmmaking community, selected five projects to undergo a story editing workshop with Allan McGee, whose credits include features Roadkill, Highway 61, Blood & Donuts and Cube and tv series such as Danger Bay, Road to Avonlea and Straight Up.

The workshop is intended to bring the projects to a polished stage where they are ready to be pitched to producers and broadcasters. At the end of the program, the scripts will be showcased at a public reading led by professional actors.

The Manitoba Roundtable, sponsored by CBC Training and Development and Manitoba Film and Sound Development, is the first of a series of Writers Roundtables that nsi plans to organize across Canada in 1999. Each roundtable will develop scripts with a regional focus, written by regional writers.

The winning projects for the first Writers Roundtable include Brian Drader’s feature script The Fruit Machine, the interdepartmental nickname given to a series of physical and psychological tests administered to government employees in Canada in the ’50s and ’60s to root out homosexuals in public service.

The story follows a young civil servant whose married life unravels as his participation in the study brings his closeted homosexuality to the surface

Edward Hughes’ Beegee and the Golden Boy is a feature-length mystery in which a precocious 14-year-old boy investigates the disappearance of a classmate, and his own kidnapping and imprisonment by a crooked vice-principal.

Liz Janzen’s screenplay Elements of Proof follows a homicide detective who uses her intuition and the help of an anthropology professor to solve a 10-year-old murder, which leads her to the highest office in the city.

Described as a cross between The Suburbanators and Monty Python, Patrick David Lowe’s half-hour script The Warriors of Ecstasy Chicken involves three hapless delivery boys who are forced to honor the newly imposed working conditions and ‘dress code’ of their sadistic employer.

Ian Ross will be developing his half-hour script The Lesson, an urban aboriginal story that revolves around two brothers and their struggles to exist within Winnipeg.

Financing workshop

nsi is holding another pilot project – Producers Workshop: Diversifying Your Financing Options. The program is being launched in Winnipeg and facilitated by Ken Chartrand, former manager, media and entertainment (Manitoba) for the Royal Bank of Canada’s film financing team.

The workshop is designed to teach small production companies how to deal with banking and financial institutions, position their companies to be looked on favorably by lending agencies, and help producers suss out new sources of financing. Producers taking part in the workshop develop business plans based upon their own corporate needs and practice financial pitches in front of business and financial analysts.

nsi plans to roll out the producers workshop nationally, bringing the program to various regions across the country.