Ottawa is not usually the first place people think of when talking about major centers of television production, but that may soon change with the arrival of Citytv affiliate The New ro. The new station is pumping some fresh blood into the capital city with its first project, Juiced from Ottawa’s Bark Productions.

Written and directed by Katie Tallo, the 93-minute mow captures a day in the life of a waitress who hates her job at Robbie’s Italian Restaurant in Ottawa.

The film is a mockumentary: the waitress agrees to let a documentary crew follow her around. She actually talks to the crew.

‘This is the day that really pushes her over the edge,’ says Bark producer Barbara Jordan. Not only does she hate her job, she’s thrown into crisis when her parents disown her.

‘It is raunchy and doesn’t pull any punches.’ says Jordan of the script. The waitress has the worst customers ever imaginable, businessmen behaving like jerks.

Tallo also wrote and directed Split Shift in 1995, her ode to the restaurant business that captures the story of a waitress who kills her manager.

Tallo knows the life a waitress well, having waited on tables herself before going to film school almost 10 years ago.

dop is Ronald Plante out of Montreal. The mow stars Sue Brooks (Split Shift) as waitress Sid, who confronts her feelings about her job. The film moves back and forth between the mockumentary in the restaurant and Sid’s monologues, where she speaks directly to the camera, philosophizing about life, talking about sex and ultimately working to transform her life.

Most of the production’s 29 actors are recovering waitresses and waiters from the local Ottawa area.

Juiced will be shot over six days on a budget of $450,000.

Jordan, who founded Bark, says getting the green light on Juiced ‘is a breath of fresh air. City has been very supportive of the movie and of local filmmakers.’

She’s taking Juiced to the Banff Television Festival in June and hopes to market the feature internationally.

*Television that matters: Sleeping Giant is smoking

Jim Hanley, president of Toronto’s Sleeping Giant Productions, is busy living out his vision: producing insightful, meaningful programming, with a 1999/2000 season boasting 73 hours of television.

Some of the highlights of this season’s lineup include Spiritual Literacy, 26 half-hours of reading the sacred into everyday life (now in production). Spiritual Literacy is based on Frederick and Mary-Ann Brussat’s best-selling book of the same name. Written, produced and directed by David Cherniack, the series will air on Vision tv.

Hanley has just returned from Houston, Texas, where he interviewed Wendell Mendell, an expert on Mars and its colonization (he’s employed by nasa), for an upcoming episode of Originals in Space.

Also licensed for Vision is Lives Interrupted, a 13-part, 30-minute series from director Dan Robinson, currently in preproduction.

‘We’ll be looking at two stories of individual people who have met crises in their lives,’ explains Hanley. ‘We’ll see what their lives were like before the crisis – which could be anything from a train wreck to winning the lottery – and what life is like as a result of the crisis, and then whatever the resolution of the problem is.’

The show will combine true stories with reenactments and expert commentary.

Some of Sleeping Giant’s productions will be broadcast on Bravo!, Wisdom Television (u.s.), Fox-Lorber (u.s.), The Odyssey Channel, tvontario, Space: The Imagination Station, Canadian Learning Television, Chum Television, Canal Vie and History Television.

*History of Hogtown

Toronto: Reflections of A Nation (working title), a three-hour series seen through the various waves of immigration to the city, is one of Toronto producer Peter Raymont’s latest projects. Raymont, of White Pine Pictures, continues to break new ground with ctv, strengthening the network’s commitment to documentary programming. Raymont says he was one of the first to convince ctv to move into documentary programming with his film Hearts of Hate, broadcast in February 1995.

Directed by Raymont’s partner, Lindalee Tracey, and produced by Raymont, Toronto: Reflections of a Nation has a budget of $1.4 million, and has received financing from the Millennium Bureau of Canada as well as some private funding. Raymont, like other producers, is still waiting on further funding from the Canadian Television Fund and Telefilm Canada.

This series stems out of Raymont’s longtime relationship with Eddie Goodman, now in his early eighties, a legendary Toronto lawyer whose father, also a lawyer, started the firm Goodman Phillips and Vineberg. Goodman is passionate about many of the stories that were passed on to him and wanted to see Toronto’s history documented. Goodman gave Raymont some seed money to jump-start the series.

*Can you name five women inventors?

Do you know the names of five women inventors? If not, hang in for a new, many-pronged project from Annie Wood, president of Toronto’s Red Pepper Production, and her partner, Parmijit Parmar. Inventive Women, a multimedia exploration of female inventors, will include a documentary, a series of educational videos, a cd-rom, a Website and more.

While Wood is new to the television industry, as a former publisher (one of the founders of Kids Can Press, now owned by Nelvana) Wood is no stranger to business. Her project was kick-started, thanks to a healthy grant of $100,000 from the Millennium Bureau of Canada for the creation of an interactive educational Website.

Red Pepper is now in preproduction on the 13-part, half-hour series, under consideration by tvontario. A second window of broadcast licences for the one-hour special has already been negotiated with scn and Knowledge Network.

Wood and Parmar are hoping to raise $1.7 million from private and public sources.

‘We have absolute confidence we will be able to do it,’ says Wood. ‘We want to create a ripple and change people’s perception that there were/are many women inventors.’

Parmar also heads up her own Toronto company, Montana Ridge Enterprises. She’s in the midst of production on a documentary about Sikh women in Canada, Set Fire To Water.

Parmar says scn, Knowledge and Global Television have offered broadcast deals for the production. As a Sikh woman herself, Parmar hopes to capture the voices of Sikh women’s history in Canada.

*Through the barrel of a gun

High Road Productions is wrapping up production on its three-hour series about the social history of the machine gun.

Produced by Sally Blake and Paul Jay (Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows), and directed by Emmy-award-winning director Steven Silver, Machine Gun will be broadcast on Discovery Canada and Discovery u.s.

The series uses the machine gun as a vehicle to tell stories, tracing the invention and uses of the weapon through the Civil War, the First World War, the ’30s and the gangster era, on to the labor unrest of the Depression and the rise of Hitler. on to the labor unrest of the Depression and the rise of Hitler, through to the Cold War.

It winds up at the present, taking look at current world politics, and examining the future of automatic weapons.

Storytelling and anecdotes from those who have used the machine gun such as Norman Edwards, an Englishman who fought in wwi, gun runners in Afghanistan and a woman in the Vietcong, are interspersed with interviews with heavyweight social commentators such as Noam Chomsky and Tony Benn.

For producer Sally Blake, working on the film ‘has been really fascinating, to look at history through the barrel of a machine gun, the way politics, economics and war really work. By understanding how it works you can conceive of a world without war.’

*Gzowski’s not retired

Tapestry Films is now launching its second season of Gzowski in Conversation for cbc, with a mix of half-hour interviews and one-hour specials. Some of the ex-Morningside host’s guests this season include: singers and musicians Diana Krall, Natalie MacMaster and the McGarrigle Sisters; actors Donald Sutherland, Molly Parker and Gordon and Leah Pinsent; defense lawyer Edward Greenspan; and Heritage Minister Shelia Copps.

Executive producer is Mary Young Leckie (The Arrow) and supervising producer is Heather Goldin. Joan Tosoni is directing and producing.