So now what? That’s the question we’ll be asking directors, producers and screenwriters with films at this year’s festival. Pitching will bring you up to date on what festival delegates have on deck, as they schmooze and pitch the players, hoping to get the support necessary to give their next project the green light.

*Fitzgerald’s Beefcake

After hitting the festival circuit with his much-anticipated The Hanging Garden which opens Perspective Canada tonight, Halifax-based writer/director/producer Thom Fitzgerald of Emotion Pictures is set to begin shooting the docudrama Beefcake in October.

In between festival preparations, Fitzgerald has been doing research and interviews for the $500,000 picture, which Emotion is producing with assistance from Telefilm Canada, Britain’s Channel 4 and France’s arte.

The film is already presold to broadcasters in Britain, France, Germany and Canada, with Cineplex Odeon distributing domestically. Fitzgerald will most likely be looking for a u.s. distribution deal for the project, which he first conceived at an on-the-spot pitching session during the 1995 Sharing Stories Conference in Glasgow.

Beefcake examines the men’s muscle magazines of the ’50s and ’60s, which Fitzgerald points out were in fact published and photographed by gay men, for gay men. ‘They somehow survived censorship,’ says Fitzgerald, who thinks the magazines’ homoeroticism was simply overlooked by an unknowing public. ‘I guess in the ’50s you could show a biker spanking another biker and not think twice about it,’ says Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald optioned the book Beefcake as a basis for the film, but says, ‘I don’t know why I optioned it, because it’s all pictures.’

Beefcake marks the first feature produced by Emotion as the lone production company, and Fitzgerald says he and Emotion partner Shandi Mitchell are hoping to do more features.

The Hanging Garden will be opening this year’s Atlantic Film Festival, and will have its European premiere later this month at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.

*The Dawn

Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice are still trying to sell their mob comedy script The Dawn. Their unsuccessful attempts to peddle the screenplay at last year’s festival are documented in their film Pitch that is playing as part of the Perspective Canada series. They’re hoping that their new status as festival participants instead of outsiders crashing the gate will add weight to the much passed-on tale of a Mafia don who gets an accidental sex-change operation. Even if they don’t sell the script they could make a sequel to Pitch.

Rice also says that he and Hotz will be pitching their new project 7 Days In The Hole to anyone who will listen. Though they don’t have a completed script, the pair were desperately trying to create a working synopsis of the story in time for tiff while giving numerous local media interviews.

Trying to keep a leash on the antics of Rice and Hotz will be Joel Roodman of New York-based Gotham Entertainment, who will be acting as a sales agent for Pitch and looking for a distribution deal.

Word has it that the Pitch boys have been told not to discuss business over the next 10 days, and to leave the deal making in the capable hands of Roodman, a former Miramax exec.