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"Demon" wins CTV Canadian Documart
Panel also liked Teens and Spam
Demon in the Freezer, a proposed documentary about biotech
terrorism, won the $50,000 top prize Wednesday in the inaugural
CTV Canadian Documart. The $30,000 second place winner was Teen
Invasion: How Teens Came to Dominate World Culture. Third spot,
worth $20,000, was awarded to SPAM: The Shelf Life and Times
of the World's Most Popular Luncheon Meat.
A panel of 28 commissioning editors heard proposals from seven
participants at the documentary pitching competition, which CTV
president and COO Trina McQueen called "a cross between Survivor,
The Weakest Link, The Mole and maybe a step toward The Millionaire."
Each of the seven pitchers had three minutes to make their presentations,
followed by five minutes of questions from the panel. Participants
were scored 20% on the quality of their presentation, 30% on the
economic viability of their project and 50% on the quality of their
project's content.
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"I've been petrified for three weeks waiting for this,"
said Dugald Maudsley, of Toronto's Infield Fly Productions,
who pitched the winning proposal. "It's a tremendous
thing Banff and CTV have done. Being able to pitch to a large
group of people at once and to have them make a decision so
quickly is wonderful." Within 30 minutes after the close
of the session he had five contacts from interested broadcasters.
The finalists had some tense moments waiting for results
to be verified. With the audience filing out of the room after
declaring Demon in the Freezer the winner, Banff Television
Foundation president and CEO Pat Ferns announced that the
tally for Demon and Teen Invasion had to be re-checked. Teen
Invasion was judged to have the best quality of content, but
Demon had the best pitch. The two tied for viability of project.
After the weighting of each judges was calculated, Demon prevailed.
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Dugald Maudsley |
Commissioning editors were introduced to Demon in the Freezer
by a white powder that spilled out of envelopes Maudsley asked each
of them to open. "You have all just been exposed to smallpox,
the deadliest virus known to man. You each have 14 days to live,"
he said. From there, Maudsley explained how Demon in the Freezer
will explore the ease with which a bio-terrorist can create a deadly
designer virus with the potential to kill more people than the world's
entire nuclear arsenal and efforts to combat it by such organizations
as the Epdiemic Intelligence Service and the Bio-Terrorism Response
Unit of the Centre for Disease Control. Maudsley's partner on the
project is Douglas Propp of Atlantic Television (New York).
Even though he came second, Tom Perlmutter of Teen Invasion
said the CTV Canadian Documart was valuable exposure for his project.
His proposed series of four, one-hour programs will explore the
history of teen culture, a 20th Century phenomenon (the term teenager
wasn't even coined until 1941) that has become a pervasive world
force. Perlmutter, of Toronto's Primitive Entertainment Inc., says
the rise of teen culture has isolated and segregated teens from
the rest of society. "In a sense it has become increasingly
more segregated," he said in an interview. "It has to
do with the whole world marketing strategy that puts an emphasis
on demographics." The series will explore how teen culture
came into its own with the 20th Century development of the high
school and examine everything from movies and rock 'n roll to that
great teen liberator, the automobile.
 The
audience favorite seemed to be SPAM: The Shelf Life and Times
of the World's Most Popular Luncheon Meat. Anne Pick, of Toronto's
Reel to Reel Productions, wore a Spam hat and brought a tin of the
Hormel Foods product that has become part of world culinary culture
ever since the company trademarked the name on May 11, 1937, the
same day the Golden Gate Bridge opened. "There is much more
to Spam than ham in a can," said Pick. "Often it has been
the soldier's last meal and the immigrant's first meal." There
are 120 websites devoted to Spam ("double the interest of Marilyn
Monroe"), said Pick, who wants to "view the world through
the luncheon loaf. "We will go to war with Spam," she
said, and also go to Spam Jam, a weekend celebration of Spam held
each year in Austin, Minnesota, the home of Hormel Foods. Pick plans
to mine the archival and photographic record that exists on Spam,
from early TV commercials to print ads. Consumption of Spam, she
said, is increasing.
Not making the cut were Sunday Night, by Scott Harper of
Toronto; The Secret Language of Girls, by Matt Zimbel and
Josey Vogels of Montreal; Inside the Great Magazines, by
Irene Angelico and Abbey Neidik or Montreal; and The River: An
Inquiry Into the Origins of AIDS, by Arnie Gelbart and Yves
Jeanneau of Montreal.
Inside the Great Magazines aims to take viewers "behind
the gloss" of such high-powered magazines as Vogue,
Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Paris Match and
Time, said Angelico and Neidik. They plan to look at the
media barons who own them and the editors who run them - being a
fly-on-the wall in the Time boardroom as it makes its last-minute
decision on its Man of the Year, going on a photo shoot with Playboy
and seeing how celebrities and advertisers influence content. As
well, the pair hope to explore how magazines such as Ebony,
Ms., Playboy and Rolling Stone helped shape
and define culture. Commissioning editors questioned how much real
access they would get to the promotionally conscious, media-savvy
magazines.
The $100,000 awarded at the session yesterday makes the CTV Documart
the world's richest program pitching competition. It was adapted
with permission from the Australian Documart format pioneered by
the Australian International Documentary Conference and is intended
as a stimulus for popular, mainstream Canadian documentaries. It
is open to Canadian independent producers and international producers
who have Canadian partners.
Interested participants for next year should watch the Banff Television
Foundation website for details.
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