When the Whistler Film Festival launched a competition to connect Canadian filmmaking teams with Chinese production companies, the hope was that maybe one movie deal would come together.
Early indications suggest that goal has been surpassed.
As of the close of the festival on Sunday, WFF managing director Jane Milner told The Sun as many as eight potential deals are now in discussion. "I think it would have been an over-the-top success if we got one real movie deal out of this and I've heard from the teams that did the pitching that as many as eight of them are talking to people - so you're now talking to somebody who is walking on air," said a giddy Milner. "This is over the top."
Milner has spent the last three years co-ordinating the inaugural China Canada Gateway for Film script competition, in which Canadian writer/ producer teams were invited to vie for three Chinese production contracts worth up to $5 million. The resulting movies, they hope, will appeal to audiences from both countries.
"We set out to be a gateway between Canada and China for the film business and I think we've done that," she said. "My goal is that if you want to do business with China, you have to come here."
The first inkling the competition was an overt success came when one finalist team was picked to go straight to production before the winners were even announced.
In a plot twist worthy of the script he was pitching, veteran Vancouver screenwriter Guy Bennett's script is being fast-tracked after winning, then withdrawing from, the competition.
Bennett and producer Raymond Massey (Iron Road), optioned the rights to the wildly weird true life story of a Chinese peasant who was scammed by an American businessman.
"This peasant tracked the con man all the way to a squalid little townhouse in the east of Los Angeles, knocked on the man's door, he answered the door and he said 'you and I are joined now.' And he took the car keys and made a little cot at the foot of the man's bed and he slept there until he'd extracted the $50,000 back," Bennett explained.
Before the peasant could return home he was scammed out of his money again - this time by a friend - and decided to stay in Los Angeles, where he became one of the city's top private investigators. At the competitive pitch session Thursday, Bennett and Massey dazzled the crowd at the Whistler Conference Centre by revealing their surprise guest - Eddie Zhao, the script's protagonist. "He was the clincher," said Massey. "There were jurists weeping by the time he finished."
The film was one of three winners selected among 13 competing teams who were whittled down from over 100 applicants, but before the competition was over Massey was offered a production deal, which meant withdrawing from the formal competition. It was an offer no filmmaker could refuse. "They want it written, finished, shot and delivered by December of next year - a year from today, fully financed," Massey told The Sun during a festival party at Araxi Restaurant. If all goes according to plan it could be ready to screen at next year's Whistler Festival.
But the Whistler connections played a role in the project beyond hooking up the pitch with the right production team. Bennett said he first read a news story about Zhao two years ago in The Vancouver Sun when he was attending the festival. When he heard about this year's script competition, Bennett remembered the article and thought it was the perfect story for a Chinese production house.
The two other winning scripts were Blush and Butterflies Tale.
Richard Bell, the writer behind Blush, quite literally wined and dined the judges - or at least he wined them. As his producer, Vancouver's Elizabeth Yake (It's All Gone Pete Tong) pitched the production details, Bell uncorked a lovely bottle of blush and poured a glass for each of the jurors.
When the competition was announced, romantic comedies were on the wish list, Bell said, but because of Chinese censorship laws he decided to draw his inspiration from a more innocent age and fashioned his story after classic comedies like Roman Holiday.
His script, about a Chinese food blogger who visits Paris to learn more about wine, was picked up for development by Ivy Zong, vice chair of Galloping Horse.
Butterflies Tale, a 3-D animated romance about a pair of butterflies, landed with Lifeng Wang, executive director of Wuxi Studios and CEO of Xing Xing Media.
At least one more project will be optioned out of the competition, with details expected to be released within the week. Other deals may be made as well, entitling WFF's Milner to consider her mission, for this year at least, accomplished.
The call for entries for the second annual China Canada Gateway for Film Script Competition will be announced in spring 2013.