‘Great North’ Festival an Ambitious Undertaking : The event is a fund-raiser for a proposed theater that would showcase short films.

Short films are the movies’ neglected stepchildren, but they may be soon getting first-class treatment in Los Angeles. Tonight, Douglas Piburn launches his first “Great North American Short Film Festival” at the World Theater, 6543 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood as a fund-raiser for his proposed Fellini Theater, which is to occupy space in the old Benson Hardware building across the street from the World as a showcase for short films both old and new.

Of the six films Piburn selected as a two-hour sampling for the press, five are top-notch. Only one is a documentary, Bart Mallard’s casual, ingratiating portrait of Warren Lewis, a black middle-aged Memphis barber-entrepreneur-civic do-gooder who lives above his large, rambling barber-beauty shop compound and whose specialty is, of all things, trimming hair by burning it with slender candles used in church fixtures.

Lewis comes across as a man of exceptional self-reliance and generosity. Douglas Kunin’s “Twist of Fate” introduces us to another distinctive personality, William J. Renquyst, an actual homeless man Kunin drops into a fictional story that has Renquyst, wiry, weathered and middle-aged, coming into sudden good fortune. (Renquyst himself rambles on like an exotic Joe Frank radio narrative.)

Kunin has a wry, detached way with telling a story, which is also true of Steve Buscemi’s “What Happened to Pete,” Rick Velleu’s “Two Days in Wisconsin” and Myles Connell’s “In Uncle Robert’s Footsteps.” Buscemi’s film is a deft transfer-of-identity fable in which he plays a sort of goofy average Joe who stops in Seymour Cassel’s bar only to have a drastic, out-of-left-field encounter with another seemingly ordinary type, played by Mark Boone Jr.; it’s not for nothing that the film pays homage to William Castle’s 1964 “Straitjacket” with Joan Crawford.

Velleu’s film is a hilarious take on a woman (Stephanie Silverman, a marvelously expressive comedian) going nuts from boredom by her mate (Jerry Mettner), proprietor of a seedy, ancient roadside gas station in a deserted rural area; the guy’s much more interested in mastering his taped French lessons than in making love to her. The best of the lot is Connell’s film, a wistful tale about a naive young Irishman (Patrick Fitgerald) who arrives in New York unannounced to descend upon his uncle (Nye Heron), who turns out to be a penny-ante wheeler-dealer.

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white by the talented Tim Naylor, Connell’s film is the most fully developed and beautifully crafted of all six shorts; we should definitely be hearing more from Connell.

The least of the six, “Heavy Put-Away or, a Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted,” proves to be as ponderous as its title--a tedious business directed by Charles Zigman from his and Terry Southern’s adaptation of a Southern short story about a young man trying to sell a glum tale to an understandably dubious agent.

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