1935. The Depression has done its work. A cloudy, early spring sky falls along a lonely stretch of road in Northern Ontario, a melting patch of snow and mud. Over the opening credits, a pan over frozen fields reveals the silhouette of a woman and two children walking. We hear the magical, bubbling sound of children in a nursery contrasted with the drama of Mozart as we cut abruptly from the happy cradle to a shot of badly swollen feet and the discovery that the woman is pregnant.

She collapses and falls flat on her face in the mud.

Thus begins Cinar Films/Bernard Zukerman Productions’ $8 million celluloid saga of the Dionne quintuplets, Million Dollar Babies. This evocative opening tableaux is only one of 230 scenes in the four-hour Quebec/ Ontario miniseries which goes before the cameras May 9.

The production has been presold to cbc and cbs and brings together Montreal’s mercurial Cinar, director Christian Duguay and Canada’s most successful miniseries team, writer Suzette Couture and producer Bernard Zukerman.

Most expensive

The miniseries is Zukerman’s most expensive production to date. But even at $2 million per hour, he says the shooting budget is tight.

‘It’s a period piece and epic in its scope,’ says Zukerman. ‘Part of what the story is about is how this small village in the middle of the Depression became a mecca for hope; the world really streamed to North Bay, Ont. in the mid-1930s.’

The quints were a huge event: Hollywood did three feature films on the subject, and the concept of commercial endorsement actually began with them, according to Zukerman.

‘At one point,’ he says, ‘the quints were a $500 million industry for Ontario. After gold mining, they were the second biggest industry in the province. That’s how much tourism they pulled in.’

Million Dollar Babies will be shot on 35mm and calls for 2,400 extras, close to 100 speaking parts and ‘proper’ 1930s outfits and costumes. Costume designer Renee April’s search for the real thing is taking her to North Carolina, Los Angeles and London, Eng.

Cast

Leading players on Million Dollar Babies include u.s. actor Beau Bridges as the country doctor who delivered the Dionne babies, Quebec actor Roy Dupuis and stage actress Celine Bonniere in the roles of the quints’ father and mother, Remy Girard as the family lawyer, and Oscar-nominated Canadian actress Kate Nelligan as the American journalist who broke the sensational story.

The production is Zukerman’s first Quebec experience and he admits, ‘I was a bit nervous knowing that I have to do this picture entirely in Quebec with people I’d never worked with before.’

Elite craft talent

Happily for the Toronto producer, he’s surrounded by the elite of Canadian craft talent – line producer Irene Litinsky, production designer Francois Seguin, costume designer April, editor Yves Langlois and casting director Lucie Robitaille.

The first part of the story, set in 1934, chronicles the heartbreaking separation of the quints from their parents. The storyline reveals how the media created circumstances which allowed the government to vilify the Dionne parents, and essentially kidnap their children.

In part two, set five years later, the drama turns to the family’s fight to have the children returned.

Casting director Robitaille has the daunting task of finding five lookalike five- to seven-year-old girls to play the Dionnes at age five, and five babies to portray them as one-year-olds.

For the birth sequences, Zukerman says the production will use prosthetic babies built in England, ‘because no hospital is going to let us near two-pound, premature babies.’

Zukerman and Cinar partners Micheline Charest and Ron Weinberg began discussing the Dionne project almost two years ago. Events moved rapidly when Couture, ‘the best writer for this project, and the best in the country,’ according to Zukerman, agreed to write the script.

Of his relationship with Cinar, Zukerman says: ‘It was, as often happens in this business, a collision of circumstance, which in this case turned out to be very fortuitous. My company and Cinar were able to work out a deal that is good for everyone.

‘We’re basically partners on this thing. I’m the up-front producer, and the executive producers are Ron and Micheline.

‘Cinar is the bank in that they are the cash flow, and Cinar’s distribution wing will distribute the project internationally. Cinar is taking care of (negotiating with) Telefilm, and the day to day (business),’ says Zukerman, adding: ‘They’re good producing partners because both Ron and Micheline have good taste.’

‘Proven track record’

Weinberg says the deal couldn’t have happened without Couture, ‘someone who could write and bring the story alive,’ and Zukerman, ‘a creative producer with a proven track record in miniseries.’

Zukerman is cbc’s leading supplier of miniseries and cbc has first right of refusal on all his projects.

His credits as an executive producer for cbc include And Then You Die, a gritty 1987 crime story directed by Francis Mankiewicz and produced by Brian McKenna, and Skate (1987), written by Couture and directed by Randy Bradshaw.

He produced Squamish Five (1988), directed by Paul Donovon, and in 1990 and 1991, teamed again with Couture and Mankiewicz on two hugely successful breakthrough cbc miniseries, Love and Hate and Conspiracy of Silence. His latest production, Dieppe, shot in 1993, was directed by John N. Smith.

According to Zukerman, Joan Harrison, cbs vice-president in charge of miniseries, ‘fell in love’ with Couture’s screenplay for Million Dollar Babies. He adds the project sets an important precedent in that it is ‘the first time an American network has invested in the front end of a totally Canadian production.’

‘It’s a very good deal for everyone involved,’ says Zukerman. ‘It’s a wonderful deal for Cinar, clearly, and it’s a good deal for Bernard Zukerman Productions. It’s a wonderful deal for cbc, who are getting a very expensive miniseries for a fraction of what they normally pay. And it’s a wonderful deal for cbs because they’re also getting a miniseries for a fraction of what they normally (pay). So financially, it’s a rare entity.’

Despite his growing recognition in the u.s. tv market, Zukerman says he has no intention of changing his business plan or moving his operation to the States.

‘I’ve chosen a path with my company where I can take on projects that I’m passionate about and keep my overhead extremely low, and that’s the balance I’ve always been looking for.

‘If I expanded the company, I would have to take on projects that I wasn’t necessarily as passionate about, and I prefer at this point (to work on) projects that I feel have great commercial potential but also say something.’

A perfect fit

With Couture’s script securely in place, Zukerman’s most important creative decision on Million Dollar Babies was the selection of a director. He says he found the perfect fit in Duguay.

‘With Christian, I think I’ve been very fortunate. When he was working on Dieppe, Kenneth Welsh (who had just wrapped shooting on Atlantis Films’ Adrift, directed by Duguay), mentioned how much he liked working with Christian.

‘Once we had a commitment from cbs and cbc to proceed into production, we were faced with the formula of getting a director that (a) we were happy with, (b) a director that cbc and cbs would be happy with, and (c) a director who could meet the point requirements of sogic, therefore, one based out of Quebec. And, by the time you put all those factors into one pot, a very small list of directors emerges.

‘The reason I’m lucky to have Christian is that I didn’t have to sacrifice anything, despite all those conditions.’

First trained as an a cinematographer, the 37-year-old Duguay was once considered to be one of the country’s best (read daredevil) steadicam operators.

Zukerman especially liked Duguay’s comments on Couture’s script.

‘We connected very quickly. As a matter of fact, I spoke to Suzette on the phone today, and she said, `He (Duguay) knows how to read scripts, he’s passionate about the program.’ ‘

‘Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, Christian knows that, and he likes working with people,’ says Zukerman. ‘I think he’ll add a lot, not only visually, but in every way. He has this enormous amount of energy, and like myself, he has high standards.

‘I’d go on record as saying it was fortuitous that he (Duguay) met the Quebec (certification) requirements. But if you’d given me the choice of the whole country, at this point, I’ll say absolutely he’d have been my first choice, Quebec points or not.’

According to Duguay, the $2 million an hour budget makes sense when one considers the magnitude of activity surrounding the birth and merchandising of the five Dionne children.

Some of that money, he adds, will go to ‘Quintland,’ a medical care facility being built across the road from the Dionne home.

Make magic

Duguay says Couture’s script and the story’s character development are strong enough to attract any number of top stars.

‘For myself, I have four leads – Beau Bridges, Kate Nelligan, Roy Dupuis and Celine Bonniere – who are going to make telling this story totally magic,’ he says.

Duguay says he had intended to move away from television and concentrate solely on features, but Couture’s ‘gold mine of a script’ based on contemporary issues like greed and cultural discrimination, helped him change his mind.

In fact, his recent career preoccupation has been to get away from being pigeonholed as an action director, where thin stories ‘make you feel like a traffic cop on a set.’

Duguay has made eye-opening progress as a director in a very short period of time, learning about actors by watching top directors like Paul Mazursky.

‘Some people might go to school to learn but I discovered actors and drama through my craft – by filming people,’ he says. ‘From there, seeing what worked and what didn’t, I started to piece the mechanisms together.’ He has also gained insight into acting from his wife, actress Liana Komorowska.

Survival themes

Duguay’s firm dramatic direction on two intense survival-theme tv movies, Snowbound (1993), broadcast on cbs, and the award-winning Adrift (1992), broadcast on the CTV Television Network and cbs, has placed him among the elite of Canadian directors. Earlier credits include Live Wire and Scanners ii & iii.

On this project, as on earlier shoots, Duguay will operate his own camera while dop David Franco concentrates on lighting the set and supervising cinematography.

He says doing his own camera work keeps him close to the actors. ‘It becomes more of a dance, and the actors love it because of the kind of `synchronicity’ that exists.’

Despite the big budget, huge crews and endless casting calls, Duguay says he’s undaunted by the challenge.

‘No matter what problems there might be on a set, the basic rule is to make the story work. And because this story works on the page, even if it has to be simplified, everything will come together as a single beat.’

Duguay is aiming to shoot four to five minutes a day, a task made easier by the presence of ad Michael Williams. The two have an instinctual relationship, he says, having worked together on Duguay’s last four shoots.

‘I don’t want to shoot a typical television movie,’ says the director. ‘I want to dirty up the set. I don’t like it when you actually feel you’re on a movie set with 10 light sources everywhere. I want to back off a little bit, give it a European feel, more tableaux and softer, versus the contrast of the nursery where everything is being built and lit using wider angles.’

Discrimination

Duguay says the idea of discrimination plays a key role in the miniseries and points to the Dionne story as a glaring example of the racism and contempt that weighed heavily against the impoverished, French-speaking Catholics of the era. ‘Even if they (the Dionnes) were limited in some ways,’ he says, ‘they were proud, fair-minded people with strong souls, but they were overwhelmed.’

As for his future, Duguay says he’s not abandoning action films, he just wants to be sure there’s a story worth telling when he does one. He is developing a couple of major feature projects with Montreal producer Rene Malo, another big feature with Tom Berry and Allegro Films, and a third project with Vancouver producer Jonathan Goodwill.

As an interesting aside, Zukerman says he would have hired more Quebec talent but so many of the younger actors he saw, people in their 20s and 30s, had virtually no ability to work in English.

‘Of a certain generation, Quebec actors in their 50s and 40s, most of them are totally fluent in English,’ says Zukerman. ‘It was a total surprise for us, and to a certain degree to Lucie Robitaille, that actors in their 20s and 30s are much less bilingual. There were a number of actors we would otherwise have been interested in, but they spoke no English.’

With shooting only days away, fully 80% of the financing on Million Dollars Babies is now in place. Along with cbc, cbs and Cinar, investors include the Quebec tax credit program and the Ontario Film Development Corporation. At press time, the project was under evaluation by Telefilm Canada, according to Weinberg.

Couture’s screenplay is based on the 1986 book Times of their Lives: The Dionne Tragedy written by John Nihmey and Stuart Foxman. Cinar acquired the rights to the book several years ago

‘Sixty years ago,’ concludes Zukerman, ‘the whole world came to the Dionne quints. Now this series will bring the story back to the international community, in what we think is likely to be every major broadcast market in the world.’