With the Genie screenplay nominees mirroring those of best picture, save Andre Forcier’s La Comtesse de Baton Rouge standing in for the six director-helmed Cosmos, and with all the nominated films’ directors having had a hand in the screenplays, this year’s list furthers the maxim that a great film starts with a great script.

A screenplay juror for the past three years, writer Michael Gibson (Defy Gravity) noticed a few common elements running through many of the films nominated this year, including dark elements of humor, unconscious motivation and a personal nature to the kinds of stories being told. Gibson says while there were fewer movies eligible this year, it was nonetheless a strong year for Canadian film.

This year the screenplay jury, chaired by Jefferson Lewis, chose to combine the categories of adapted and original screenplay due to the small number of entrants. Adapted screenplays The Sweet Hereafter and Kissed were judged alongside original scripts for The Hanging Garden, Karmina and La Comtesse de Baton Rouge. ‘You look at the script that stands on its own, no matter how good the book may be,’ says jury member Donald Martin.

Thom Fitzgerald’s first feature script The Hanging Garden combined all of the required elements to make a film that Gibson found exhilarating and poetic, while Martin liked the script for its cinematic quality, dialogue and East Coast setting.

Seasoned screenwriter Martin (Never Too Late), who spent many hours in a dark theater in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough with his fellow jurors watching this year’s entrants, says, ‘When one is judging a picture you look at the various elements, but with a screenplay you try to detach yourself from performance, direction and all the technical aspects and just distill the script.’

The difficulty in trying to distill the script from a finished film is why Gibson thinks the Genies judging process for best screenplay should be changed to allow the judges to read the actual scripts.

‘I’ve seen scripts changed quite dramatically by an editor if not a director,’ says Gibson. ‘It would be helpful to see what the writer actually wrote because the visual scenes in a screenplay are often attributed to the director even though they could be written in the script to the most minute detail.’

Fellow juror Louise Pelletier (Nenette) felt many of the screenplays were ‘truly original works’ unlike some previous years ‘where everybody was telling the same stories.’

Pelletier notes that Colleen Murphy’s feature debut Shoemaker was a strong screenplay that ‘was made into an interesting film,’ but says ‘the casting was not backing the screenplay.’ Nevertheless, Shoemaker has two nominations, both in acting categories.

Gibson found Cosmos an ‘exciting’ screenplay given the fact there were six young filmmakers working on a theme given to them by a producer. ‘It hung together quite nicely and I liked it,’ he says.

Pelletier points to director/ writer Lynne Stopkewich and cowriter Angus Fraser’s nominated screenplay for Kissed as a very original script ‘that makes you believe in a psychology that is an invention. It is science-fiction applied to psychology and it works,’ says Pelletier. ‘It’s not so frequent that you believe something that is in fact psychologically unbelievable.’

Stopkewich says she was doing research for another film when she came across Barbara Gowdy’s short story We So Seldom Look On Love about a young necrophile coming to terms with her sexuality while apprenticing as an embalmer. Finding the story ‘very cinematic,’ she asked fellow screenwriter Fraser if he would be interested in helping her adapt it into a short film.

‘But as I started to pursue it and acquired the rights to it, I began to think that it merited more screen time and character development,’ says Stopkewich from the office of Boneyard Films, her production company with partner Dean English.

Due to a short window (eight weeks) of opportunity for use of equipment at a major discount, Stopkewich wrote the first draft of Kissed in a week. She then collaborated with Fraser on the subsequent two or three drafts, which were completed during the short preproduction period.

Stopkewich says she consulted Fraser ‘because the screenwriting process is really isolating and lonely and Angus is a high-energy guy who is very funny and has a real strength with dialogue, while my production design background has made me visually strong.’

Fraser’s gender was also helpful, says Stopkewich, considering the story was written and directed by a woman with a woman’s perspective. ‘I wanted him to play devil’s advocate, especially in regard to the male characters.’ The director says she and Fraser worked side by side doing revisions right up to and during shooting.

While the film stayed essentially true to the original story and Stopkewich’s first draft, adapting Gowdy’s short story to a feature-length film forced the Vancouver director/writer/producer to add scenes and events to the film.

‘There are scenes that I wrote in initially that aren’t in the short story,’ says Stopkewich, who added the embalming demonstration and now perfunctory Canadian film moment, the car-wash scene (see Crash, The Sweet Hereafter), to the first draft.

Actors Molly Parker and Peter Outerbridge also collaborated on dialogue. ‘Peter and Molly would always challenge the text, so while we were lighting a scene I would sometimes be writing new dialogue or changing little things because I thought some of their points were valid and I was really open to collaboration,’ says Stopkewich.

As with all low-budget features, the film’s script was written with money in mind.

‘I think part of the reason I wrote with Angus was because I was also one of the producers on the film,’ says Stopkewich. ‘He would want to write in a scene at a football stadium and I would say, `Can we do it in a cafe where there’s no one else around?’ We had to cut to the heart and essence of the scene and ask what does it need to say and then try and set it in a place that could work for us with our limited resources.’

The final scene of Lux Film’s comedic vampire movie Karmina was also written with budget in mind, according to director/ cowriter Gabriel Pelletier. The scene, both funny and effective, simply involves two actors controlling two other actors telekinetically like a video game.

‘In terms of special effects we didn’t have the money to do anything too elaborate so we had to think of ways to do stuff cheaply,’ says Pelletier. ‘We had a lot of off-camera gags with sound and that was where my involvement in the script was useful.’

Karmina has four screenwriters to its credit, employing a group strategy that Pelletier says is often successful in a script’s search for laughs. The director says when producer Nicole Robert approached him with Ann Burke’s original script it was more of a children’s fantasy film. He decided to turn the film into a comedy and bring on writers Andree Pelletier (no relation) and Yves Pelletier (no relation).

Yves Pelletier, who also plays the role of Vlad in Karmina, had written for tv as a member of the Quebec comedy troupe Rock et Belles Oreilles and was originally approached by Gabriel Pelletier to serve as a gag writer for the film. ‘I didn’t think he would be a scriptwriter but we really hit it off and he earned his place as our main writer,’ says the director. ‘He’s very talented.’ Yves Pelletier wrote the final version of the script and has been credited with writing all the film’s dialogue.

Fellow writer Andree Pelletier was given the scenes involving the film’s namesake, a 140-year-old vampire in the process of coming of age. ‘She helped develop the female character,’ explains the director. ‘The more comedic scenes I gave to Yves and the more visual action scenes went to me because my strength is in story and structure. Then we put our scenes together and on the strength of Yves’ dialogue I had him go over the script for the final draft to give the comedic flavor overall. We worked rather quickly as a group (a month and a half) and delivered a script that was rather strong in the end.’

Veteran Quebec director Andre Forcier’s brilliant, semi-autobiographical and self-reflective script for the Max Films production of the Roger Frappier-produced La Comtesse De Baton Rouge was ‘a script with a lot more maturity than the other ones,’ according to jury member Louise Pelletier, who adds, ‘It was the integrity of the screenplay I liked.’

Forcier says he originally wanted to make a film about his experiences as a young director in Quebec in the late ’60s going from set to set looking for 16mm black-and-white short ends to complete his first film.

‘At that time I was living in an editing room,’ says Forcier, who spent about a year and a half writing La Comtesse, going through six drafts with help from wife Linda, Frappier and the late nfb producer Jacques Bobet, to whom the film is dedicated.

After abandoning the idea of the young filmmaker’s relationship with a blind editor after he discovered someone else was working on a similar story, Forcier invented the character of The Great Zenon, a human Cyclops who can project images using his mind without film or a camera. It was from this framework that Forcier developed the character of the beautiful bearded woman Paula Paul with whom the young filmmaker named Rex Prince falls in love.

Portraying central character Rex Prince past and present was one of the biggest challenges facing Forcier at the script stage. ‘I don’t like flashbacks because you know where they start and you’re always sure to come back to where you started. Flashbacks are anti-cinematographic,’ says the veteran director. ‘This is where I came up with the idea of the film within the film, which was a high-risk idea.’

Forcier still feels uncertain about the film’s narrative structure, which tells a story with scenes that take place in the past, present and, most ingeniously, in a film within the film made by a mature Rex Prince about his younger days.

‘Young people, 25 years and under who use computers and the Internet, really go for the film, they have no problem with the structure,’ says Forcier. ‘But some older people may have some problems because you create sympathy with some characters and then you break it. I like this idea but you have to live with it.’

A good story, well told

Despite the fact that Louise Pelletier says the current crop of movies shows a certain level of maturity, with screenwriters taking on subjects they would have shied away from in the past, she warns that the dire financial reality of the Canadian film writing market is taking a toll on developing talent.

Per Pelletier, the state of Canadian feature film screenwriting is essentially lamentable.

Screenwriters are asked to work on spec during the first phase, she says, and ‘they are not reimbursed before the shoot, and we’re [the writers] the only real investors in the whole thing. You can’t hire a technician and pay him after the shoot. Look at the budgets, there’s more money for the producer to make photocopies than there is for the writer.

‘In cinema, a screenwriter is often asked to make an investment over a period of three or four years and nobody knows if it will end up on the screen. If [the film] does get done, the screenwriter is among the last to be paid,’ says Pelletier, adding:

‘And Telefilm has a shocking attitude. It wasn’t so long ago that the cost of the screenwriting [for purposes of the refundable tax credit] was not counted as a Canadian cost! It’s mind-blowing. We’re seeing more and more members of the Writers Guild of Canada based in Los Angeles.’

Among new wgc members, she says 80 out of 117 have left Canada for the u.s. ‘It’s normal, they’re going to leave.’

There is only so much that can be done to disguise the impact of meager budgets, and the truism ‘talent will out’ is taking on a darker interpretation. Pelletier says few of this year’s movie crop, other than those nominated as finalists, succeeded in creating ‘a good story, well told.’