Having cowritten the script for the Kingsborough Greenlight feature production of To Walk With Lions and penned numerous reality-based biopics or mows, Toronto-based screenwriter Keith Ross Leckie finds himself in the anomalous position of being a busy Canadian scribe.

The $12-million Kenya-based shoot of To Walk With Lions recently wrapped location shooting under director Carl Schultz. Richard Harris stars as African game warden George Adamson, whose work with lions inspired the film Born Free, Kerry Fox as a visiting anthropologist, Brit newcomer John Michie as his brawling young assistant Tony Fitzjohn and Honor Blackman as his wife Joy.

Written by Leckie and Sharon Buckingham, the film highlights the latter days of lion lover Adamson’s life as seen through the eyes of Fitzjohn.

Certainly not a remake of Born Free, To Walk With Lions is an unflinching look at Adamson, and according to Leckie has lots of ‘adult’ aspects including Joy’s numerous affairs and Fitzjohn’s womanizing. The film reportedly climaxes with a gunfight where bandits kill Adamson as he defends the lions and the anthropologist.

Lions, a Canada/u.k. coproduction with Studio 8, is the first major feature Leckie has penned, but the biopic continues a long string of reality-based projects (mostly mows and miniseries) that the writer has scripted over the years. He says starting with a true story provides a project with a strong foundation.

‘I like starting with that because there is a truth or a reality to it that you can build on,’ says Leckie. ‘I feel that I’ve developed a good instinct as to how far you can push a good story dramatically without losing the spirit of truth and authenticity.’

And although a script is warranted artistic licence, Leckie points out that there have been times when he’s consciously pulled back from a story to prevent the script from getting away from the spirit or facts of the story. Adamson’s eventful life, for example, is prime fodder for a feature film, but Leckie says his job was simply to weave it all together.

‘I don’t want to undermine my contribution to the thing,’ he says modestly, ‘but it had all these wonderful elements… the hard part is tying it all together and making it a cohesive story. Reality is never a sequence of exciting events that relate to one another; it’s intermittent events, and I think the writer has to find the means by which to bring them all together.’

Still preferring to work within an act structure – ‘[even though] life doesn’t have an act structure, it’s all over the place’ – Leckie says in the case of the cbc miniseries The Arrow (The Film Works/Tapestry Films), bringing the story of the ill-fated Canadian fighter jet to the small screen presented some of his most difficult writing challenges to date.

In addition to wrestling The Arrow’s broad story into a dramatic structure, Leckie had to tailor his script to budgetary and logistic problems while trying to please his mentor and consultant Jim Floyd, the Arrow’s chief engineer. To make the miniseries work, Leckie had to take dramatic licence and present the Arrow’s progress through a core group of six engineers, including composite character Kate O’Hara who was based on real-life engineer Kay Shaw.

‘Jim said it wasn’t three guys in a drafting room coming up with this; it was 300 guys in 80 drafting rooms that would get together,’ recalls Leckie, who won a Writers Guild of Canada Top Ten Award for his script. ‘So I tried to explain the dramatic necessity of focusing on only a few characters.’

Leckie’s next project will be Hard Time: The David Milgaard Story for ctv. Barna-Alper is producing the mow, with Alliance distributing worldwide.

Leckie has been on the project for a few years now and says the dna evidence which finally exonerated Milgaard provided a great final chapter to his script. The major concern now, he says, is how far the mow can legally go in implicating the person who Leckie believes is the real murderer, as well as revealing a deal Milgaard made with authorities in order to get the dna testing done.

On the down side, Leckie says because the Milgaard project has been greenlit, it most likely will mean a no-go for his Guy Paul Morin script that has been in development with Atlantis for ctv.

‘Because of the low licence fees a private broadcaster gives, the project needed an American sale,’ says Leckie, who along with Atlantis’ exec vp Seaton McLean shopped the Morin injustice story to a bevy of u.s. broadcasters.

‘They all said, `Wait a minute… he gets tried twice?’ ‘ says Leckie, adding that u.s. broadcasters would usually turn down the project, saying America has its own injustice stories and doesn’t need those of foreign countries. ‘But when they try to sell us things, we’re a domestic market,’ he points out.

Leckie’s writing talents are not confined to reality-based projects. He has completed an mow script based on Gabrielle Roy’s novel Children of My Heart. The ‘Dirty Thirties, Prairie romance’ was to have been produced this summer, with wife Mary Leckie (The Arrow, Gzowski in Conversation) producing for Tapestry and A-Channel, but the project got turned down for eip funds by Telefilm.

Leckie says Children of My Heart is currently being reworked with a Quebec company in order to access that province’s 35% tax credit. Leckie, who has helmed a couple of Traders episodes, is slated to direct a September shoot and Ashley MacIsaac has been signed to play an idiot savant fiddle player.

Citing his positive experience on To Walk With Lions with Kingsborough producers Pieter Kroonenburg and Julie Allan, Leckie is also working on a script for the Kingsborough feature Ocean Warrior about environmental activist Paul Watson, as well as scripts for a Viking television series for Granada Television in the u.k. and Telescene’s u.s. operation.