The job of writing the screenplay for Canadian tv movies and miniseries is rarely given to a ‘hired gun.’ In the case of this year’s batch of nominees in the category of Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Miniseries, the writers were all personally involved with the subjects they took on. Playback asked four of the five nominees why they thought their stories needed to be told to a Canadian tv audience and how they made that happen.
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Scriptwriter Janis Cole says she had artistic, personal, but also political motives in wanting to tell the story of Marlene Moore.
Then, cbc’s Jim Burt identified another compelling factor: Cole knew so much about Moore, the first woman prisoner in Canada deemed a dangerous offender, that much of her research was done before she brought the project to Burt in 1992. Both Cole and the film’s director Holly Dale had become friends with Moore during the making of their 1982 Genie Award-winning documentary P4W and the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival best short film prize winner, Shaggie: Letters From Prison, which was about Moore.
With the success and notice that the short film received, Cole realized that Moore was an important historical figure whose story needed to be told to a wider audience.
She and Dale pitched Burt, who greenlit the project. Dangerous Offender was shot in 1995 and the film was chosen to kick off the 1996/97 slate of cbc movies, drawing 1.6 million viewers.
‘It’s a really rare situation where you have the artistic team already so close to the topic,’ says Cole.
Cole says that being so close to Moore’s life did not make writing this script any more difficult than writing any other fact-based drama.
‘When you’re writing a fictionalized script, you’ve got to make it dramatic. And when you’re basing it on real life, you’ve got to be historically correct to certain facts that you’re including in the program. It’s a fine balancing act to get the right amount of information in and condense it so that it plays out well within the two-hour time slot. I love the challenge.’
Cole wrote approximately five drafts of the script, seeking ‘to improve and make better but not lose what had been done.’ Material was based on her personal knowledge of Moore (whom she visited once a week in jail) and on the court transcripts of her trial at which Cole was a witness for the defence, and she got feedback on the script from Dale and the cbc.
The biggest challenge for Cole was balancing both the dramatic and political elements of the story. ‘I wanted to do both. I wanted to get at the Marlene Moore that I knew, so I wanted to get it right, make it strong and honor Marlene,’ she says. ‘But I also felt that it wasn’t enough if it was just her life story, so it had to be about the treatment of children and problematic people within the system. It was looking at those broader issues through Marlene.’
Also in this report:
Profiling Best Direction in a Dramatic TV Series: Kari Skogland p.22
Jon Cassar p.22
Jane Thompson p.27
Profiling Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Miniseries:
Jim Burt: The non-nominee behind so many nominations p.29
David Adams Richards p.31
Keith Ross Leckie p.37
Pete White p.37
Profiling the contenders for Best Sports Program or Series p.39
The nominees list p.44