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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Canadian novelist and screenwriter David Adams Richards admits that one of his major motivations for writing screenplays based on his novels is to entice people to read his books.
The New Brunswick native now living in Toronto won the 1996 Gemini for best writing in a movie or miniseries for the cbc in-house production of Small Gifts and is nominated again this year for his script of the Credo Entertainment/Flat City Films production For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down, based on his novel of the same name.
‘When you’re dealing with the novel, it’s a different art form and you can do different things. When you’re dealing with a movie-of-the-week, you’re dealing with 90 minutes and you’re dealing with time,’ says Richards, who won the Governor General’s Award for his novel Nights Below Station Street, which has also been made into a film with Credo. Again scripted by Richards, the tv movie will air on cbc later this year.
The differences between Richards’ book For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down and his screenplay are many. Most obvious is the ending. In the novel, the antagonist Gary Percy Rils is captured by the rcmp and a poetic conversation between characters Loretta and Constable Petrie follows. At the end of the film, Rils is killed along with the hero Jerry Bines.
‘For the film to have complete closure it worked better if they were both killed. But if you read the novel it amounts to the same thing,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think it was too forbidding to change the ending, because it was essential to have some kind of forceful closure. I don’t think it’s as poetic an ending as in the book, but in its own way it works.
‘Screenplays and novels need different things,’ says Richards. ‘If you’re a novelist, you’re a novelist, but if you’re also a scriptwriter you shouldn’t fear that. The essential thing is that a script is its own art form and it needs different things to deal with the way movies are shot.’
But for an artist like Richards, the restrictions and collaborations of scriptwriting are never easy. ‘At times that’s painful, there are certain subtleties within the body of a novel that you just can’t get on the screen,’ says Richards, who considers himself a novelist first and has a new book coming out with McClelland & Stewart this fall. ‘But you have to deal with it as it comes, and I can deal with it.’
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
Janis Cole p.29
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