Every year, media writing students in the Radio and Television Arts program at Ryerson Polytechnic University write an article for Playback as part of their course. The following is the first in a limited series of this year’s stellar contributions.

A lot of people thought Colin Brunton was crazy to leave. He’d led a rather charmed career up to the point he was asked to head up the Canadian Film Centre’s Feature Film Project: winning a Genie for his short film The Mysterious Moon Men of Canada, then coproducing Roadkill and producing Highway 61, both from director Bruce McDonald and two of the more successful Canadian films ever made. And then, like the cherry on top of an already tasty sundae, he was asked to head up the ffp.

‘[It was] a dream come true, a chance to run what was like a little studio,’ he recalls.

Brunton ran it well, exec producing the ffp’s extremely successful first five features: Holly Dale’s Blood & Donuts, Laurie Lynd’s House, Clement Virgo’s Rude, Colleen Murphy’s Shoemaker and this year’s Toronto International Film Festival breakout Cube from Vincenzo Natali.

Then he walked away.

‘It was frustrating because I was the executive producer and wasn’t really the producer so I only had so much say. I’d want to get my hands dirty and really get into the projects,’ says Brunton.

So against his better judgment, he left his ‘ivory tower’ to do the one thing that seemed crazier than leaving in the first place: a film about the Donnellys.

Filmmakers have been trying to adapt the tragic tale about a family of Irish settlers who are murdered in 19th century Ontario since the ’50s, but no one has ever been able to get it on film. John Huston tried for years to get the picture made, and at one point had Robert Redford attachedÉwhen it fell though.

The Toronto section of the Writers Guild of Canada claims to have over 30 Donnelly scripts, and those are just the ones that are registered.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a thousand screenplays out there,’ Brunton says.

So why attempt to make a film that seems to be the cinematic equivalent of Macbeth?

‘I’m totally obsessed with this film. I’ve got to make this film before I die.’

Why?

‘Man, I don’t know. If I was a bit flakier, I would think I was a reincarnation of someone back then.’

The obsession started in 1990 when Brunton read Kelley’s now-famous book The Black Donnellys, which was followed by more and more books. The compelling story seemed so ideal for film, and after several pilgrimages to the Donnellys’ old stomping ground, he decided to set the movie in motion. He has been working on the screenplay part time since 1992.

‘I’ve got this, almost like, support group of people who are like me and have their own script,’ he says.

But with so many scripts circulating (Columbia Pictures is rumored to have an entire shelf dedicated to unproduced Donnellys scripts), why haven’t any of them been able to get made? Most likely a couple of reasons.

‘We think that the writers couldn’t resist all the incredible stories. The story itself spans at least 50 years, but you could really say that it spans 100 years or 10 years, and so many amazing things happened… the details are endless,’ says Brunton.

‘We think that none of the writers were able to resist all these incredibly juicy stories, and so when they tried to put them into a film, it ended up being episodic and didn’t add up to much.’

Along with writer Hugh Graham (Palais Royal, A Sudden Darkness), Brunton feels they’ve solved that problem with their script Vigilance by making the lead character a friend of the Donnellys’ grappling with the moral dilemma of joining the angry mob and betraying his friends, or becoming a social outcast.

But along with the creative hurdles there are practical matters that have sent many a Donnellys film back to development.

‘For one thing,’ says Brunton, ‘it’s a period piece and it’s tragedy. And so it’s very expensive to make and it’s a downer of a movie. That’s probably stopped a lot of the execs from giving it the go-ahead.’

This is Brunton’s main concern now. He has a final draft in hand and is actively looking for a director, after that he will begin to find Canadian and international financing for his Mainline Pictures project.

‘I think we can do justice to it and make it for five million bucks, Canadian, and still have it look decent and not have to resort to going to Pioneer Village.’

The financing may be a hurdle, he adds. ‘People who have the money to hand out, I think are so sick of Donnellys.’

Could that be just part of the ‘curse of the Donnellys’?

‘Sometimes I think it’s jinxed, you know, Johanna Donnelly, when she got clubbed to death, her dying words were, `You’ll never make a film!’ No, she said `not a one of you will die in bed, you’ll roast in hell.’ You kind of think that, maybe there’s a curse on the project.’

On a recent research trip to the Donnellys’ old property with Graham, Rob Salt, the present owner, who also happens to be a psychic, claims to have talked to Johanna Donnelly and she told him: ‘Tell those boys they can make their film, just don’t make us out to be sinners and don’t make us out to be saints, we were neither.’

‘In a year I’d love to be starting to shoot’ says Brunton. ‘Get the cameras rolling, watch some barns go up in flames, have some good fist fights and stuff like that… there’s a real momentum to it. I’m not dropping this project, it’s on my mind every day, it’s going to happen.’