Joni Mitchell inspires adoption fantasy

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Mongrel Media Director Tara Johns, left, with actress Macha Grenon.

The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom is, to some extent a road movie, depicting a prairie girl's attempt to flee to Minneapolis to meet the woman she believes may be her birth mother.

So it is entirely appropriate that the film's writer-director Tara Johns, 46, is doing the phone interview from her car, which is pulled over during a particularly noisy Vancouver rainstorm.

Cars figure in the film's inspiration, too.

"The predominant memory of my childhood is car rides," she says. "I was born and raised in Calgary -- very prairie -- and my family is from Saskatchewan mostly. Big sky and lots and lots of highway."

Johns' mother was a Saskatoon girl who, in a way, inspired the central premise of the film, set in 1976. The 11-year-old heroine of the film, Elizabeth (Julia Stone), discovers she was adopted, and comes to believe that country singer Dolly Parton may be her actual birth mother.

Johns was not adopted, but she too fantasized about the possibility that her mom might have been a famous recording artist: Joni Mitchell.

"My mom was a good friend of Joni's in high school in Saskatoon," Johns says.

When the Joni Mitchell album Blue came out in 1971, the song Little Green hinted to astute listeners that the singer might have given up a baby daughter for adoption. "And my mom was fairly astute," Johns says.

"(The song) could only have come from a very personal place and so she kind of pieced it together, although she told me she didn't have any inside information at that point," Johns recalls.

"As it turned out, that's what happened. (Mitchell's baby) was born the same year and, if I'm not mistaken, the same month as me (in February of 1965).

"I did definitely take the 'Joni Mitchell had a daughter that she gave away for adoption' away with me and I spun it into my own little fantasy that I was that daughter," Johns says. "For a while, I think every Canadian girl that was born in the '60s might have dreamed she was Joni Mitchell's long-lost daughter."

Johns, based in Montreal, worked in short films and documentaries before a vision of a tense encounter between a mother and daughter in a car jump-started the script for Dolly Parton. Johns pitched the project first to fellow Montreal producer Barbara Shrier and then to Liz Jarvis of Winnipeg's Buffalo Gal Pictures. Last spring, she found herself directing the exteriors of her first feature film on the prairies of Manitoba, which, she says, "was a great fit."

"Much of my childhood was spent in transit between Calgary and Saskatoon, so the very flat, open-sky wheat fields on either side of the highway is very much what I remember and what informs the writing of the film," she says. "Manitoba totally was what I had in mind, really." (The film's interiors were mostly shot in Quebec.)

It was one thing to pitch producers on the film. It was something else to sell the idea to the woman in the title.

"I had found a way into Dolly Parton through her right-hand woman in Nashville," Johns says.

Johns sent her the script and waited long weeks for word to come down from the iconic country singer, just prior to a cross-country tour.

"I figured once that date had passed, my window would have closed," Johns says. "And she did leave on tour and I didn't hear back anything.

"So then I was in the production office plotting some other stunt, some kind of guerilla thing to go into a town where she was playing and track down the tour bus or something," Johns says with a laugh. "And a fax came in to the production office... and it had Dolly Parton's letterhead, her signature sprawled across the top of this one single page.

"It just started out 'Dear Tara, I spent the weekend reading your wonderful script...'

"Then she went on to say that she would be honoured to let me use her name and she'd contribute in all the ways I asked her and more.

"She was just so incredibly generous and I just cried for two days, completely bowled over," she says. "I knew that meant everything I dreamed could be possible for this film was going to be a reality, so it was a very incredible breakthrough."

Tara Johns and actress Julia Stone will be at Cinematheque on Friday and Saturday to introduce the film. randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie preview

The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom

Starring Macha Grenon and Julia Stone

Cinematheque

Opens Friday

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 9, 2011 D3