Winnipegger helps put Atwood’s stories on TV

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This article was published 15/02/2003 (8552 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE eyes of Canadian fiction lovers will be on the W Network during the coming six weeks.

Thursday at 9 p.m., the specialty cable broadcaster will begin airing one of the classiest properties of the winter TV season.

The Atwood Stories is a half-hour anthology series adapting six short stories by Canada’s queen of the printed word, Margaret Atwood.

It is a daunting undertaking on a variety of fronts, not the least of which is the scorn a failed adaptation might elicit from the barbed tongue of La Peggy herself.

“She has taken a hands-off approach,” says Kim Todd of Winnipeg-based Original Pictures, which co-produced the series with Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films.

“Atwood’s hallmarks are edgy characters, intriguing situations and endings you don’t see coming. It’s the very definition of entertainment.”

Christine Shipton, W’s Toronto-based senior director of programming and development, says the project hits their target market square on its well-coiffed noggin.

“Women in the 25-to-54 demographic have a huge range of interests,” she says.

“Margaret Atwood has to be one of their favourite writers.”

When Todd approached her with the concept, Shipton says, she was aware of the many novels, such as Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber Bride, but didn’t know that Atwood had penned short stories.

“I was totally impressed with the ones they chose to adapt. They lend themselves very well to the short film format.”

The individual stories adapted for this TV anthology, Polarities, Betty, The Man From Mars, Death by Landscape, Isis in Darkness and The Sunrise, are taken primarily from Atwood’s early ’80s collections Bluebeard’s Egg and Dancing Girls.

“The challenge was to use the same discipline making the films that she did writing the stories,” says Todd, 47, whose numerous credits include the popular youth TV series The Adventures of Shirley Holmes and the TV movie version of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.

“Atwood sketches a character in a sentence. We had to find a visual equivalent. As Hemingway said, if there’s a gun on the wall in the first scene, it had better go off by the end.”

The project originated with Toronto-based writer-directors Francine Zuckerman and Lori Spring, both friends and colleagues of Todd’s from her Toronto days.

They approached Christina Jennings of Shaftesbury, who immediately thought of Todd. It seemed like a perfect fit for W, which issued them a broadcast licence.

Together the producers assembled a crack team of writers and directors, including Jason Sherman, Lynn Stopkewich and Norma Bailey.

Key to the project was Winnipeg-based production designer Craig Sandells and wardrobe designer Charlotte Penner, who gave each story a different look.

The stories were shot in Winnipeg over six weeks in September and October. They averaged $650,000 per story. Among the cast members are such actors as Toronto’s Rebecca Jenkins and Sonja Smits and Winnipeg’s Sharon Bajer and Sarah Constible.

Bajer, by the way, has the title role in a stage adaptation of Atwood’s debut novel, The Edible Woman, which opens March 20 at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

Todd recently saw her TV movie The Many Trials of Jane Doe air to acclaim on CBC. Her new theatrical feature, Leaving Metropolis, an adaptation of Edmontonian Brad Fraser’s hit play Poor Super Man (featuring Fraser’s script and direction), will have its Winnipeg premiere at the National Screen Institute’s FilmExchange Festival next month.

If that’s not enough, Todd has just completed filing applications to the Canadian Television Fund for four new projects, including The Shields Stories, a six-part followup to The Atwood Stories.

“From the beginning we hoped this could be a franchise,” says Todd. “Of course, we’d have to go to Paris to shoot Mavis Gallant. That would be tough.”

Both she and Shipton are conscious of the irony of The Atwood Stories being made in Winnipeg for a network that skedaddled from here to Toronto. Corus Entertainment bought the property from Moffat Communications in 2001.

“We will work with the best producers anywhere in the country,” Shipton says.

“Kim brought us the project, and we knew she was the woman to do it.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca