Down East Drama
By Claire Bickley

The Toronto Sun TV Magazine
December 28th. ~ January 3rd., 1998

MALPEQUE, PEI - Counting your chickens can get grisly. There were more here earlier before a raid by a wild red fox and pieces of those that didn't get away remain scattered about.

It's only mid-October but a day so gray and bitterly cold that Emily Of New Moon's small star Martha MacIsaac is layered in clothing, huddled by a space heater between takes and feeling a bit under the weather herself. Some days, hurricane force winds of up to 80 km/hr have whipped this exposed set but have never shut it down.

The discomfort and struggle of shooting a TV series on this corner of Cabot Beach Provincial Park where the cliffs meet the sea is in keeping with Emily's themes.

The story of Emily Starr is drawn from a darker, wilder side of author Lucy Maud Montgomery's spirit than was Anne Of Green Gables. The Emily trilogy is set earlier - in 1898 - but was written later in Montgomery's life, after she had experienced marriage and mother-hood, illness and her husband's depression. Like Anne, Emily is an orphan, forced upon relatives who do not want her. A sensitive, creative child with intuition that goes beyond imagination, Emily constantly sees the ghost of her mother, writes letters to her father in heaven and converses with her own alter-ego Emily In The Glass.

"It's not cutesy stuff. It's not sugary stories and we're not afraid to give our principals colorful tragic pasts," says Emily supervising producer Marlene Matthews. "We're not apologizing for any of this or trying to put a sweet surface on it. The terrors that children face are very real."

Emily marks the first time that a TV production has brought Montgomery's stories fully to life on her native island. The series is a collaboration of Montreal's Cinar and Halifax-based Salter Street Films, enticed here by the province's $1.9 million contribution to the show's first season budget of $13 million, an investment PEI hopes to recoup in tourism dollars and employment.

"Islanders were always saddened that Road To Avonlea wasn't shot here so this is a feather in their cap. They felt it was an affront," admits Matthews, who joined Avonlea in its second season and spent six years as a writer/story editor on that Ontario-shot series she now calls "a beautiful delightful fairytale."

It was the grittier Emily stories that were her lifelong passion. She was introduced to them at age 10 as a child actor (with a similarly youthful Peter Jennings and Al Waxman as castmates) on the CBC radio show The Doorway To Fairyland.

"That year I handed in my homework on pieces of brown paper bags because that's what Emily did. She was forbidden paper by her aunt. I thought that was the most romantic notion. I'm sure my teacher thought I was either deprived or demented," she recalls.

The deprivation of Emily's life with her aunts - stern Elizabeth (Susan Clark) and nervous Laura (Sheila McCarthy) - is reflected in the series' lighting and muted palette.

"Avonlea was very pastoral. I wanted this to have a much grittier, darker, more mysterious feel," says Matthews.

The pallor and scruffy appearance of the cast is as deliberate a choice. Stephen McHattie who plays Emily's mentally disabled adult cousin Jimmy, is downright filthy.

"Jimmy has a bit of a damaged spine, a damaged head, a bad eye. Other than that, he's perfect. Nice teeth," McHattie jokes.

All McHattie knew of Montgomery is what he'd read in a Calvin Trillin piece in The New Yorker about Japan's Anne-mania. But the Guyesboro County, Nova Scotia native endorses Emily's authentic tone. Growing up without electricity, running water or many automobiles, McHattie calls life in the region even those many years later "not too far from this."

His father was blinded in a mine accident and an uncle similarly lost an eye. "There was a lot more disability around then. People lived with things that they have fixed, now," he says.

Production of a second set of 13 Emily installments began long before the series premiere on CBC Jan. 4 and the series will have a second-broadcast window on WIC stations later this year.

"We would be delighted if we're even remotely as successful as Avonlea," Matthews says. "It was a tremendous series, much beloved, and I think this will be too."

This is an unofficial fan page for fan enjoyment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended!

Return to: My Unofficial Emily of New Moon page