The Globe and Mail - July 27, 1985

"Anne of the silver screen"
Ray Conlogue

At first impression, Kevin Sullivan does not look like a man who should be producing a major feature film - especially of that much-loved classic, Anne of Green Gables. He is a scant 29 years old, and he spent a good portion of that time preparing to be a doctor. He is blond and clean-cut, relaxed and affable, without the faintest cloud of artistic temperament blemishing his sunny complexion.

As if that were not offputting enough, his first act as producer was to hire himself as writer and director of his film. (The finished product will be shown as a four- hour CBC mini-series and theatrical release will be sought in the United States, Japan and Europe.) It took him so long to clear the rights and raise the $3.5-million to do it that one of his major stars, Colleen Dewhurst, was advised by her agent to "forget it." This man, from a New York agent's hard-bitten point of view, was an amateur.

But there is another way of telling this story. And Dewhurst saw it. "The thing that struck me about him," she says, "is that he fought every inch of the way. When my agent said forget it, I said, 'No, I like this young man. Let's see what he can do.' " This is what he did.

First of all, he didn't accept the widely held assumption that Don Harron, creator of the Anne of Green Gables musical, also held the movie rights - a belief shared by Harron himself. According to Sullivan's assistant, Trudy Grant, "Kevin went off to the law library to sort it out for himself." When he thought he had a case, the real lawyers were brought in. The film rights, it turned out, still resided with the estate of Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Then he raised $3.5-million, a third of it from public television in the United States and a network in West Germany (the rest from Telefilm and the CBC). The offshore money will help him distribute the film internationally. "We did talk to the biggies like Lorimar in the U.S. But I realized that that would be a good way to lose control," he says.

Then he hired Dewhurst and Richard (The Grey Fox) Farnsworth to play Anne's foster parents. Both actors, especially Farnsworth, are much in demand by better known producers and directors. But Sullivan insists they were his first choices for the roles, and once subjected to his intent blue-eyed gaze, they agreed as well. "Nobody but Colleen could play that humorless old spinster," he says in a way that makes it sound as if playing humorless spinsters were the raison d'etre of an actress's life. "And Richard Farnsworth had that shy, gentlemanly quality that I love." He admits that Farnsworth took some work. "He's expensive these days." After that it was a mere nothing to audition "thousands of kids" before deciding that cute was not enough, and a professional was required. Sullivan settled on Megan Follows, the ambitious daughter of Toronto actor Ted Follows who two years ago decided on her own initiative to move to Los Angeles to further her film career. Megan Follows is rolling amiably down Toronto's Winchester Street in a horse-drawn trap this particular summer afternoon. She answers not badly to the novel's description of a girl with a "small, white and thin" face bracketed by "two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair." "My own hair has red in it," she says moments later between shots, "but they had to help it along." In the novel, Anne is 11 when she arrives (in lieu of an orphan boy) on the porch of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. At the end of the story she is 16, which was evidently seen as too much of a stretch for a real life actress, so the film starts with a 13-year-old Anne and progresses to the age of 16 - which is Megan's real age. "At 16 you had to be a lot older then than now," she says. "You were a young adult then." This is an odd assurance from a member in good standing of Hollywood's Brat Pack. After two years in California, Megan has several TV shows in her resume, as well as a thriller feature called Silver Bullet which just finished shooting under Dino de Laurentiis. Her manner and personality are prematurely adult. She weighs the answers to questions, allowing no snippets of girlish opinion which might look bad in print to sneak past.

Only when sitting alone with a young Californian named Schuyler (who plays her best friend in the movie) and Tamara Singer, an old school friend from Toronto and the daughter of York University drama teacher Ron Singer, does she allow herself to be her age.

Follows insists that it was "my decision" to go to Los Angeles. She had been acting professionally since the age of 9, and at 14 decided to go for a film career. Her mother, actress Dawn Greenhalgh, accompanied her to Los Angeles to set up house and has become the guardian lioness of her daughter's career. "It was a commitment to go to L.A.," Follows continues, "but it was also like an adventure. It wasn't like we were selling the house here." She seems comfortable enough playing Anne, although the character is one century and several degrees of gentility away from Hollywood and the Brat Pack. The restored farmhouse at the end of Winchester Street is serving as the exterior, with its white picket fence, for Old Miss Barry's home in Charlottetown where Anne is sent to prepare for college exams.

Anne is being led to the steps of the house by Charmion King, clad in black and playing the role of Aunt Josephine. Amid the crowd of film people recording the shot, Kevin Sullivan easily stands out. He is the one who is NOT wearing an army surplus jacket, shades, new wave shorts or hair uncombed since last week. He is in pressed trousers and a striped blue shirt.

And he is very impressed by Megan Follows. "Her emotional range, from the tragic through to the eccentric, is breathtaking. On a single location we have her do as many as five age changes. It will be a showpiece of what she can do. She's thought of as a contemporary actor, but this is a period piece, about an eccentric kid. It will be her big performance." He emphasizes that the movie, unlike the musical, will span the whole of Anne's life in the novel. Also, unlike the musical, it will dwell at length on the exteriors, the plants, flowers and trees, "all the visual images of the book which make such an impression, say, on the Japanese. They are always talking about the fairy tale quality of the landscape." Sullivan, with the international film market in mind, is very mindful of how the Japanese feel about Anne of Green Gables. It is a classic there, even more so than here, and thousands of Japanese girls compete each year in essay-writing competitions that have as a grand prize a trip to Charlottetown.

Attention to the international market is a characteristic of Sullivan, who has until now treated film as a business first and an art second. His company makes its money on industrial shows and TV episodes, but his one previous venture into film was a calculated purchase of rights to a Disney story. It became The Wild Pony, a film which sold heavily in the States and became Home Box Office's third best seller last year, right after Sophie's Choice and The Wrath of Khan.

Sullivan may be young, but he is savvy. Anne of Green Gables is not going to languish on a distributor's shelf. By adapting it himself, as he did The Wild Pony, he is going for a straight, middle-of-the-road feeling in the end product. It will be a quality film, but there will be nothing unusual or offputting about it. "The book was read to me when I was in Grade 4," he says. "I never forgot it." And he is content to re- create it as he found it. Colleen Dewhurst, too, remembers the book from her childhood in Montreal. "I have loved it forever," she says. "It's strange that it's so popular, though. It's not all sweetness and light. Maybe it's that Anne is a completely free spirit, what we all dream of being." Her own character, Marilla Cuthbert, is the opposite: a sour spinster living on a farm with her brother. "I approached her as a woman with a well-defined morality: right is right and wrong is wrong, which makes life simple. But she has a sense of humor and she can read other people clearly. When you see how she moves toward this orphaned child, who has been mistreated by others and fled into a fantasy world . . . well, Lucy Maud is a better writer than people give her credit for. She lets the child open doors in this character which have been slammed and glued shut for years." Dewhurst has a first-hand acquaintance with Prince Edward Island. Years ago she bought a summer house there, to which she took her children. It was owned originally by Omer Harris, who wrote Johnny Belinda, and it is a literary landmark. "I haven't been there myself in years. We fixed it up when we bought it, but it's a huge place and we'd like to see it restored to the way it was when Harris lived there." She has refused to sell it to developers ("nobody's going to turn it into a restaurant") and is holding out for Heritage Canada to take it over.

This conversation takes place by phone from Dewhurst's home in Westchester, just outside New York City. She and Farnsworth finished their onsite shooting very quickly, mostly around Toronto. Doubles for them will be needed when the final shoot takes place in Prince Edward Island in the near future.

But this is not a serious problem to Sullivan. The shoot survived tornado damage in Barrie a few weeks ago and a flu epidemic among the crew in Toronto. His business-like, low-key director's style has kept it under budget so far. "I've been working on this film for four years, counting the time it took to straighten the rights out," he says. "When the guys in the lab say that the rushes are the best they've seen for a film in this country, that feels terrific to me. "I want it to be a good movie." The script for the television film Anne of Green Gables was written by Toronto author Joe Wisenfeld and director/producer Kevin Sullivan, not solely by Mr. Sullivan as reported on July 26.

Source: The Globe and Mail