Sketched with sunshine
A great short story should be timeless. After all, people are people. What do you do, though, when your story involves a place? A fictitious place. Based on a real place. Television will give it a go.
I spent a number of years in Orillia, Ontario. A place marked, for better or worse, by its treatment in the work of Stephen Leacock. Satire wounds, as much as any imaginary bullet. And the small town never forgave his jabs, even asit then named everything in sight after a town that exists only in the mind’s eye: Mariposa.
We’re a hundred years removed from Leacock’s effort. Enough time for a generation or two of thin-skinned villagers to shuffle on. Enough time for a second go-around at making a movie out of a Canadian masterpiece, the Sunshine Sketches Of A Little Town. I haven’t seen the 1952 adaptation (yet) but I did skip the Grammy awards last evening, to devote two hours to watching the brand new, 2012 version .
The idea of filming a story, in a town that hasn’t existed for a century, received a Canadian solution. If one place won’t do, use a few. The waterfront in Gravenhurst. The Pioneer Village in Huntsville. King Street in Millbrook; shuffle, stir and bake lightly to reproduce Mariposa just before the Great War.
I enjoyed my evening. The narration and brief appearance by my favourite Rowdyman, Gordon Pinsent, set the machine in motion, with the gears and inner workings bringing together a cast of Canada’s finest. In no particular order: Donal Logue, Peter McKenna, Peter Keleghan, Jill Hennessy, Ron James, Colin Mochrie, Katie Douglas, Owen Best, Leah Pinsent; and that’s just the familiar faces.
