W Files

Profiling Screenwriters at Work

Plan B works out fine for Daegan Fryklind

by Vern Smith

Writing was Daegan Fryklind’s plan B. Even then, the parachute wasn’t screenwriting. No, if her more sensible aspirations didn’t pan out, she was going to pen literary fiction.

The crazy notion came about while studying pre-law. Fryklind’s mom told her she’d better have a back-up plan, just in case. And then, in just a few short courses, plan B became plan A.

“I sort of stumbled into creative writing,” says Fryklind, now writer and story editor of the lakeside serial, Falcon Beach. “My mother said, ‘Make sure you have a parachute.’ I think she thought I would take medicine or something, but I was just sort of crap-shooting my way through.”

The gamble began paying off as Fryklind published with such respected small-press magazines as Moosehead and sub-Terrain. Film and television then just “sort of serendipitously happened.”

Upon returning to Vancouver after finishing her masters in creative writing, a friend working on a documentary called The Vanishing Housewife hired Fryklind to research images of 1950s housewives and get them cleared.

Shortly thereafter, Cadence Entertainment’s associate producer left, so Fryklind stepped in to do “all the Telefilm, the financing side.” After that, Cadence “absorbed” her as a producer’s assistant, then head of development, figuring that “because I come out of the world of writers, I understood writers. So they decided to put a writer with other writers.”

The next step was writing for animation programs such as Yakkity Yak, Yvon of the Yukon, Something Else, and What About Mimi?

At the same she was developing a half-hour comedy for CTV, Grappling with Charlie, which revolved around backyard wrestling. It never saw air, but the contract was an education of its own.

“I’d just started writing for TV so admittedly I got that way too early,” she says. “They just said develop it, develop your skills, and that’s what I did. It was the first time I’d worked half-hour comedy.”

When Cold Squad’s on-again, off-again situation was deemed back on again, creating an opening for a writer/story editor, Fryklind “went from writing dialogue for Yak to writing dialogue for pedophiles.” Asked if pre-law finally came in handy, Fryklind says, “Yeah, I had a bunch of books.”

She admits Cold Squad involved a fair bit of reading and ripping headlines, but sometimes it went the other way too.

“It was almost pre-cognizant that we would come up with an idea and then it would appear in headlines. It was kind of creepy. You put this into the universal consciousness and then it’s happening.”

More fun is Falcon Beach, a 20-something serial about, among other things, the ethics of otherwise good girls baring their breasts at bars, corrupt small-town mayors, and, of key importance, wake-boarding.

“Each episode doesn’t have to sum up because you’re going to drag it across 13 episodes. So in writing an individual episode, there’s the relief of not having to wrap things up. But then you’re putting pressure on the next episode and the next…building pressure towards episode 13.”

As for other scripts, Fryklind has been working on the CTV movie-of-the-week Bushman: The Hunt for John Bjornstrom, billed as “a dark comedic take on the capture of the Shuswap fugitive.” Next season, she joins Robson Arms for season two, and sees the gig as a yet another adventure in fiction.

“Robson Arms is really interesting that way because (the episodes are) very much like short stories with a beginning, middle, and end,” she says.

“And they’re character driven, and as much as they are a comedy, at heart of each episode there’s a nugget of really poignant human emotion. And so coming into Robson Arms as a short story writer, it just sort of loaned itself naturally to that show; being able to encapsulate the episodes.”

Fryklind is also working with Dwayne Beaver and James Dunnison on developing a half-hour comedy, Dirty Work, with CBC. Set around a 20-something slacker who does surveillance work for a store selling spy equipment, Fryklind likens it to Napoleon Dynamite meets James Bond.