Andrew Wreggitt

True to the story:
Andrew Wreggitt writes the script for Canada's real-life dramas

by Philip Moscovitch

Andrew Wreggitt may write drama, but having penned several fact-based movies-of-the-week (MOWs) the last couple of years, he spends a lot of time thinking about the nature of truth.

“To write a drama based on something true, you have to alter the facts,” he says. “You have to compress time, you have to put people where they weren’t, in order to make the drama unfold. Each one is a different puzzle.”

Wreggitt got his start in series television (with North of 60 as his first staff gig), and had a two-season run with Tom Stone, a CBC series of his own. But over the last couple of years he’s made his mark writing TV movies that dramatically retell some of Canada’s biggest news stories. One Dead Indian–about the 1995 Ipperwash Provincial Park standoff in which native protester Dudley George was shot and killed by the police–aired on CTV in January, and the network will soon be broadcasting Wreggitt’s Conrad Black biopic, Shades of Black.

Meanwhile, he’s at work on Killings at Mayerthorpe, a drama that revisits the events leading to the gunning down of four Mounties by James Roszko in small-town Alberta last year, which set off all kinds of heated debate on who was to blame–with grow-ops, the gun registry and policing procedures as some of the favourite targets. And he’s researching another MOW on a possible flu pandemic.

But most importantly, Wreggitt, who also has five books of poetry and four stage plays to his credit, is having fun. “I’m getting a huge kick out of these movies,” he says.

Wreggitt had a nice transition into the MOW genre, scripting four North of 60 movies. But writing MOWs based on real events offers a completely different set of challenges. Conrad Black, Mayerthorpe, Ipperwash–these are big, sprawling stories that have played out on our screens and in our papers, sometimes to the point of saturation. So why go to the trouble of creating dramatic versions?

Well, Wreggitt says, in part it’s because with day-to-day saturation media coverage, we never quite manage to get an overview, a context.

“It’s interesting how people think they know stories well. I had a binder with a thousand pages of news stories about Conrad Black, which I went through. They’re huge stories, most of which are redundant. They’re things you read yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, and you’re adding one small piece of new information–which is really of no consequence by the next day, because it has been superseded by something else…That’s what I find very interesting. You think you know what happened on a particular day, and then when you really get into the research material you realize, ‘Wow. There are so many shades of grey in this story.’”

The emotional truth

What it comes down to is finding the emotional core of a story–absorbing as much information as possible, then cutting through it all to go straight to the story around which the drama can be built.

One Dead Indian (which Wreggitt came on to early, after writer Hugh Graham) and Shades of Black presented very different challenges when it came to finding that core. In a recent presentation to the CRTC (the WGC initiated this meeting to help the commissioners understand just what screenwriters do), Wreggitt described coming to terms with the scope of the Ipperwash story. He had a book to work from–One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police, and the Ipperwash Crisis, by Peter Edwards, and Edwards introduced him to the community, where Wreggitt’s past came in handy. Pamela Matthews, who played the Suzie Muskrat character Wreggitt had created for North of 60, had known Dudley George. Wreggitt says, “All Peter Edwards had to say by way of introduction was that I was the writer who created Suzie Muskrat, and everyone immediately agreed to talk to me.”

While things may have gone well in the community, the enormity of the story hit Wreggitt on the flight back to Calgary. As he put it to the CRTC commissioners, “It was beginning to dawn on me that I had taken on a story that spanned nine years, dozens of court cases, two different land claims going back 75 years, messy and bitter internal politics between two reserves, different layers of OPP involvement and years of internal investigations, the Premier’s office, the Attorney General’s office, lawyers, lawyers and lawyers… Unfortunately, there was no movie.”

After sifting through it all, Wreggitt decided that the film really centred on two brothers–Dudley, who would be killed during the standoff, and Sam, who feels guilt over not having been at the protest, and who sets off to seek justice.

Screenwriter Michael Seitzman describes a similar approach when it came to writing North Country, a film about a sexual harassment case starring Charlize Theron. For Seitzman, like Wreggitt, the key was to jettison lots and lots of information in order to get at the emotional core of the story.

In a piece for the December 2005 issue of Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America, west, Seitzman writes, “How do you remain respectful to those historical events, as well as the personally intimate ones that those women hold sacred, while still honouring the very real, often competing responsibilities to the audience... You’ll never tell the complete story, word for word, in a two-hour movie. But what you can do is capture the spirit of the event, make sure you don’t violate the historically relevant moments, and you can find the emotional experience for an audience. But to do that, you’re gonna have to be brutal.”

That’s the approach Wreggitt took to One Dead Indian, and once he was confident about the emotional centre of the piece, he felt free to fictionalize the events. “I had to invent most of the people in the film around the central characters because it was a cast of thousands. There were hundreds of Indians and cops and investigators, and different people were there at different times. So you have to create fictional characters and put six people into one.” But, he says, he never lost sight of the “emotional truth” of the story, as he understood it. That way, “when you are making stuff up you remain true to what the story is.”

Tackling Lord Black

When it came to dramatizing the life of Conrad Black, Wreggitt faced a different set of challenges.

Few people elicit stronger emotional responses than Lord Black of Crossharbour. Hating him is practically a national sport. If it were in the Olympics, Canada would win gold, hands-down. But Andrew Wreggitt wouldn’t even make the team.

“I would never say, ‘I want to do a movie about Conrad Black because I really hate him,’ which is what I heard a lot when I’ve said I’m writing this movie about Conrad Black–‘I hate him!’ Well gee, why? Why would you automatically feel that way? These are people who don’t know much about him. There’s this conventional wisdom that you have to hate Conrad Black… I knew he was a powerful guy with a lot of money and some fairly radical neo-conservative views. Maybe I didn’t find that as disturbing, being from Alberta. I was just interested in a man who’s had such an incredible life. How did this person spring up and become who they are?”

The Ipperwash standoff lies in the past, and–even though the inquiry was ongoing–the key facts have all been well-established. Shades of Black was a different story though, with Wreggitt writing as news continued to break of Black’s troubles with the law (racketeering, fraud and money laundering charges laid in the US). It was, says Wreggitt, “a current story that was running and changing as I was writing it.”

The Conrad Black story was sprawling too, but in its own unique way. Here was a man who wore many hats, including newspaper magnate and historian. “It was a question of looking at a man who’s had such an enormous life, with so many huge events in it, and trying to figure out what the essence of that person is and what’s driving him–and reconciling the trouble he is in now with the person he has been,” says Wreggitt. “How did he come to this point in his life where he’s in so much trouble? Are there clues to that somewhere in these events? That’s what I was looking for.”

Black has a fearsome reputation for handing out lawsuits–like the one for two million dollars (since settled) slapped on Peter C. Newman during Maclean’s centenary celebration. In an interview with Sarah Hampson of The Globe and Mail, Shades of Black producer Mary Young Leckie said she’d never worked on a film where “script editors asked to be named as additionally insured in the [errors-and-omissions insurance] policy.” But Wreggitt says he never felt any libel chill while writing the film.

“He may take offence at something–you know, he takes offence at very odd things, very small things,” Wreggitt says. “Maybe I should have been more concerned–I don’t know. On the other hand, I wasn’t out to skewer him. It wasn’t my agenda. I didn’t set out with that in mind… I went in without preconceived notions, and observed some things I think about his life that most people don’t know... He’s a brilliant, complex guy and he’s in a lot of trouble.”

Keeping an open mind

In the course of our conversation, there are a couple of phrases that Wreggitt uses repeatedly: “preconceived notions” and “open mind.” He says he tries to avoid the former, while cultivating the latter.

Simply put, Wreggitt has a distaste for “collective wisdom,” saying, “I hate this kind of knee-jerk political response to stuff.”

Look at the reactions to the shooting of the four Mounties on that farm near Mayerthorpe, Alberta, by James Roszko in March of last year. Wreggitt has been mulling it over as he writes the MOW about that day and the events leading up to it.

“There’s a lot of complexity in Mayerthorpe that people don’t know about. There’s a sense that there’s this single event, and it was an aberration and a terrible thing–which it was–and then it’s over. There’s a huge story behind what happened that day, and the decade before that–and that’s the part that really gets me going.

See the Spring 2006 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.