Dramatic Strategies: Writing John A.

BY Jaime Weinman

Bruce Smith maintains that “Canadian history is as fascinating as everyone else's, but we don't take ourselves seriously enough to treat it that way, at least not usually.” Smith takes it seriously though – writing John A: Birth of a Country, a two-hour MOW that aired in September on CBC.

The story of John A. MacDonald and how Canada came to be hadn’t really been considered the stuff of good storytelling before Smith took it on. In Canada, Smith says that the writer of a historical film has to struggle with audience perception of our creation “as something passive and vague: that Canada is a country that was handed to us without a war.”

The original idea was for a “large mini-series” that would do for John A. MacDonald what HBO did for John Adams; producer Bernie Zukerman suggested the idea to Smith after John Adams premiered. Initially conceived as a four part series, CBC put only the first two parts into development, and eventually greenlit production on just the first script – the story of events before Confederation – as a stand-alone movie.

“Why CBC wanted it as a movie and not a miniseries I don't really know,” says Smith, who still hopes to get the other parts made. “Budget was surely a factor, although we would've had a great chance to amortize costs if we had done parts one and two together.”

John A. is Smith’s third historical drama for CBC. In 1998, he wrote The Sleep Room, a mini-series about CIA-sponsored brainwashing experiments in Montreal in the 1960s and the lawsuit that happened when the truth came out in the 80s. The Sleep Room won five Gemini Awards and earned Smith a nomination for Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series. And in 2006, Smith worked with the CBC on the historical mini-series Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story – not as pleasant an experience. The film was quietly disappeared after it aired – and Smith recalls that “political actors” forced the film out of schools. “CBC didn’t lift a finger to defend its own product.”

There’s risk with historical subjects. “I owe my audience the truth,” Smith says, but a writer has to shape material into scenes that fit into the overall theme and constraints of the film. To create a story out of this material, Smith first of all did as much research as he could: “key was Richard Gwynn, author of John A: the Man who Made us. We bought the rights to his book and he gave notes on every stage of development.”

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