The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1959, Blaðsíða 32

30
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1959
steel is made.” Some of his most suc-
cessful documentaries have been on
alcoholism, citizenship and medicine.
One of them, “The Discoverers”, re-
creating the events leading up to the
discovery and successful use of insulin
by Sir Frederick Banting and Dr.
Charles Best was shown recently on the
television program “General Motors
Presents”. George based the document-
ary on the book by Max Rosenfeld,
first presented three years ago by the
CBC in Canada and Kraft Theatre in
the United States; it won a Christopher
Award for promoting good will in the
entertainment field.
George has a shy friendliness that
helps him disarm the people he inter-
views in his research, and get to the
core of their thoughts and attitudes
without seeming to probe. Fie has just
spent nine months preparing 16 scripts
for the R.C.M.P. series for CBC-TV.
“Only a very few of the stories were tak-
en from files”, he told us. “The rest
were all gathered from conversations
with R.C.M.P. men—fascinating fellows.
We’d get a couple of them talking
around a tape recorder. One would
stimulate the other to recall incidents
in their careers and away they’d go.
We’d examine their stories for script
possibilities. A writer would work up
a treatment, and then sit down with
the mounties and discuss the whole
thing again. They would sometimes
get so enthusiastic about the creative
method and dramatic problems in the
script that we had to hold them back—
their ideas were dashing off away ahead
of ours! The scripts were scrutinized
by the R.C.M.P. at every stage of
development, and an officer was al-
ways on the set during filming. They
never interfered with poetic problems,
though, just helped to prevent our
stepping into th ridiculous or extreme.”
George was asked what were some
of the problems he encounters in
adapting from one medium to another.
“Say you’re dramatizing a novel or
short story”, he said. “A fiction author
frequently uses the stream of con-
sciousness method—’freely moving in
and out of his characters’ minds. Some-
times he tells his story almost entirely
introspectively. The whole drama is
in the mind of the leading character,
and none of the others know it exists.
It makes exciting reading, but the
dramatist has to search for a logical
way to let the introspection emerge
without damaging the story. Or
take the story with a rather complex
plot and a large number of characters.
The adaptor has to combine in one
character the aspects of three or more.
Switching from fiction to drama you
have to pull free-wheeling action into
dramatic unity of time and place. A
story spun over weeks must be con-
fined to one evening or weekend. It
requires mechanical thinking—a mat-
ter of architecture. You must empha-
thize into the basic feeling, characters
and statements while pulling the story
from its original shape and means of
expression. It’s quite a gamble, really.
George had written exclusively for
radio until four or five years ago,
when he became the first CBC-TV
drama editor; he took the job to learn
the mechanics of writing for television.
He held the job for three years, “it
was fun, but heartbreaking when I had
to hand out a disappointment to a
writer who had almost written a good
play, or to one whose work was good
but didn’t fit into any market.” Fie
left to take on the R.C.M.P. assign-
ment.
Although he grew up in a home
where writing and markets were dis-