ShareThisStan Lee, legendary co-creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man and other Marvel Comics staples, electrified the comic world seven years ago when DC, Lee's onetime archrival, hired him to write alternative-origin stories for some of its most famous figures -- Batman! Wonder Woman! The Flash!
With Batman, it was out with Bruce Wayne -- orphan, hunky white guy, Gotham City billionaire playboy -- and in with Wayne Williams. Like Bruce Wayne, Williams was an orphan, but Lee recast the future Caped Crusader as a struggling African-American who, while working as a stock boy in a Los Angeles grocery store, is framed for armed robbery. In jail, young Williams bulks up both body and brain, and takes a bat as a cell-pet. Upon his release, he decides to fight evil as Batman.
Devotees of another legendary orphan, Anne of Green Gables, Canada's fabled "freckled witch," now have their own rival (and radically different) "creation myths" to choose from.
One has been OK'd by the relatives of Anne's creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery; the other is by a man with whom these relatives have had stormy, often litigious relations for decades.
The latter version, published late last month, is "Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning" by Kevin Sullivan of Toronto. It's the novelization of a three-hour TV movie of the same name that Sullivan wrote, directed and produced in 2007 to mark this year's centenary of the publication of the original "Anne of Green Gables."
As timing would have it, Sullivan's book adaptation and the film are appearing about 10 months after the publication of "Before Green Gables." A novel by veteran children's author Budge Wilson of Nova Scotia, "Before" was billed as a prequel to the 1908 original and written with the approval of Montgomery's heirs. Indeed, copyright and royalties are shared among Wilson and the heirs.
It's these heirs and their families who, in 1994, partnered with the government of Prince Edward Island to create the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority. The authority, according to information on its Web site, is dedicated to protecting "the integrity of the images of Anne" while preserving and enhancing the legacy of Montgomery and her work.
Crucially, the corporation strives "to control the use of Anne of Green Gables and related trademarks and official marks" via licensing approval or enforcement activity. Included in its purview are "words and images depicting the fictional characters, places and events" described in "Anne of Green Gables" "and related novels," of which there are seven.
Sullivan seems to have been able to duck these codicils with "Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning," a yarn he calls "both prequel and sequel" since it weaves back and forth from 1945, as a 57-year-old Anne, now a well-known novelist and aspiring playwright, waits to hear if her adopted son, Dominic, has survived combat in World War II, to the 1890s as young Anne searches for a loving family and "kindred spirits."
Sullivan is certainly no stranger to the various fictive universes of Lucy Maud Montgomery or to Montgomery's heirs.
It was Sullivan and his wife, executive producer Trudy Grant, who struck a rights deal in 1984 with Montgomery's heirs for what became the highly successful "Anne of Green Gables" miniseries. Using a clause in that deal that promised the heirs "10 percent of 100 percent of net profits in perpetuity from all sources based on the uses of all rights," Sullivan and Grant went on to orchestrate two equally successful follow-ups, and a deal with the heirs in 1989 resulted in the duo's production of the Emmy-winning "Road to Avonlea" series that introduced Sarah Polley to the world. (It was known as "Avonlea" in the United States.)
Along the way, Sullivan has been able to create his own Montgomery franchise. "A New Beginning" is not just a TV movie and a novelization, it's a merchandising moment freighted with "collector's dolls," an audio book, "official journals," an "official movie soundtrack," "New Beginning" stationery sets and other souvenirs.
Wilson's yarn accepts as gospel the story in "Anne of Green Gables" that Anne's parents, schoolteachers Bertha and Walter Shirley, died of "fever" within weeks of each other in Nova Scotia, when their only daughter was just 3 months old. From that point, plucky Anne endures years of adoptions and orphanages before finally being sent, at age 11, to Prince Edward Island and the Cuthberts' farm.
In Sullivan's interpretation, the dual-death story is a fiction, dreamed up by the precocious Anne to cover her shame at the actual circumstances of her mother's death, her father's involvement in that death and Walter Shirley's eventual desertion of Anne to start a new life in New Brunswick. It's a fiction that the 57-year-old Anne is still holding onto at the start of Sullivan's tale.
Sullivan asserts that Montgomery's own life "was really more the inspiration" for "A New Beginning" than any of her fiction. Montgomery "grew up as a very lonely child," he noted, "and this loneliness allowed her to create Anne as an alter-ego." Indeed, Montgomery always saw herself as an orphan. Her mother died when she was only 21 months. Four years later, her father "deserted" Prince Edward Island for Saskatchewan, leaving 6-year-old Maud in the care of "her stern Calvinist grandparents." Over time, she was able to turn "all those negatives into this very positive, optimistic character called Anne Shirley."
Unlike Wilson's narrative, which traces Anne's life from her earliest days in Nova Scotia right through to her fateful trip to Prince Edward Island, Sullivan's has Anne living with both her parents into her earliest school days. Wilson, moreover, presents Anne's first adopters, the Thomases, as no more than dirt-poor hillbillies, headed by an alcoholic laborer of little skill. In "A New Beginning," Mr. Thomas is a doctor, admittedly one with a drinking problem, but blessed with a formidable mother, Amelia (played in the telefilm by Shirley MacLaine).
Sullivan claims he had no intention of doing what he calls "Anne IV" until about two years ago. This is when Anne fans, including the Avonlea Convention, a/k/a AvCon, an annual gathering, in Toronto, of "Road to Avonlea" devotees, began to offer ideas to mark the 100th anniversary of "Anne of Green Gables." "Eventually, it started to bubble up (and) I kind of accepted the fact that people were keen to see another interpretation of Anne from me," Sullivan said.
Whether the heirs are keen is an unanswered question. "I have no comment on Mr. Sullivan's project," was Kate Macdonald Butler's only response to recent queries about Sullivan's book and show. The granddaughter of Montgomery, Butler is a staffer at the Toronto office of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority. Lawyer Marian Hebb, who represents the heirs, would only say that her clients had no involvement in Sullivan's works.
Indeed, the only reference to the Anne authority in the "New Beginning" book is on the copyright page. It's a sentence reading "The word mark ANNE OF GREEN GABLES is an official mark of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc., used under license." The same wording appears at the end of the TV movie's production credits. But is the terminology simply a formality? Or does it mean the authority has some financial interest in the book and the film? Neither party would say.
"Essentially, each party operates in its own separate hemisphere by mutual agreement," according to Sullivan, "and we're free to create and do all of our own copyrighted and trademarked materials. ... They (the heirs and authority) don't have any autonomy over us." In fact, Sullivan observed, "all the disputes that existed in the past have essentially been settled.
"When it seems there's a lot at stake," he said with a laugh, "everyone gets into a flap. But over time it's worked itself out. ... We continue to operate in accord."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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