In 1984 I drove along numerous rural back roads looking for a landscape that could capture the idyllic maritime farming community of turn-of-the-century PEI in my first mini-series adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. I wanted to produce the interiors for my film in studio in Toronto. I was criticized at the time for adopting a lack of authenticity in not shipping my production unit 1500 miles east to Prince Edward Island, to shoot exteriors just off the coast of Nova Scotia. With four seasons of changes in the script and knowing I would still have to build exterior sets on the remote East Coast Island, I opted to try and find my ideal setting just outside of Toronto. I remarked to the press “If David Lean can create a spectacularly authentic vision of Winter Moscow in the heat of summer in Spain for the exteriors of my epic Doctor Zhivago, Sullivan films can find PEI outside Toronto”. Ironically he found the location that became the production’s signature about 15 minutes from Leaksdale, Ontario, and the town where L.M. Montgomery and her family lived for a decade after they’d moved away PEI.
Out of the corner of my car window I caught sight of a wave of rolling fields, crested with pines into which was nestled a charming, rambling whitewashed farmhouse that looked remarkably as if the ocean were located just on the other side of the hill. I adapted the farm building and barns and successfully shot them for all of the reverses of “Green Gables”. Five years later when I was required to construct an entire maritime village, with lighthouse, schoolhouse, a cannery, woods, ponds, lanes and even the exterior of the White Sands Hotel perched on the Atlantic, there was only one property he could think of with enough vista. I returned to the charming property at Copping Corners and began building. The original farm building was renovated and painted blue to become the King Farm. Roads were painted red and covered with crushed brick to emulate the red oxide back roads of the Island. After seven years of filming and seeing the property through over two dozen changes of seasons, it was clear that the farm at Copping Corners had become a reliable character and a true back-lot in its own right. Through sun dappled colored leaves to spectacular snowfalls a more convincing environment of a 19th century small town has rarely been captured on film. The effects were often enhanced with digital matte work where real PEI ocean vistas were married with back-lot photography. When Jasper Dale’s whimsical cannery was constructed on the farm hillside, sand was brought in along with plenty of fish – which attracted hundreds of seagulls as extras from nearby Lake Ontario. The overall effect was complete when the set was coupled with photography of an authentic period cannery shot on PEI.
And so the series unfolded, marrying frequently shot second unit photography from PEI with the breathtaking Avonlea set. The set eventually looked so real that citizens in the neighboring town lobbied to even have it preserved as an mytoric monument to attract tourists. Sadly, once the production was completed in 1996, the town of Avonlea had to dismantled. All of the lifelike buildings were only shells propped up with timber and tape. The town’s demise was bittersweet. Like the salute Hefty gives the town at Felicity’s wedding in the final episode, many locals from Copping Corners arrived to try to steal a piece of bric-a-brac or a rooftop finial as the property was returned to its original condition. So the mythical Avonlea remains; but only on film and in the imaginations of its loyal fans.
