Kevin Sullivan’s blog

Help build the Anne of Green Gables School in Kenya

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:44:24 -0700

Sullivan Entertainment is proud to announce their very first online fundraiser in support of the non-profit organization Free The Children. Launched in 1995, by Craig and Marc Kielburger, Free The Children has been harnessing the energy of young people from all over the world to help build schools in developing countries, as well as to address social issues affecting underprivileged communities around the world. Inspired by the breadth of achievement Free The Children has so successfully accomplished, Sullivan Entertainment has turned to its online fan base to participate in helping to build an Anne of Green Gables school and water filtration system in the community of Maasai Mara region Kenya.

Throughout the month of May, Sullivan will be accepting donations from fans on our various websites to contribute towards the construction in Kenya. For every dollar that fans donate, Sullivan Entertainment will match the donation with the total proceeds being presented to Free The Children in June for construction in 2010 of a school and water filtration system to be named in honor of Anne of Green Gables. Fans who donate over $10.00 will be entitled to receive a charitable tax receipt from Free The Children in June, 2009.* In addition to matching fan donations, Sullivan Boutique will donate $5.00 from each order of merchandise placed in the Boutique during the month of May.

Now is your chance to help build the first ever Anne of Green Gables school! Free The Children is currently using many of Sullivan’s Anne: the Animated Series DVDs and educational materials, developed in conjunction with PBS, as a teaching aid in schools in Kenya. Hannah Endicott-Douglas (who made her screen debut as Anne Shirley in Sullivan’s latest movie Anne of Green Gables – A New Beginning) is acting as Free The Children’s elementary school Ambassador, speaking to thousands of schoolchildren across the country about the important work that Free The Children is achieving internationally. For everything that Anne has meant, to so many families around the world, in terms of defining community, strong relationships and inspiration, Sullivan and its wide fan-base will be honored to be able to have Anne contribute to Free The Children’s vision of education in the most underprivileged areas of the world.

Click here to DONATE

*Tax receipts are only valid for Canadian and U.S. citizens who donate.

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A Sullivan Christmas Special

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:40:14 -0800

Kevin Sullivan is throwing an online Christmas party, and YOU are invited. In the middle of December, Kevin Sullivan will air a holiday special over the internet that will feature a question and answer period with you, the fans. Send your questions for Kevin to sullivanchristmas@gmail.com before noon on December 10. The best questions will answered by Kevin Sullivan during this festive online video event. Stay tuned for the date of this online party.

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Specials!

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:53:38 -0800

Sullivan Entertainment is proud to offer Weekly Specials.

This week’s special: With the purchase of Beyond Green Gables, receive a limited edition photograph of Kevin Sullivan on the set of his new film Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning!

On November 6^th, Sullivan Entertainment released Mozart’s The Magic Flute Soundtrack, the soundtrack for Kevin Sullivan’s new film. This recording of many of Mozart’s famous pieces is sure to delight fans of all ages.

We are now accepting pre-orders for Diana: A Life to Remember (DVD), a fantastic documentary about the life and death of Diana that is told through poignant images and interviews.

Check www.sullivanboutique.com every week for amazing new deals!

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Sullivan Update!

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:34:28 -0700

There has been a lot going on here at Sullivan Entertainment!

We are currently shooting Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, a three-hour made-for-television movie set to premiere on CTV in 2008. The film follows Anne’s life before arriving in Green Gables. Acting legend and Academy Award-Winner Shirley MacLaine plays matriarch Amelia Thomas, Rachel Blanchard plays Louisa Thomas, Barbara Hershey plays a 50-year-old Anne, and Hannah Endicott-Douglas plays the younger Anne Shirley.

Amelia Thomas (MacLaine) is a character mentioned in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s first novel, which has been shaped into a principal character in Kevin Sullivan’s original screenplay. She is a wealthy, powerful and unlikable widow who runs Marysville, New Brunswick, a prosperous lumber town with saw, cotton, and cider mills belonging to the Thomas family. Her temperament, however, is quickly transformed for the better by the imaginative and playful Anne Shirley (Endicott-Douglas).

Hannah Endicott-Douglas was personally selected to play Anne by Kevin from over 1000 hopefuls. That search included an open casting call on YouTube and a cross-Canada audition tour that lasted for three months. Hannah has also appeared in “The Good Witch” and “Samantha: An American Girl.”

The Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning website will be up soon, so stay tuned for more updates!

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The Sullivan Touch

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:15:14 -0700

This was part of an article written by the CBC. I have decided to post it as it has some good background information about me and some of our productions…Enjoy!

Kevin Sullivan’s films have been praised for their visual beauty, their strong storytelling and their fine acting through which he weaves his unique spell. Sullivan’s style has translated into an image that has cultivated a devoted international following. In American film schools, Anne of Green Gables is studied as a model of television drama with multi-generational, multi-cultural appeal. Renowned for his directorial ease with children and well known stars Sullivan’s careful attention to performance and production detail has earned the enthusiasm of audiences who have come to appreciate the charm and authenticity of productions such as Road to Avonlea.

When the steely figure of Sullivan tours his five-acre studio in downtown Toronto Sullivan points out a newly developed park set with Gazebo adjacent to a train station. New is good. New, but designed to look old. Sullivan has cultivated an entire 1930’s town on a back-lot built on the exterior of his studio. He has shot over a dozen recent productions here, including 65 episodes of Avonlea’s replacement series Wind at My Back. He has literally found a home to explore his attention to period detail and created a body of work in the process. From anyone who has ever worked on one his films, what Sullivan demands from any member of his team they are willing to give – with no questions asked. After working with Kevin, Colleen Dewhurst once said she’d gladly appear in any Sullivan project without seeing the script. So she did, the time Sullivan cast her as the mysterious seer Hepzibah in Lantern Hill after pitching her the role over dinner.

Sullivan began his career in the arts at Hart House theatre at the University of Toronto, after he graduated there in 1978 with an honors degree in Biology. As Sullivan explains it, after years of a scientific approach to the world he discovered he had a longing to explore the other side of his brain. After a brief foray into commercials in an attempt to establish a film company, he managed to cajole a number of talented individuals; he had met backstage at the theatre, into helping him make his early films. He was joined by his partner Trudy Grant who established Sullivan Entertainment with him in 1980 and helped him create the hallmark of the Sullivan brand: intelligent, beautiful and moving stories.

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The Evolution of a Series

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 10:18:11 -0700

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 19^th 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.

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The Sets

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:11:15 -0700

Four immensely talented Production Designers, Perry Gorarra. Marian Wihak, Nancy Pankiw and James Oswald each added their ingenuity and personal stamp to over 100 individual sets built over the course of seven years in both studio and back-lot. The challenges were often enormous. From a traveling circus to Dickensian back alleys. From a completely snowbound schoolhouse that had to be shot both interior and exterior in winter blizzards, to cricket fields, castles, caves full of bats and ships at sea!

Over the course of many, many episodes my team of writers and I had opted to set scripts in other locations as well as Avonlea. The production team was challenged to create a permanent maritime seaport out of the cobblestone streets of a 19^th century Toronto distillery. The fashionable private girls academy attended by Felicity was staged at Penryn Park an estate in nearby Port Hope. The locations became more lavish, fanciful and more complex as the series grew in size, character and scope. Meanwhile all of the original interior sets for King Farm, Rose Cottage, the Dales, the Pettibones, and the General Store were maintained across four sound stages in Sullivan Studios. Even these became crowded with the mammoth completion of two floors, offices and dining room and kitchen of the Edwardian seaside resort - White Sands. Though Road to Avonlea grew in scale and imagination, it never lost its heart. Thanks to the talented team of designers and set decorators, the show’s unique brand of humor and human drama was allowed to evolve as far as the writers’ imaginations could dream.

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The Costumes

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:15:51 -0700

When the doors to the Avonlea costume department were closed in 1996, the staff at Sullivan Studios took stock of an inventory that had been created by designers Martha Mann, Madeline Stewart and Ruth Secord over seven years of cutting, stitching, fitting and primping. Imagine 7000 pairs of shoes - including period skates, slippers, high-button boots and dance wear;10,000 costumes – half of which were original designs for all of the lead performers and guest stars; 2000 hats – with enough feathers, frills and furbelows to exhaust a fulltime millinery department. Avonlea scripts presented enormous challenges; and so did the actors who often had much to say about their character development and how it would best be reflected in what they wore. Most female performers had been subjected to seven years of authentic corsets and heavy undergarments had no desire to keep them. Souvenirs were the rare costume jewelry, eye wear, head dresses, wigs and fans had been procured at great expense and sold at the production’s close to enthusiastic memorabilia hunters.

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Anne Of Green Gables Announcement

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:43:15 -0700

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES: A New Beginning

There is something new developing in the world of Anne…we are beginning work on the newest installation of Anne of Green Gables. That’s right, there is going to be a new Anne movie!

Kevin Sullivan has written a completely original story about Anne’s early years, before she was orphaned. Have you ever wondered who Anne’s mother and father were? What happened to them? Did she have any brothers or sisters? The mystery will unfold when Anne finds a secret letter in the floorboards of Green Gables almost 50 years after she arrived on Prince Edward Island and changed the Cuthbert’s lives forever.

THE CASTING CALL:

Sullivan Entertainment is searching for a new Anne Shirley for the prequel to the Emmy Award winning franchise Anne of Green Gables…

Sullivan is now conducting an extensive casting call on YouTube as well as performing a cross-Canada talent search in seven cities across the country with Casting Director John Buchan (“Away From Her”, “Where the Truth Lies”, “Being Julia”). Sullivan and Buchan will also be collecting audition submissions by mail in search of a new “kindred spirit” to play the role of the infamous Anne Shirley.

They are looking for charming actresses between the ages of 10 – 12 years to audition for the part of Anne Shirley. Auditions must be 1-2 minutes in length and must depict a portrayal of Anne through passages from the film or book. What was life like for Anne before she arrived at Green Gables? Participants have the freedom to create an Anne of their own invention.

Auditions should be submitted through YouTube under the group http://www.youtube.com/group/screentest or send a DVD / VHS submission to Sullivan Entertainment, Attention: The Next Anne Shirley, 110 Davenport Road, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 3R3 by July 20, 2007. Your submission will not be returned and is the property of Sullivan Entertainment. The name of the actor in the audition must be included on tape or online as well as full contact information. Submissions, due no later than July 20, 2007 are the property of Sullivan Entertainment and will not be returned. Furthermore, only candidates selected will be contacted for a live audition.

Please visit www.sullivanmovies.com for updates about Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning as well as for other exciting film and television projects.

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The Cinematography

nobody@vox.com(Kevin Sullivan) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:19:31 -0700

The atmosphere of any film is established through production design, costume, props and set decoration. Even the performers are able to achieve mood. However all of this culminates in the lens of the camera. The lighting that a Cinematographer uses to embellish all of the set details is a key ingredient in bringing any story to life. Cinematographers Manfred Guthe CSC and Robert Saad brought many moods to the Avonlea canvas. Sun-dappled greenery to misty autumn exteriors, to lavish Edwardian interiors alive with color, texture and shadow evoke the character of the period. Over the course of 91 stories, their diverse use of soft, contoured lighting and hard shadow brought an air of originality to each new project. They were enormously successful at creating a visually inventive body of work that stamped each episode with a fresh, and original imprimatur.

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