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Historical sites featured in Doctor's Case

The Doctor's Case has become a benchmark film for the Prince George region. The one-hour flick was made almost entirely using local cast and crew, using some local locations as well.
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Michael Coleman plays Dr. Watson in The Doctor's Case.

The Doctor's Case has become a benchmark film for the Prince George region. The one-hour flick was made almost entirely using local cast and crew, using some local locations as well.

The script is based closely on the short story written by Stephen King as an homage to Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the modern-day story based on the Victorian super-detective, King twists the usual plot devices and has Holmes' trusty first mate Dr. Watson solve this mystery.

This appealed at a compulsive level to James Douglas, a professional actor who is also the manager of visitor experiences at Barkerville Historic Town. Barkerville is awash in professional actors during the tourist season, performing the period-specific roles of the 1860s gold rush town just a hop to the southeast of Prince George, parallel with Quesnel. Douglas had access to props, costumes, sites and other resources that made filming a story like The Doctor's Case an exciting proposition.

Thanks to licensing permissions granted by Stephen King's Dollar Babies Program, a protocol by which aspiring filmmakers can work with his literary collection without paying high royalty fees, Douglas and a cadre of creative friends embarked on this cinematic adventure.

During the Cinema CNC Film Festival, the public got a special preview of the film, including a panel discussion at which questions from the audience were answered by Douglas and some of the cast and crew. Joining him on stage were J.P. Winslow who portrayed Holmes, Ian Case who played police inspector Lestrad, Andrew Hamilton (the story's villainous but murdered millionaire Lord Albert Hull), Michelle Lieffertz (abused widow Lady Hull and also acted as the film's production designer), Stewart Cawood (one of the jilted Hull heirs and also acted as production manager), and first assistant director Evan Ollenberger.

Some of the other key production staff were also on hand at the panel discussion like executive producer Norm Coyne, script supervisor/co-producer Kim Feragen, executive producer Jana Phillips, and others from the senior crew.

"Evan was the only one here who actually went to film school, so he gave us some great advice, especially on the days we had Denise Crosby and William Davis on set, because we knew for those three days we couldn't really afford to make any mistakes at all. Not to say that we didn't, but, it was really important to have someone with Evan's training and experience there on set with us," said Douglas, by way of explaining the grassroots and passion-based nature of this project. It was done for the love of the story and the interest in the motion-picture art medium.

The audience had many technical questions, like how the many cats of the story were convinced to act on cue, how a seamless visual result could come from using different cameras with different lenses, and so forth.

One of the most involved sets of questions and answers stemmed from the use of Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria as the main setting. Like Barkerville, its age and appearance insinuated itself into the crew's plans.

"It was actually surprisingly simple, but for a reason," said Douglas about obtaining the palatial manor located in his former hometown. "Because so many of us work in the tourism industry, serendipity played a huge role in a lot of this. I was at a trade show in Jasper in 2016 and I ran into an old friend who Ian also knows from theatre in Victoria, Kate Humble, who also went on to heritage tourism later in her career and was now working at Craigdarroch Castle. So I very feverishly pitched her this idea, she was able to talk to the people at her organization, and they gave us relatively free rein, just for the cost of staff time to make sure we didn't wreck the place, as long as we promised to shoot between 5 p.m. and 3 a.m. every day. Had it not been for that past relationship with Kate Humble, and her mutual appreciation for both film and the castle, we probably wouldn't have had that particular location. We really allowed the castle to be a character in the film.

"One of the things I love most about this film is how it gets to showcase three national historic sites that are within British Columbia," Douglas added, meaning Barkerville, Craigdarroch Castle and also Emily Carr House in Victoria in which doubled for 221B Baker Street, the famous address for Holmes and Watson in the original stories.

Letters still arrive in the mail at the actual 221B Baker Street, London, from those who mistakenly believe the stories to be nonfiction. This passionate kinship between audience and character was factored deeply into Winslow's portrayal of Holmes. He explained this when asked about his feelings of getting a part portrayed by some of the true greats of the acting profession, including Christopher Plummer, Robert Downey Jr., Basil Rathbone, Benedict Cumberbatch, Orson Welles on radio, Boris Karloff, Jonathan Pryce, John Cleese, Ian McKellen, Leonard Nemoy on stage. Even Will Ferrell has a version about to hit the silver screen.

"I'm glad you asked that, because yes it is a daunting thing to not only realize that this character's been played by, well, incredible actors including one of my own favourite actors, Jeremy Brett, whom I drew a little bit from for this, but daunting also because the character of Sherlock Holmes some people believe to be real. You're going to laugh, but it's true. So in taking this on, what I was looking for was a human being, because Sherlock Holmes is, in essence, real to a lot of people, even though the rest of us know he's fictional. Finding some kind of humanity made it doable for me."

Another character with a high profile past in Holmes stories, and the ensuing stage and screen productions, is police inspector Lestrade.

"I have not played him before, but I did work at Craigdarroch Castle for 15 years doing site-specific theatre in that space," said Case. "I've done a couple of Sherlock Holmes (plays) in the castle, but I have never played Lestrade and Lestrade never appeared in any of my plays at the castle, but I love the character. I am a Holmsian, so I had quite a lot of fun. What I loved about this script is, Holmes and Lestrade are really sort of almost on an even keel. They hate each other for various reasons, but they also admire each other, and I like that this script didn't turn Lestrade into a buffoon. So often he is portrayed as a bit of an idiot, and this Lestrade has at least a modicum of intelligence, which I enjoy. I like playing the foil, and I thought there was quite a bit of humour to be had with the role as well, which I really enjoyed."

Case also said that in his 30-year career in film and television, this is the first portrayal of his own that doesn't make himself cringe at the sight, when he comes on screen.

"There are two reasons I really wanted Ian to play Lestrade," Douglas said. "One is a very personal reason. Ian Case actually gave me my first acting gig ever, back in Victoria in 1992. But also because I knew he had the kind of gravitas, the stalwart nature, that would bring out the real policeman qualities of Lestrade. And because we so often do see him portrayed as a buffoon, I thought in this case, what we really wanted to see was somebody who really had a solid centre."

While Winslow and Case were given characters puffed up with nuance, the character of Lord Hull was devilishly one-dimensional. He was deliciously rotten, which delighted Hamilton. He is used to playing perhaps the most complex portrayal of all in Barkerville, that of town founder Billy Barker himself. For The Doctor's Case he got to emanate not golden qualities but dirty, soiled ones.

How did he conjure up those wretched qualities to play such a debased character on the threshold of death, taking delight in reading his family the last will and testament cutting them all out of his fortune, giving it instead to a frivolous charity?

"It really is a matter of us just all being capable of those sort of energies, aren't we? And at the end of the day, you're tired," Hamilton responded to a round of laughter. "This time it was just a delight to let yourself go and be someone so truly despicable, you could just relish in it."

The cast and crew were literally exhausted by the process. The shoot took place over a 12-day period on a budget so modest it hardly even amounts to pocket change, by normal film industry standards. Much of it came from crowd-sourcing, and many of the donors were in the audience at the festival.

Since Craigdarroch Castle could only be used at night, that left the daytimes to shoot all other scenes, so the actors and crew were going almost around the clock.

This could have led to mistakes, which could have led to additional costs or hastier storytelling. Douglas said he counted successfully on crewmembers picked for their organizational skills and attention to detail.

One of those was Lieffertz who had some acting to do, but also some setting of the scenes. That's a scary task when time is short and expensive, and all done in rooms full of priceless historic artifacts.

"There is a huge amount of necessary carefulness that must be taken, so whenever we were setting anything up, we all had to have gloves on, the curator needed to be there, their people would move the furniture around and things like that, any props we brought in had to be approved, we just had to remember where it all went back," she explained.

Douglas interjected, "If anyone ever tells you 'oh, we'll fix it in post' (meaning using computers to manually erase in post-production any errors that are discovered long after the shoot is done) punch them in the face. Then say no, let's do it right the first time."

These are lessons that the Prince George film industry is only beginning to learn. The Doctor's Case is one of the first screen arts projects to spring from the brains and hands of local people and come to full completion. This, said Cinema CNC lead organizer Peter Maides, was why he wanted this film to be featured in the festival. He applauded Douglas, Coyne, Ollenberger, Feragen, co-director Leonard Pearl and their merry band of Holmsian storywrights for making the filmmaking process "more real" because, he pointed out, "quite often we think of films as being something made by people far away with loads of money and stuff, and you don't, and you're much closer," and that will only stand as mentorship and guidance for the next band of aspiring filmmakers who want to bring their own screen arts production to life.