Skye Borgman wasn't just in Prince George to be a special guest at Northern FanCon.
The director of the hit Netflix true-crime documentary Abducted In Plain Sight was also here for some project development with local writer-director James Douglas. He is the driving force behind the award-winning Dollar Baby drama The Doctor's Case.
It was all because of Northern FanCon, though, that the two came to be involved in a pending screen production.
The roots of the idea trace all the way back to Denise Crosby, a FanCon alumna, who also attended a fan event that predated the Prince George pop-culture convention. Douglas is also one of the senior managers at Barkerville Historic Town where this precursor event took place. He explained how the origins of the project got sparked.
"When Denise Crosby first came to Barkerville in 2013, she and I got talking one night at the Wells Hotel Pub about historical interpretation and some of the incredible things she'd seen at Barkerville and how she related it to some experiences she'd had at a cemetery in Hawaii where they had a historical interpreter who took people on tours and they would meet these historical characters along the way. She had always been fascinated by it, and she said she thought it would be interesting to try something like that at the Hollywood Forever cemetery where she and her friends had hung out as a kid. We talked about that back and forth a few times even before The Doctor's Case came up."
Come up The Doctor's Case did, though, a couple of years later when Douglas and FanCon founder Norm Coyne were collaborating on some film projects, one of which was a pitch to Stephen King's Dollar Baby program to make a film adaptation of the King story The Doctor's Case. The film was indeed made, and when it was, Crosby was one of the leading cast members.
Douglas took the movie around North America for various film festivals. The very first one, where The Doctor's Case had its official world premiere, was the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival. As Douglas and one of the film's stars, J.P. Winslow, got off the plane and was looking for a cab to the venue, they got chatting with another airport passerby who, it turns out, was also a director there for the festival. They shared the cab and they hit it off in conversation.
"We became festival buddies," said Douglas, and the discussion eventually came up between them about Crosby's idea to roll cameras on the interesting human interest stories a filmmaker could unearth at cemeteries like Hollywood Forever.
Borgman got the appeal immediately.
A meeting was held in Los Angeles with Coyne, Douglas, Crosby and Borgman and the idea started to take the shape of an action-item.
"Denise and I went there during Day of the Dead," said Borgman. "There are food trucks everywhere and all these movies they project against a big wall, so you can see these great films while people sit on the lawns on picnic blankets, drinking wine, the peacocks that are there, this great thing to do in the summer that's just part of that neighbourhood. Denise was telling me about how she grew up right around the corner and the kids would all go to play at the cemetery and it was just zero fear, it was full of life, in that bizarre way of thinking about it."
Douglas and Borgman were just getting their filmmaker wings when they first met, but both have had projects that soared in the past year. Borgman sees an especially good fit between this proposed cemetery cinematography and her newfound status, because this series would be nonfiction with dramatization.
"Because of Abducted In Plain Sight I'm meeting so many more people now with the ability to green-light projects," she said. "We will have to take it around and see if anyone wants to back it. I can see it happening on so many platforms, a lot of homes we could find for it, for sure."
Douglas has made a career, in and out of film, of historical interpretation and drawing story out of authentic antiquity. In addition to the historical settings in which The Doctor's Case was shot, he is also involved in a working project called Wicked Ways With Vamp (also sparked at Northern FanCon) in which cosplay superstar LeeAnna Vamp shows the audience around places with paranormal stories, one of which is in Barkerville. So Douglas, too, has a lot to empirically contribute to a project such as this.
With Crosby also excited about the show, it stands a ghost of a chance.
