Mary Sexton’s labours of love
St. John’s filmmaker talks ‘Maudie,’ the new ‘Hatching, Matching and Dispatching’
Mary Sexton opens the door to the downtown house that’s really her production company office, and pokes her head out to greet you in the freezing rain.
A little white dog takes advantage of the moment and runs outside, bounding down the steps. “Maudie!,” Mary calls. “Come back here!”
Inside, sitting behind her desk, Mary is a multitasker: she Sexton gets Maudie settled and prepares for an interview while sorting mail. Tearing open envelopes, she explains her dog’s original name was Sheba; the original owner was a man Mary would see walking her. She’d pull over her vehicle to chat with him, and one day offered straight out to buy his dog.
“You know how people never have cash anymore? This day I happened to have $300 cash. I said to him, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you $300 cash right now for that little dog. He said, ‘No, missus, I loves that little dog,’” Mary says. “I said, well here’s my card in case you change your mind. Fifteen minutes later he phone me and said, ‘Missus, I loves that little dog. $350?’”
At the time, Mary was about to start filming “Maudie,” a feature film about the life of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis. She had poured close to 10 years — and entire bank accounts — into the project, so it was only appropriate that Sheba should be honoured with the same name.
Maudie the dog comes in and out of the room as Mary talks. She never meant to be a film producer, she says; she got her first job in the field on the encouragement of her brother, the late CODCO comedian, actor and activist Tommy Sexton. It was the very early ‘90s and Mary was back in town, having owned a vegetarian restaurant in Halifax and a vintage clothing store, Rainbows and Roses, here. Tommy was working on the political thriller “Secret Nation” with producer Paul Pope, and suggested Mary try and get a gig with him.
Not artsy
“I didn’t think I’d (get into film). I didn’t go to the Ship Inn very often, but I went a couple times and I felt I wasn’t artsy enough for them,” Mary says. “I guess I was younger, too, and my ideas of art were basically vintage clothes and sewing skirts and creating other things. But when I worked with Pope on ‘Secret Nation,’ I got the bug and I realized I could do this.”
Tommy died in 1993; Mary started Rink Rat Productions two years later. Her first major production under that name was “Dooley Gardens,” a sixpart TV series she did in partnership with Ed Riche and Andrew Younghusband. Set in a hockey rink, it starred Nicole de Boer, Mary Walsh, Andy Jones, Younghusband, and Ron Hynes.
Mary’s directorial debut also came about through Tommy: in 2002, she earned a Gemini Award for “Tommy: A Family Portrait.” Since then there have been a number of documentaries, a six-season stint as regional producer of “Canadian Idol,” the feature drama Behind the Red Door,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, and fan favourite “How to Be Deadly,” her son Nik’s film based on character Donnie Dumphy, among other projects.
“Maudie” is close to Mary’s heart and she did what she had to in order to bring it to life as a co-producer.
“I worked on other people’s projects to be able to pay (screenwriter) Sherry (White) to get this to fruition,” Mary says, offering her six years on CBC’S “Republic of Doyle” as an example. “We kept it alive.”
Maudie
Maud Lewis was born in the 1900s in rural Nova Scotia. Her hands were said to be deformed at birth and worsened by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which also earned her torment at school. Essentially abandoned by her family after her parents’ death, Maud met miserly fish peddler Everett Lewis after she answered his ad for a housekeeper, later marrying him and covering the walls of their tiny cabin with her folk art. Maud died at age 67 of pneumonia.
Though her sweet, child-like paintings of animals and landscapes never sold for more than $10 during her life, today they fetch up to $20,000. It wasn’t solely Maud’s art and health that interested Mary, Sherry and the rest of the “Maudie” film team, though. It was her unlikely love story with an abusive husband and the way her art brought her outside herself.
“(Director) Aisling Walsh took Sherry’s script and made it maybe a little lighter and turned it into a little love story,” Mary says. “And it just sings. It doesn’t get maudlin or syrupy. It doesn’t hit you over the head or get too sappy or too cliché. It just brings something out in you.
“I’ve had people call me to say, ‘It’s still with me. I’m still thinking about it.’ You’ve done your job tenfold when that happens.”
Starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawks, “Maudie” opened across the country over the weekend, including at Cineplex’s Scotiabank Theatre in the Avalon Mall in St. John’s, where it’s still running.
Projects keeping her busy
As always, Mary’s got a good number of projects in the hopper, including “Christmas Furey,” a TV movie set to air on CBC in December as an extension to the short-lived series, “Hatching, Matching and Dispatching.”
The series — canceled after a single season in 2006, though never forgotten — starred Mary Walsh as Mamie Lou Furey, the matriarch of a family in rural Newfoundland that runs ambulance, wedding and funeral services.
Mary Sexton reckons the show didn’t get picked up because of the political climate of the time. Globe and Mail colum- nist Margaret Wente may also have had a hand in its demise.
“I think it’s because we changed governments and it became more conservative, and then Margaret Wente wrote that article about Newfoundlanders,” Sexton says (Wente wrote a column in 2005 in which she described this province as a “vast and scenic welfare ghetto” full of “ingrates on pogey.” Earlier this year she wrote another one, apologizing.). “I think Wente poured something out of Newfoundlanders that made everyone start to question themselves.”
Mary Walsh spent 10 years putting together “Christmas Furey,” Mary says, and they shot the movie last month with all the original “Hatching, Matching and Dispatching” cast members: Walsh, Sherry White, Shaun Majumder, Mark Mckinney, Jonny Harris, Joel Thomas Hynes, Susan Kent and Adriana Maggs among them. Not easy, considering many of those actors have seen their stars rise in the past 10 years and the shooting schedule had to be coordinated around the schedules of shows like “22 Minutes, “Murdoch Mysteries,” “Ten Days in the Valley” and others.
Everyone fell into place as if no time had passed, Mary says, and she excited to show Newfoundlanders the new film at Christmastime.
“I think that when people see it, they’re going to want to watch it every year of their lives,” she says. “You know how people watch ‘The Grinch that stole Christmas’? Like that.”
It’s clear Tommy isn’t ever far from Mary — her office is full of pictures of him on the wall at various stages of his career, and she often speaks of him with pride, seeming to date her own accomplishments according to before or after he died. Like Tommy, she says she loves every project she undertakes.
Around her neck is a sturdy gold chain with a round locket. She takes it off and hands it over.
“Love, Tommy” is engraved on the outside. Inside is a slightly wrinkled black and white photo of him.
“Tommy will always be with me,” Mary explains. “My success is not just based on him, but sometimes you have to call upon spirits or angels, whoever it is, to keep going. I do call on him.”