Joe Wiesenfeld received an Academy Award in Short Film Live Action category for his adapted screenplay of Alice Munro's Boys and Girls in 1984.Jude Wiesenfeld
L.M. Montgomery. Alice Munro. Mordecai Richler. Great Canadian authors were in good hands with Joe Wiesenfeld. The veteran screenwriter from Winnipeg had a knack for taking their literary works and shaping each into award-winning, audience-pleasing dramas. His deft adaptation of Ms. Munro’s story Boys and Girls won a 1984 Academy Award for best live-action short film. He transformed Ms. Montgomery’s cherished children’s classic Anne of Green Gables into the strong dramatic script that became the backbone of the seminal 1980s’ television miniseries.
And where Mr. Richler himself was unable to wrestle his unruly St. Urbain’s Horseman into a workable screenplay, Mr. Wiesenfeld expertly folded the novel’s sprawling structure into a two-part 2007 telefilm.
Mr. Wiesenfeld, who died of a heart attack on Jan. 27 at the age of 71 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif., was known in the industry for his skill at writing dialogue that rang true and his prized ability to reveal character through action rather than words.
Producer-director Kevin Sullivan, who collaborated with him on Anne of Green Gables, said he approached Mr. Wiesenfeld after seeing Boys and Girls and being mightily impressed. “He was able to take Alice Munro’s very literary piece and bring a dramatic reality to it,” he recalled.
Mr. Wiesenfeld worked similar magic with the Anne script. He injected the Victorian-era story with a realistic, contemporary flavour, Mr. Sullivan said, “and kept it from becoming too saccharine.”
His style was perfectly complemented by the naturalistic acting of the miniseries’ star, an adolescent Megan Follows, who had also been in Boys and Girls. “They had a writer-actor chemistry from the beginning,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Thanks to the international success of Anne, Mr. Wiesenfeld became the go-to guy for TV family fare, especially with young female protagonists. He fashioned author Bernice Thurman Hunter’s Booky series – about a girl living in Depression-era Toronto – into two CBC movies; wrote a Secret Garden sequel for Hallmark and adapted Shirley Temple’s autobiography for Disney.
Mr. Wiesenfeld went on to earn a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program, as well as many Gemini awards including one for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series.Jude Wiesenfeld
His destiny may have been foretold before he’d even entered the world of TV. As a burgeoning playwright in the 1970s, Mr. Wiesenfeld was commissioned to pen a play about divorce for children. The result, Hilary’s Birthday, became a landmark in Canadian kids’ theatre.
“I think he found his voice then without realizing it,” said his niece, writer Leah Singer. “And of course, when you do something and it’s successful, everyone wants you to do that again.”
If Mr. Wiesenfeld ever felt he’d been pigeonholed as a writer, he didn’t complain about it. “He was very proud of his work,” said his wife, Judith (Jude) Wiesenfeld. And his focus on family-oriented projects also had financial benefits, she added. “We still receive residuals for a lot of the work because it can easily be aired any time, anywhere and the stories are universal.”
The tough, determined son of Holocaust survivors, he was born Jozef Wiesenfeld on May 12, 1947, in Treysa, Germany, to Boris and Freda (Rosenstok) Wiesenfeld, who had met in a displaced persons’ camp. In the fall of 1948, Joe, his parents and older sister Betty immigrated to Canada and settled in Winnipeg, where Boris had a brother. Joe was raised in the city’s gritty North End, where life was a struggle. Boris died when Joe was 12 and Freda worked in a meat-packing plant to support the family, which by then included a third child, Rose.
As a kid, Joe was an insatiable reader, making weekly pilgrimages to the library to check out stacks of books. He was also popular with his peers at St. John High School. “He was cute and smart,” said Rose Snukal, his adoring kid sister. “We didn’t have as much money as a lot of the people we went to school with, but he seemed to be able to overcome that.”
Restless and bent on being a writer, he briefly attended United College (now the University of Winnipeg) but dropped out to work as a newspaper reporter, first at the Brandon Sun, then with the Winnipeg Free Press. What he really wanted to do, however, was write for film and TV. Seeing bigger opportunities on the west coast, he moved to Vancouver in the early 1970s.
It was there that he fell in with the city’s thriving playwriting scene of the time, bolstered by such initiatives as the New Play Centre and boasting such rising talents as Sheldon Rosen, Tom Cone and Leonard Angel. That writers’ circle also included his future brother-in-law, Sherman Snukal. “Joe decided to try his hand at plays,” Mr. Snukal recalled, “and he was very good at it.” Mr. Wiesenfeld’s debut play, Spratt, a dark drama about a pathetically macho salesman, was produced in 1978 at the Vancouver Playhouse and Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.
The play caught the attention of another writer, Dennis Foon, who had recently started the adventurous Green Thumb Theatre for Young People. Looking to break the kids’-theatre mould, which then consisted mostly of fairy tales and fantasy, Mr. Foon pondered the idea of a realistic story that spoke to children’s concerns. “I suggested to Joe we do something on divorce for kids. He said, ‘Fantastic! I just moved in with my girlfriend who has a nine-year-old daughter that hates my guts. I’ll write about that.’ ” Hilary’s Birthday caused a sensation when Green Thumb toured it to schools and ushered in a new era of serious theatre for young audiences.
By then, Mr. Wiesenfeld’s first screenplay, an original story called The Mourning Suit, had been made into a feature film in Winnipeg. On the strength of that, he was tapped by legendary Quebec director Claude Jutra to work on the script for By Design, a shot-in-Vancouver comedy starring American actress Patty Duke. Released in 1982, it followed a same-sex couple looking to have a baby, a subject that was unusual for the time.
Mr. Wiesenfeld at Vancouver's International Habitat Festival (later known as Habitat I) in 1976.Courtesy of the Family
His career taking off, Mr. Wiesenfeld moved to Toronto. There, in 1983, he met Jude Mann, the future Mrs. Wiesenfeld, who was a project manager at TVO. Both had been previously married – Mr. Wiesenfeld, to Marilyn Magid, from whom he was divorced in 1979. Mrs. Wiesenfeld was drawn to his wide-ranging intellect and to the fact that, like her, he was eager to start a family. They eventually had two sons, John, now a geology instructor at California State University Northridge, and Will, an electronic musician who performs under the name Baths.
With the Oscar win and an Emmy nomination for Anne to his credit, Mr. Wiesenfeld decided to jump into a bigger pond. In 1989, the family immigrated to the United States and bought a house in Woodland Hills in the Los Angeles area, complete with backyard swimming pool and a large office for Mr. Wiesenfeld. There, he scripted a string of TV movies, including 1990s’ adaptations of such classics as The Yearling and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
He continued to do Canadian projects as well. Director Peter Moss convinced him to write the first Booky movie for the CBC, Booky Makes Her Mark, in 2006, which starred a then-unknown Tatiana Maslany. Mr. Moss said he was “incredibly easy to work with” – a writer who was never precious about his writing and who could solve unexpected production problems with a quick, artful rewrite.
After doing a Booky sequel, he teamed with Mr. Moss a third time to work on St. Urbain’s Horseman. The difficult adaptation had already been through two writers when Mr. Wiesenfeld came on board. “He took to it immediately,” Mr. Moss said. “He got who the characters were.” Mr. Moss noted the similarities between Mr. Richler’s working-class Jewish milieu, Montreal’s Mile End, and Mr. Wiesenfeld’s in Winnipeg’s North End. “And certainly, he understood the novel’s Jake character, the angry young artist looking to find his way against the world.”
St. Urbain’s was his last major project. In 2018, the Wiesenfelds moved to Palm Desert where Mr. Wiesenfeld was semi-retired but continued to write. He’d undergone triple-bypass surgery in December and had been recovering well until he died in his sleep.
Along with his significant contribution to Canadian TV and film, Mr. Wiesenfeld is remembered as a man devoted to his craft, who inspired fellow writers with his pragmatic – at times, brutally honest – advice. But he was equally devoted to his wife and children and that love suffused his family stories, giving them both authenticity and sensitivity.
He leaves his wife, Jude Wiesenfeld; sons, John and Will Wiesenfeld; and sisters, Betty Singer and Rose Snukal.