Wanted: an idyllic turn-of-the-century farm to make famous in a Disney-released film.
Found: a tumble-down, abandoned farmyard outside Saskatoon, with most outbuildings collapsed and the house sagging under years of neglect.
Perfect.
Well, maybe not perfect, but when a Saskatoon film production company set out to make Summer of the Monkeys, they had to find an old style farm site, and the Block farm near Dundurn was as good as they were going to get.
The film, scheduled to be released on video in December in the United States and in early 1999 in Canada, is about a poor farm boy who comes across a troupe of escaped circus monkeys near his farm one day. He spends the summer trying to capture the monkeys to collect a reward and buy a pony.
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For the show, the producers needed a farm that could be quickly given a facelift to look like a farm from around 1900.
That should be easy, thought Edge Entertainment marketing director Bill Braaten.
“There are old farms all over the province.”
But, as the former southwestern Saskatchewan ranch boy soon found out, there’s a lot more to finding the perfect old farm than just finding an old farm.
They needed a farm house of the right vintage, an antique barn, a perimeter tree line and a garden. They also had to find “an ominous-looking, ravine-type area” nearby.
After searching every old farm within 50 kilometres of Saskatoon, the Block farm fit most of the requirements. So an 18-person work crew was sent in to rebuild the buildings, which had mostly fallen down. They had only two weeks until filming would begin.
Some of the collapsed outbuildings were cleared away and the crew got working on the house, repairing its roof, its porch and interior.
The barn was also fixed up, but not so much that it would become a sound building. Near the end of the movie, a storm strikes the farm. So work crews propped up the barn for the first few days. Then, when the “storm” struck, they pulled out the supports and let it collapse back to where it had been.
The farm was right for the look of the film, but producers had a problem with Mount Blackstrap, a pimple-like ski hill a few miles away, visible against the flat horizon. They brought in live trees and strategically planted them to obscure the view.
They also had to sprout a vegetable garden in two weeks. The film crew bought a Saskatoon-area garden, then transplanted it into the farm site. For the five weeks of filming the crew had to keep the garden thriving.
