It is a rainy mid-August afternoon at Cabot Beach Provincial Park near Malpeque, P.E.I, not far from Summerside. The film crew of the upcoming Emily of New Moon TV series are wrapped in slickers, rain pants and galoshes, clutching coffees and huddled around the set: a barn filled with straw. Mary Walsh of This Hour Has 22 Minutes strolls around unobtrusively, clad in black sweats and muddy rubber boots. Co-producer of BBS's new show Brass Tacks, Walsh is here to study Giles Walker's technique, this episode's director. (Walsh is also a guest star on the series.)

The rain doesn't dampen anyone's spirits. Nor did an incident earlier in the day, when Nova Scotian actor Stephen McHattie, who plays Cousin Jimmy, was taken to hospital after an iron pulley crashed into his forehead during filming. While he was being bandaged, the crew scrambled to reorder scenes they could shoot without him.

After the lighting tests are done, the real shooting will begin, but that's still a few hours off. In the meantime, two of the young stars are holed up in a trailer, hyper with hunger, dancing about madly. It's after noon and they haven't had lunch. When they finally get to eat - at around 2 - it's shish kebab, fresh corn, P.E.I. potatoes and a variety of salads and desserts, served in a circus-size tent.

Thirteen-year-old P.E.I. native Martha MacIsaac, who plays Emily, darts about like a wiry brunette hummingbird, all flash and zip, repeatedly slamming the trailer door on a young male actor whom she describes as "annoying" and flailing a flannel shirt at another when he swears. It's difficult to get her attention, but when she gives it, it's undivided.

Not far from her side is fellow Islander Jessica Pellerin, 10, who plays Emily's best friend, Ilse Bumley. Pellerin sits demurely, eyeing the shenanigans but not quite taking part. Every few minutes the child coordinator pokes her head in the door in an effort to prevent complete pandemonium from breaking out.

So goes a typical day on the set of the Emily series, based on Emily of New Moon, a novel written by Island daughter Lucy Maud Montgomery, set in late 19th-century P.E.I. The protagonist is Emily a young orphan who has aspirations to become a writer, as well as a mischievous knack for attracting attention, and who has gone to live with older maiden aunts. The episodes revolve around Emily's and her friends' adventures. The filming of the $26-million, 26-episode series began in September 1996 and will wrap up this December. The show begins airing January 4 on CBC (Sunday nights at 7) and in September on WIC Entertainment, the private Vancouver-based broadcaster. It is set to run for two seasons.

All told, it's been a big production, with a cast of nearly 40 and a crew of 85. Besides the exterior sets constructed at Cabot Beach - the barn, a general store, schoolroom, the Disappointed house and the New Moon house - an entire hangar at nearby Slemon Park, a former air force base, has been devoted to production, art department, wardrobe and props offices, as well as interior sets. Here, attention to period detail is impeccable: for example, Booths Real Old Willow china sits on the shelf of New Moon's kitchen. The set decorator for the series, Dan Owens, shopped all over the Maritimes for the antique pine and oak furniture and oil lamps in each room. Costumes, designed by Kate Rose, are treated with the very same care; the late Victorian wardrobe includes trousers, suspenders, pinafores, skirts and bodices.

It is this attention to detail, along with dramatic story lines and the Island's own natural beauty, that Marlene Matthews, the show's senior producer and writer, says will enable the series to rival Sullivan Entertainment's Road to Avonlea series, on CBC from 1990 to 1996.

Matthews should know. She spent six years on Avonlea, first as a senior writer, and later as head writer and senior story editor; she describes those stories as "a sugar-coated candy box." Montgomery was only 34 when Anne of Green Gables was published, early in her career, and she wrote life the way she hoped it would be, the way all fairy tales turn out. She says in her diaries that it was only years later, after she'd matured, that she "had the courage to write about rural P.E.I. in Victorian times the way it really was," says Matthews. That book was Emily of New Moon.

While the similarities to Anne can't be ignored - both lead characters are young, orphaned girls with literary ambitions -Matthews suggests that it is the differences, both in story line and atmosphere, that will entice audiences. "Emily has second sight, so we're depicting what she imagines: ghosts, images of the past, her dead father. The result is deeper, more richly textured stories." Filming mist-shrouded night scenes and using spare candlelight in interior shots help convey an eerie sense of mystery and drama.

Frequently called the series' "creative centre," Matthews describes her involvement as "the joy of coming full circle." When 8 or 9, she discovered the Emily books and says "a door opened to a world that I suspected existed but I never knew until then." Since she was old enough to write, she, like Emily, copiously scribbled stories. After reading about the little girl in the garret who wrote on letter bills, Matthews, for an entire school year, scrawled her homework on brown paper bags. Fortunately her teacher encouraged her. "She must have either thought I was mad or she knew about Emily," she laughs. "Years later, when I started to look into the development of this series, I learned that many Canadian writers were influenced by these books." (See The Emily Effect, page 71.)

Michael Donovan, chairman and CEO of Halifax's Salter Street Films, Emily's coproducer along with CINAR Films of Montreal, experienced that same influence when he first read the books as a youth. (Donovan's mother received an autographed, first edition copy of Emily of New Moon as a young child.) He, too, dreamed of becoming a writer, and was inspired by Emily's passion.

But it wasn't until about six years ago, during a trip to a family Club Med with his teenage daughter, that he began to develop the idea for the series. There, he met a young American woman who, upon learning Donovan came from Nova Scotia, remarked that she was familiar with it because of its proximity to P.E.I. Surprised by her un-American familiarity with Canadian geography he asked about her knowledge. "Why, that's where Lucy Maud Montgomery's from," she said. "I've read all her books and watched the Anne movies. But can you tell me why her best book, Emily of New Moon, hasn't been made into a film?" To which he replied, "That's a good question, and I can't answer it." But something clicked.

On the return trip home, Donovan stopped at a Toronto airport bookstore and bought all three Emily books. He reread the first on the flight back to Halifax and, over the following few days, Emily Climbs and Emily Quest. "I just wanted to confirm that my memory had served me right - that the books were as good as I remembered." When he was satisfied, Donovan then spent a complicated year trying to purchase the rights to the novels from the Montgomery estate. After finally acquiring them, Donovan worked for a couple more years trying to get the project off the ground, at which point CINAR stepped in with its offer to coproduce. It was then that Marlene Matthews, in Toronto finishing work on Wind at My Back, another CBC series, and the final year of Road to Avonlea, heard about the venture. After regaling Donovan with her identification with Emily, she took the helm.

One of the first changes Matthews wanted to make based on her experience on Avonlea was the location - she wanted it to be more authentic. "I worked on Avonlea for six years and never saw the Island. It was shot entirely in Uxbridge, Ont., and that showed. When we started to talk about Emily, I thought the time had come for me to see where Lucy Maud lived, and when I got here it just stunned me. It's that love and passion for the land that kept those early settlers going, and that fuelled Emily's writing."

Film commissioner Berni Wood of Enterprise P.E.I. in Charlottetown, who works as a liaison with film companies shooting in the province, scouted the Slemon Park and Cabot Beach locations, recommending the north shore of the province known to Islanders as "Anne's Land," near Montgomery's own home and the areas she wrote about. Wood, who works closely with P.E.I.'s Economic Development and Tourism Department, points out the positive economic impact the production has had on the Island, stating that while it's hard to come up with an actual figure, it is "significant." You don't have to tell that to Christine Mac-Donald, owner of the Summerside company Grilled Cheese, which caters all the meals on set, five days a week (last year; the cast and crew's favourite morning snack was grilled cheese sandwiches; hence the company's name). Thanks to the production's business, MacDonald has had to contract another company's help.

The provincial government invested a total of $1.9 million in the production companies (CINAR and Salter Street Films), and P.E.I. Minister of Economic Development and Tourism Wes MacAleer estimates that the economic spin off from the series, through direct and indirect jobs, such as tourism, will reach about $15 million. Direct expenditure will result from things like the cast and crew's travel and living expenses some are Islanders, while others have relocated, mainly from Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia, for the production's duration, renting local houses and apartments, staying in B and Bs or in barracks on the base. In some areas, Islanders are receiving special training: Three have been taught how to implement a technique known as automatic dialogue replacement - commonly called ADR - in the postproduction process. For now; MacAleer says he's looking forward to the publicity the Emily production will give the Island. It may not rival Anne of Green Gables; but it would certainly complement its mystique," he says.

With several well-known actors in the series, publicity should pose no problem. Toronto stage and film actor Sheila McCarthy the star of the 1988 movie I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, plays the part of Emily's meek, submissive Aunt Laura. Her elder daughter, Mackenzie, 9, and husband, actor Peter Donaldson, also appear in various episodes. In reality, McCarthy says there is very little of Laura in her. "I don't think you can be an innocent to play an innocent. I'm too much of a '90s woman," she says. "But there are parts of Laura I love, like her protectiveness of Emily. I can relate to that with my own daughters."

Other guest stars include Michael Moriarty, former star of Law & Order, Maury Chaykin, star of Whale Music and Unstrung Heroes, and grande dame comedienne Phyllis Diller. Diller, who plays Emily's crusty Great Aunt Nancy describes her character as "a salty old broad. In fact, I wasn't acting." Years earlier, Matthews interviewed Diller for a magazine article at the comic's California home, where Diller showed her "Phyllis's Dream Book" in which, as an adult, she catalogued her hopes and dreams. When Matthews sent her Emily's script, Diller felt akin to Emily and was captivated. (The cast and crew sent her fresh lobster in California for her 80th birthday in July, and she will appear in both seasons.)

Morning dawns clear on set at Cabot Beach, and while it's no longer damp, it is still chilly, the cool air blowing onto the red cliffs overlooking the ocean only a few footsteps away. Filming began at 10 and won't finish much before midnight-they're running two hours behind schedule because of a couple of uncooperative cows. Martha MacIsaac has the stomach flu; she's been given Gravol but says stoically, "I feel better now that I've thrown up." Marlene Matthews casts a watchful eye over the whole production, giving equal attention to cast and crew, children and adults. She describes herself as mother, and Emily as her baby "It may sound a bit corny," she says, "but it's like Emily is standing beside me, saying, this is true, this is right."

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