CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. -- There are Prince Edward Islanders who have never forgiven Upper Canada for abducting their beloved Anne Of Green Gables stories and turning them into a TV series in Ontario.
 
  You can count P.E.I. film commissioner Berni Wood among them.
 
  So when she heard back in 1995 that Lucy Maud Montgomery's lesser-known Emily books were being adapted for TV and that the series was most likely going to be made somewhere Away, Wood swore it wouldn't happen again.
 
  "The first thing that crosses my mind is, `Emily, that's Lucy Maud Montgomery, that's P.E.I. -- that's got to be done in P.E.I. It doesn't belong anywhere else. It can't be another Road To Avonlea,'" the Enterprise P.E.I. executive says of the CBC series that spent six years pretending Uxbridge, Ont., was the emerald isle.
 
  "People have been upset for a number of years that Road To Avonlea wasn't shot here. For Islanders who have watched that for years and years, you look at it and think, `Oh, that's just not right.'"
 
  The second thing that crossed her mind was that P.E.I. ought to be in the TV and movie business, which had benefited its neighbor, Nova Scotia, some $45-million in 1994-95 alone. And that Emily could only add to the tourism draw of Montgomery's literary legacy, a main attraction for the 800,000 people who visit the province each year.
 
  So the hometown girl, as plucky and determined as any of Montgomery's heroines, fought to keep their legend local. And won. And Canada's littlest, prettiest province proved itself a fledgling player in the entertainment industry.
 
  Without a budget or even a film program in place, Wood approached Michael Donovan, head of Emily Of New Moon co-producer Salter Street Films Limited.
 
  "I said, `I understand that you have the Emily books by Lucy Maud Montgomery in development and I would like you to shoot it in P.E.I. whenever you're ready to go into production,'" she recalls.
 
  Donovan's response was, to paraphrase, "Show me the money."
 
  Salter Street is based in Halifax; Emily producing partner CINAR Films is in Montreal. Word was, locations were being scouted in Nova Scotia and Quebec.
 
  "We obviously thought long and hard about shooting on the Island because it obviously doesn't make life easy as far as costs and transporting people and bringing things in. It was very difficult," remembers Patricia Lavoie, CINAR's vice-president of live action, production and development.
 
  Wood's team found Emily's two main locations -- a windwhipped cliff in Cabot Beach Provincial Park, and studio space at a retired military base near Summerside. The P.E.I. government found $1.9-million to contribute to the show's initial $13-million budget.
 
  Shooting began in September with a nearly all-Canadian cast. Twelve-year-old Emily star Martha MacIsaac is as authentically of the island as its red clay. The Charlottetown native was the face of P.E.I. Tourism's TV campaign and even appears on the provincial road map. Susan Clark and Sheila McCarthy play the aunts the orphaned girl goes to live with, Stephen McHattie the mentally disabled adult cousin she befriends.
 
  This month, CINAR representatives were in New Orleans pitching Emily to the world at the National Assoc. Of Television Program Executives convention, the industry's biggest buying and selling bazaar. Its Canadian premiere is scheduled on CHCH this fall.
 
  Emily's authenticity has also had non-financial costs. The seaside set was lashed by the fall's hurricanes and was already bitterly cold by October. Whatever the extra hardships or inconvenience, supervising producer Marlene Matthews judges the result worth the effort.
 
  "The weather has been extremely difficult but it looks magnificent on the screen," she says.
 
  Unlike postcard-pretty Avonlea, Emily will have a wilder, darker look appropriate to its more serious, mystical theme.
 
  "In the six years I worked on Avonlea, I suffered from the delusion that Uxbridge was really P.E.I., and it's not. As beautiful as the series was, it really didn't get the flavor of Prince Edward Island," Matthews reflects.
 
  "What was missing was the real drama of the landscape and of the sea."
 
  Emily's outdoor setting and facades will have a life beyond television as a 19th century theme park. Berni Wood predicts it could become a third major tourist destination to go along with Cavendish's Green Gables museum and Charlottetown's annual Anne festival.
 
  Wood continues her work, promoting P.E.I. as a film and TV location with the slogan, `One hundred miles ... a million locations,' and is investigating possible training and mentorship programs that could build a bigger pool of skilled crew on the Island.
 
  Journalists from Japan, the world epicentre of Montgomery-mania, have already visited and written enthusiastically about the Emily project.
 
  "I think there's a real market for both Emily and Anne," Wood says.
 
  "Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote so much about P.E.I., about our landscape and about the sea and about the rolling hills and about the look of P.E.I., that she's basically selling it. That's our tourist package right there."
 
From the http://www.canoe.ca site