Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 13:23:15 +0000
To: 
From: Douglas Gresham <>
Subject: Re: Doug Gresham

Dear Rowland,

At 18:55 16/12/98 -1000, you wrote:
>Hi Doug, how are you?

We are all well at this end, how are things with you folks?

>Happy Christmas to you and yours. (Tonight the young couple fly in to
>Melbourne - can't wait to see them. Thanks for all you and Merri have
>done for them).

Give them our blessings and tell them that we'll keep missing them until
they come and visit us again.

>Doug, I received this query. If you have time to answer it I'm sure our
>friend would appreciate it. And I'd be interested to see a copy of it

No problem.

>>         Why wasn't your brother mentioned or even protrayed in the movie
>> Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins?

Very simply, it was purely for dramatic reasons. The first Shadowlands
version with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom did have both brothers, but when
Bill Nicholson re-wrote the piece as a stage play he thought that having
the two children both reacting to the same circumstances but in different
ways meant that he had two sub-plots running alongside the main plot of the
play, and this was detracting from, rather than complementing, the play's
theme. Also for a stage-play to have two boys would have meant finding and
hiring four child actors (becaause of the legal restrictions on how many
performances child actors are allowed to do without a break), and this
would be twice as hard and twice as expensive as only having to find two.
So he wrote the stage-play version with only one child and as I was the one
acting as a sort of advisor to the project he kept my name. This was found
to greatly improve the script, and so when he re-wrote it again as a
screenplay, he stuck to that new format.

I have sent this explanation off to Carl as well.

Christmas blessings to all,

Doug.