Fort Kent-based novel airs as Hallmark television movie

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FORT KENT – In the premiere Sunday night of the television movie of local author Cathie Pelletier’s book, “Candles on Bay Street,” Fort Kent has moved to the coast and Bee Jays Tavern is now Cee Jays Tavern.

But vehicles in the movie still have Maine license plates, and an American flag flies in a breeze over the water.

Pelletier, an Allagash native, wrote “Candles on Bay Street” under her pseudonym K.C. McKinnon. Sunday night, the movie of “Candles” was the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s 228th presentation.

The television version of the story was quite different from the book, Pelletier said, including that it was filmed in a small village on the coast of Nova Scotia.

But that happens all the time, she said. In “Candles on Bay Street,” much of the book happens in the mind of a veterinarian, and that is difficult to make into a movie.

Overall, she said Monday, “They [Hallmark] did a good job.”

The University of Maine at Fort Kent held a soiree for the television premiere of Pelletier’s book. Pelletier is an alumna of UMFK and has written several books set in northern Maine towns, especially her native Allagash.

“It was a wonderful evening,” UMFK President Richard Cost said Monday. “We had redone the Nadeau Hall teleconference room into a living room.

“We had special friends of the university and the Northern Maine Medical Center to watch the premiere with Cathie,” he said. “She explained, before the showing, how an author relinquishes total control of their story once it is sold to be made into a movie or a television movie.”

Between 50 and 60 people attended the UMFK event.

Cost said a major difference he found was that the film did not include the book’s theme of assisted suicide.

“Still, it remained a moving and uplifting story,” Cost said.

Peter Sirois, assistant administrator at NMMC, was impressed with the evening at UMFK.

“The story line was awesome, and it is a good story,” he said Monday of Pelletier’s book. “It nice to see someone from our local area succeed as she has. She was certainly well-received.”

While Sirois and Pelletier graduated from Community High School in Fort Kent within two years of each other, he didn’t remember her from that time.

“Candles on Bay Street” had Fort Kent as its setting in Pelletier’s book. It is the story of a young woman returning to her hometown after being away for some 13 years. With her is her son, Trooper.

Dee Dee Michaud, played by Alicia Silverstone in the film, returns looking for a home for her son. She is dying of cancer, and her son’s father – the man she left Fort Kent with the day after high school graduation – had died years earlier. Trooper never knew him.

Her next-door neighbor while growing up, Sam Timmons – Sam Thibodeau in the book – went to college and became a veterinarian in their hometown. His wife, also a veterinarian, is bothered at first by the return of her husband’s first romantic crush.

But in the end, she and the entire town become enamored of Dee Dee, who came home to find a family for her son and to die.

“It’s always an honor to have your work made into a film,” Pelletier said Monday by telephone as she watched snow falling over the St. John River behind her father’s Allagash home. “It’s an even bigger honor to watch it with people you know.

“Having my father [Louis Pelletier Sr.] there was an even bigger honor,” she said. “I could have been in Hollywood for the premiere, but I was in Fort Kent because I needed that.”

She said the film was done in Halifax, Nova Scotia, because they are set up for it. To bring a crew to Fort Kent would have been much too difficult.

Pelletier was sorry to see that the large theme of her book, assisted suicide, was not in the movie, but she understands that Hallmark is into sentimental and maudlin themes.

In the book, assisted suicide is why Dee Dee Michaud returns home.

“Candles on Bay Street” is her second book made into a movie. The other, “Dancing at the Harvest Moon,” was a 2001 movie starring Jacqueline Bissett and Valerie Harper.

She also found there were too many songs in the film.

“Amazing Grace,” sung during a memorial in the film, was not Cathie Pelletier. In her book, there is no memorial.

The book ends with Sam Thibodeau walking away from the house where Dee Dee Michaud is inside, dead.