And the two of us clicked. From the very beginning, I had the idea of interweaving the story of Martha Ballard's life with Laurel Ulrich's process of piecing it together. It is the job of a film's producer to raise the funding for the film . Scripting and production grants came several years later from the public program division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And the final piece of production funding came from The American Experience, the PBS prime time series on American History.
Research notes on dialogue.
The past is a foreign place , and a film's portrayal of the past depends upon thousands of choices about the physical, behavioral, and cultural details of the period and place being presented. Being authentic or truthful about the past involves much more than getting the costumes and the architectural details right. With their guidance, I plunged into the research. I visited the buildings which are still standing which were part of Martha's world. I visited archives all over Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire and put together a database of thousands of images from the eighteenth century, including handwritten documents, paintings, maps, medical book illustrations, children's book illustrations, newspapers, broadsides, photos of buildings, and the artifacts of everyday life.