SAM BROWN SAGA DRAWS MORE ATTENTION

TV and maybe movie: Tragic tale airs on The fifth Estate Friday;
Rolling Stone writer negotiating screenplay rights

Slated to play for a national television audience tomorrow night, the
dramatic tale of Nelson's Sam Brown may be bound for an even bigger
screen.

The U.S. writer who penned the local 24-year-old's tragic drug
smuggling saga for Rolling Stone magazine this summer is negotiating
with two different parties interested in buying the rights to the
story, with plans to write a screenplay and eventually produce a movie.

Contacted late last month by the Nelson Daily News, writer Jesse Hyde
said talks were underway.

"I can't get into any specifics," Hyde said in an e-mail, "because I'm
in negotiations with two different parties who are interested in film
rights. I'm close to signing an option agreement with one."

Hyde's telling of the Brown story was laid out over 14 pages in the
August 6 issue of Rolling Stone.

According to Rolling Stone senior editor Sean Woods, even the
magazine's iconic publisher and founder Jann Wenner commented on it.

"Jann loved it," says Woods.

Rolling Stone was only one of a number of bigtime media titles
attracted to the tale, in which Brown was nabbed by US authorities
after flying 200 kilograms of marijuana into Washington State, in a
reportedly stolen helicopter. A few days later, the young man hanged
himself in a Spokane jail cell.

The CBC's The Fifth Estate will be airing a one-hour program on Brown
Friday night at 9 p.m.

Entitled "Over the Edge," the episode " delves into the world of drug
smuggling in B.C. and the role in it of young people like Brown,"
according to the program's promotional background.

"Brown was an extreme sports enthusiast, who liked the adrenaline of
risk taking," write the show's producers. "He grew up in the B.C.
interior, living in Nelson, where the mountain biking scene offered
him challenges."

"Rugged and picturesque, Nelson is a hotbed for the young and
unconventional, a magnet for extreme sports enthusiasts - and a centre
for the lucrative, underground marijuana industry."

The Fifth Estate episode will be hosted by Linden MacIntyre, one of
the nation's most well-regarded investigative journalists and as of
this week, the latest recipient of the Giller Prize for excellence in
Canadian literature. His novel about corruption in the Catholic
church, The Bishop's Man, beat four others to take the prize Tuesday
night at a gala in Toronto.

MacIntyre is indeed one of Canada's preeminent investigative
reporters, says Bob Keating, the local broadcast journalist for CBC
Radio and one of the consultants on the Fifth Estate episode.

"He was on the story for about 10 days in September," says Keating,
"he was in Revelstoke, here in Nelson, Spokane and Seattle."

Keating, who broke the Brown story earlier this year not long after
the young man's February arrest and death, accompanied MacIntyre, two
producers and a cameraman on some of their local shoots, and put the
crew in touch with a number of contacts.

The local CBC reporter admits he was taken aback by the Fifth Estate's
interest in the case.

"I was surprised they were doing it, to be honest. They usually do
something with a gotcha-angle, and I'm not sure they've got that here."

But Keating says he's got a hunch the episode will reveal details
about the case that neither Rolling Stone nor any other media outlet
has revealed yet.

"They've probably got stuff no one else has got."

On sharing credits and a bit of downtime with one of the nation's most
revered journalistic sleuths, Keating says he was impressed with
MacIntyre's down-to-earth nature, and his talents.

The famous reporter, who hails from the Maritimes and is the father of
five grown kids, had a few pints in Mike's Place Pub, and was easily
approachable.

"He's got no ego whatsoever," says Keating, who tagged along when
MacIntyre shot a lengthy on-camera narrative for tomorrow night's
piece, staged on the Gyro Park lookout.

"It was at least a minute long," Keating recalls, "and Lyndon did it
in one take, unscripted. I looked at him and said 'you did that just
because I'm standing here right?" he laughed.

The fifth Estate story episode alleges that marijuana pours a large,
uncalculated amount of dollars into local economies in the province,
"allowing places like Nelson to weather economic swings."

In addition to reconstructing Brown's final smuggling mission,
MacIntyre speaks with a former trafficker who recruited Brown into the
underworld, his sisters and father, and Brown's American lawyers -
"some of the last people to speak with him before he took his life,"
said the episode notes.

CBC News Network rebroadcasts the Fifth Estate on Saturdays at 10 pm.,
Sundays, at 9 p.m. and Tuesdays, at 10 p.m.

Info? www.cbc.ca/fifthestate