Andrea Canning discovered one constant with every news reporting job she's had over the years: with all the traveling to track down a story comes a lot of dead time. The "Dateline" reporter has spent hours on long flights, even more hours waiting between airline connections and even faces an hour of commuting every day to New York on the train to work on the NBC news magazine.
She could have read bad novels, taken up knitting or watched endless hours of TV runs and old movies to pass the time but instead, Canning put her energy into writing mystery screenplays. Her latest script has been turned into the Lifetime Movie "Til Ex Do Us Part" slated to air Oct. 28 on the cable channel.
"There is only so much research I can do for 'Dateline.' I have been watching 'Dateline' and Lifetime movies for two decades and I love both," Canning says. "I love how they intersect in a weird way: one is real life and one is drama. So, it's just a lot of world to have the two worlds come together."
In the cable film, Sophia, (Kelly Sullivan) an award-winning architect and her husband, Kyle (Dan Payne), are in the process of getting back together after a brief separation. The only snag is that Claire (Anna Van Hooft), a woman Kyle slept with once during the separation, is determined to have the perfect life Sophia has. And, nothing's getting in her way.
The script was loosely based on true events but Canning is quick to point out that she would never use any work she had done on 'Dateline" as the basis for a script. She knows that nothing is worse than how many of the people she has interviewed have lost someone dear to them. That's why she would never do anything to jeopardize the trust people have put in her as a journalist. The most Canning has done is collect a lot of specific knowledge over the years about a lot of cases and she has taken snippets as clues for her plots.
"Til Ex Do Us Part" is the latest of five mystery scripts Canning has written that have been turned into movies but she started creating the foundation for her writing career when she was a young girl growing up in Canada.
"I loved writing when I was young and was always writing books," Canning says. "I cleaned out the closet in my childhood home and actually found a book that I had written when I was 8 years old. It was called 'Murder Mystery' and it had a knife with blood dripping off it.
"That says something about me like maybe you should stay away. I had no memory of that book and it just ended up in a box of stuff. I thought 'Wow. I really ended up in the right job.' "
Canning's passion for writing was equaled by her love of mystery books and TV shows. She was a big reader of the Nancy Drew mystery books series and a fan of the whodunit television program "Murder, She Wrote."
Her interest in writing mysteries was pushed to the side as Canning began to build up her reporting credentials. Before joining "Dateline," Canning was a correspondent for ABC News from 2004 until April 2012, where she covered the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and the Iraq War. During her time at ABC News, Canning was the designated "Good Morning America" correspondent, and appeared on "Nightline," "World News with Diane Sawyer" and "20/20," while regularly anchoring morning broadcasts, "World News Now," "America This Morning" and "Good Morning America Weekend." She joined the "Dateline" team in October 2012.
Canning's life is filled with tales of people breaking the law in both real life and in her fiction. There is a different feeling of satisfaction Canning gets from working on a "Dateline" story and a movie script. Working on a script is fun for her because she gets to create everything out of her own imagination and it really doesn't affect anyone. There's more work in a "Dateline" story because there are so many layers for which she must deal and that means treating every element with a delicate approach.
Working as a serious reporter and writing screenplays for movies has given Canning some balance in her life. One of her jobs is deadly serious while the other is wickedly amusing.
"The movies are just mindless entertainment _ not to take away from all the good work that everyone does. It's just fun. It's an escape," Canning says. "There's always so many twists and turns and what is the villain going to do next. And, how's the good girl going to prevail."
"Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction but Lifetime movies are pretty wild."
