This city is one of those that always reminds you of someplace else. Detroit. Philadelphia. New York. Chicago. Even Paris.
And now, Hollywood.
If you happen to be wandering the streets of Canada’s largest city these days, you’re likely to run into more than a dozen film crews on Bay Street alone, plus a whole slew of photo ops throughout the city. In one afternoon last fall, I spotted Denzel Washington stepping into his limo outside the Four Seasons, Gwyneth Paltrow coming out of the elevator of the same hotel, Adam Arkin chatting on his cell phone in the lobby of the Sutton Place Hotel, and Lauren Holly doing a little window shopping on trendy Bloor Street.
And the locals are totally into it.
So much so that some think nearly every camera-toting, map-carrying American they encounter is either working on a film or scouting a location to make one. When a Barnes & Noble salesman found out I hadn’t come to Toronto for the annual Caribana festival, he asked, “You here making a movie?”
Considering that more than 50 feature films and cable movies were being shot in Toronto during my visit, I suppose it was a natural assumption.
Toronto is the fourth-largest filmmaking market in the world and one of the centers of what those in the film industry pejoratively call “runaway” production: the exodus of filmmakers fleeing the United States for the comforts of Canada and other worldly destinations.
Nearly 81 percent of all runaway productions are shot in Canada, including the recent box-office smash “X-Men,” filmed in Toronto. Canadian production earnings for the last six months are topping $300 million, up 15 percent from last year.
Hooray for Hollywood North, right?
As an Angeleno (Los Angeles resident) and film devotee, I wanted to know why 90 percent of the invitations I get to visit movie sets lately require airline tickets and a passport. It used to be that those fluorescent signs with arrows directing extras and others to location shoots would be on every other block down Wilshire Boulevard. They’ve dwindled to a few. And back in the good ol’ days, Los Angeles residents couldn’t make it through a day without tripping over camera cables on Sunset Boulevard or throwing a fit in front of their favorite trendy restaurant because a production company had hired it for the day.
I wondered: Were all these industry types lamenting over lost wages and opportunities simply acting like spoiled, pampered executives? Or were “South Park” creators and Oscar nominees Trey Parker and Matt Stone right — we should blame Canada?
At any given time, dozens of American celebrities are booked into Toronto’s four-star hotels. Comedian/actor/director Robert Townsend spends a lot of time working on this foreign turf, 2,200 miles from Los Angeles.
For him, Toronto feels like home.
“One day I was having lunch with Robert Altman, and the next day I was lunching with Louis Gossett Jr.,” said Townsend, who was in town to shoot NBC’s “Livin’ for Love: The Natalie Cole Story,” which aired Sunday. “Then it seemed like a stroll down the red carpet at my hotel. I was on a floor with DMX, and every day I’d see someone else I knew from L.A.”
He’s here for the same reason other Yanks are: lower production costs, tax incentives, a strong exchange rate and the fact that this city, with its maple-tree-lined, cobblestone streets, quaint cafes, picturesque waterfront, stately Georgian brick homes and unattractive factories can be made to look like a lot of cities in the United States, and even Europe.
It’s not a new idea. The concept of taking film production beyond the U.S. borders is almost as old as the talkies. Screen Actors Guild archivist Valerie Yaros can produce memos dating to 1945 expressing concern about the practice.
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“The problem,” she said, “is that the young people running the business have no scope. People have always been running away. First it was to England, then to Mexico, and now Canada. It just goes in cycles.”
The first comprehensive study on the subject was done in 1957: “Hollywood at the Crossroads: An Economic Study of the Motion Picture Industry.” Three years later, industry executives including future Screen Actors Guild President Charlton Heston testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor about the growing number of filmmakers lured by overseas locales.
In 1963, screen legend and former SAG board member Joan Crawford summed it up in an article she wrote for Screen Actor magazine, “Runaway Americans”: “That they have harmed themselves can be seen by the mediocrity of so many of the films they have made. That is their own business. But they have also hurt Hollywood, and that is my business. They have hurt the United States financially, and that is the business of us all.”
Is the United States taking a beating today? It depends whom you ask.
Facts and figures offer more substantial proof. The Screen Actors Guild, along with the Directors Guild of America, commissioned a study last year to examine the situation. According to the report, runaway production resulted in the loss of 20,000 jobs and $10.3 billion in revenues in 1998.
“This report bears out the seriousness of the problem of runaway production,” DGA President Jack Shear said. “It is impossible to look at this study and say that this issue does not pose a grave threat to the future of film and television production in the United States. And it is important to remember that the people who are being hurt by this are people who depend on steady work to feed their families and repay their loans and send their kids to college.”
It is also a political issue. This hot issue has definitely chilled relations between some American and Canadian filmmakers. Americans often refer to Canadian crew members as “scabs.” Conversely, some Canadians characterize their disgruntled U.S. counterparts are “greedy Yanks.”
U.S. filmmakers working in Canada are required to hire a certain number of Canadians for their crews. In most cases, a healthy preponderance of those hired hands speak with a decidedly un-American accent.
“I think that’s what’s really eating the Americans,” said Michael Tassie, a Canadian assistant director. “It’s that we’re getting work in our country, and they aren’t.”
John Gray, the director of a CBS mini-series called “Haven,” airing in February, may best be described as a reluctant Canadian convert. He’s working in Canada for the first time. He said it’s no myth that runaway production is hurting people in Los Angeles.
“A lot of my friends — below-the-line people like grips — are hurting. I don’t know what the answer is. If I’m a producer and I say, `OK, if I shoot this here I can have 30 shooting days, but if I shoot in Canada, I can have 40 shooting days,’ it makes it a very tough call.
“I wish there could be more leveling of the field so that the U.S. could compete a little better. It would be nice if you could say how bad it is here, but it’s not. The crews are wonderful, and it’s first-rate in front of and behind the camera.”
Not everybody is ready to blame Canada, however.
“I don’t think anyone in L.A. is really suffering,” said award-winning Toronto director Jason DeParis.
DeParis is one of many industry insiders who see the growth of his city within the film world as a good thing. “The friends I have (in the States) love to work up here. It’s a cool place to work.”
Mark Winemaker, a Canadian producer who was hired by Paulette Breen, the U.S. executive producer of “Haven,” also thinks Canada is a cool place to work and is uncomfortable with the term “runaway.”
“It’s one of those oversimplifications of a complex issue,” Winemaker said. “There’s a lot of frustration in Los Angeles because of the amount of production that’s filming outside of Los Angeles. I think that it could be characterized as being runaway production, but filmmaking is a business, and these decisions are made for monetary reasons.
“There’s an anti-Canadian sentiment in Los Angeles, which I think is unfair. All we’re doing is a good job. Los Angeles makes a lot of film projects, and they make projects that we can’t make here. Some of the larger scale projects that can be made there will be made there because it still remains the center of the film industry.”
U.S. producers such as Gray and Townsend make no apologies for choosing to shoot in Canada.
“I work a lot in Canada, because you get more bang for your buck shooting a film there,” Townsend said. “I’m not mad at Canada because they offer certain incentives. L.A. could do the same thing, but it’s too greedy.”
And that is where many a pro-Canada producer make their strongest points. If L.A. is to win back the film companies going for northern exposure, the city must make an effort to turn around the trend.
“We have to blame ourselves and the relationship between business and government in terms of providing the kind of environment that’s conducive to keeping production here,” said award-winning director Roy Campanella II.
Campanella leases studio space for $2,500 a month in East Los Angeles and can afford to shoot the majority of his projects at home. “This is a capital, labor, government problem. It needs to be worked out within that context. Incentives need to be offered. There have been some concessions by unions, but obviously, we need to find innovative ways to keep production here.”
SAG spokesman Greg Krizman said that several unions and organizations are working toward that goal. Last year, U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) created a subcommittee of the Entertainment Industry Task Force to address the issue. “This isn’t a new problem, but I think the difference is now that we have quantifiable hard data that we’ve pulled together in a report and that’s been helpful in putting it on a lot of people’s radar screens,” Foley said.
On a late Friday afternoon, the publicist for a Showtime film called “Bojangles” ferried me to the location where its star and executive producer Gregory Hines was shooting. During our 10-minute ride, we passed through four neighborhoods. One with aging brownstones could have easily passed for Chicago or parts of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Another, a little more affluent, reminded me of parts of Austin. I was warned that another — which looks something like Long Beach, Calif., without the palm trees — was “not really safe.”
These Canadians don’t know dangerous, I thought to myself.
We met Hines, dressed in his Bill “Bojangles” Robinson garb. He was clearly in his element as we strolled down the street talking about his 12-year quest to make this film about the legendary dancer (the black guy who was always dancing with Shirley Temple). Hines spoke to everyone we encountered.
We happened upon a small lingerie shop, and soon we were combing the racks to find something for his fiance. The saleswoman issued a warning as we left, empty-handed: “Be careful, it’s not safe out there.” She told us she’d been assaulted that very evening.
Hines is from New York, and I live in Los Angeles. This neighborhood looked downright “Brady Bunch” compared with some of the places back home. But, it just goes to show you: Looks can be deceiving in Toronto.
“There are so many stories here,” Hines said. “There’s such a cool vibe. I enjoy the fact that there is so much work here in Canada. There are talented actors here to be cast. What that translates into is more work for actors.”
As a producer, Hines said, he’s sensitive to the unemployment issues facing Los Angeles production crews, but he was quick to point out that “there’s a lot of work in L.A. There should be competition, because that’s the American way. I think that it’s possible that the cost of production (in Los Angeles) has gotten out of hand. The fact that the dollar is so strong in Canada is giving people an opportunity to look twice at what they’ve done.
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“I think this is going to be a wake-up call for L.A.”
Will the City of Angels answer the wake-up call from up north? Whether or not America makes a quick response to the increasing foreign production, there’s no question that the United States hasn’t totally lost its edge.
Nobody would still accuse Canada of producing those mediocre films that Crawford spoke of in her diatribe, but Hollywood is still the film capital of the world. Most of the big-budget studio special effects films are still shot in Los Angeles, where the advanced technology to make movies such as “Independence Day,” “Jurassic Park” and “The Matrix” is more readily available.
That, however, doesn’t eliminate cause for concern. If Toronto can build baseball stadiums and basketball arenas, it can certainly construct a major studio capable of making films of all genres.
What might save Los Angeles is history. Runaway production appears to be a cyclical trend, so this may soon pass.
Los Angeles filmmaker Emma Pullen is one person who isn’t worried because she believes this trend is just that: “Canada will have its fun for a while, but it will all come back to L.A. eventually.”
And Canada’s Winemaker agreed, to an extent.
“There will be other areas that will be more economically feasible,” he said. “For example, there are certain states in the United States like Oregon, South Carolina and others that will compete with us. We will continue to be more expensive as the business continues to come here. And eventually the economics won’t be so good.”