HOLLYWOOD NORTH NEEDS A FEW HOMETOWN HEROES
If our film industry is booming, it’s high time for us to start telling our own stories, Ian Waddell writes.
The phone call comes from Los Angeles and the electricians, set decorators, prop people and a host of others show up for work. Right now, the film industry is booming in B.C., with about 80 current productions. When premier Clark — Glen, not Christy — and I as his minister responsible, with the help of then-finance minister Joy MacPhail, announced the first tax credits, it led a year later to a $1-billion industry. The Vancouver Sun reported that I proclaimed, “It’s a billion, baby!” in what they called a “lame Austin Powers accent.” Whatever. We became the third-biggest film centre in the world after Hollywood and New York. Now, it’s a $2.7-billion industry. Presto, boom town.
We clearly have an overdependence on foreign productions.
Surely this is a bright picture? Well, we have two problems.
We clearly have an overdependence on foreign productions. Talk about a branch plant — it’s even a branch plant without many plants. Those phone calls could stop tomorrow if the Canadian dollar goes up, if the state of Georgia or the city of New Orleans come up with bigger and better tax credits, or if that guy in the White House puts an adjustment tax on Canadian products and resources crossing the border.
This leads to the second problem: the decline in independent Canadian productions. Over the years, while foreign production boomed, independent B.C. production has declined. We lack in resources partly because, over time, the industry has been centralized in Quebec and Ontario (funders, gatekeepers, broadcasters), which is exacerbated by the lion’s share of funding going to Toronto and Montreal, preventing B.C. from establishing its domestic industry. The previous provincial Liberal government, while keeping tax credits, failed to help homegrown producers. Today’s independent B.C. producers need seed money for the most competitive projects, something that happened in the past under the Glen Clark government.
B.C. has all the elements to build a highly successful and sustainable film industry: solid producers, a critical mass of highly skilled talent, entrenched film infrastructure, attractive locations, the same time zone as L.A., film schools and more. What B.C. needs is more support to enable our creators to create and own their original intellectual property, and commercialize them in the global marketplace.
Here are some ways to do this. First, we can try to leverage funding, through a reformed Creative B.C., from Canada’s newly announced creative hubs program to incubate B.C. storytellers and directors and produce and bring to the global market some madein-B.C. stories.
Second, when federal Heritage Minister Melanie Joly recently announced a deal with Netflix that will see $500 million invested over five years in Canadian production, a lot of people were skeptical. I see this as an opportunity. I believe the B.C. government should actively lobby Netflix to base its Canadian production studio in Vancouver so that their stories will employ B.C. writers, directors and creators.
Third, Joly is very fond of talking about this new digital age, in which companies like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and Amazon take over from traditional networks like CTV and CBC. I think Vancouver is in a very interesting place — we do not have the presence of traditional film distributors and broadcasters in B.C., which has held our industry back. Knowledge Network hasn’t been much help either. To quote Earl Hong Tai, the former director of Telefilm’s western operations: “What Metro Vancouver is beginning to have is an ecosystem that includes tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft), video game companies (EA), and now possibly a major film production studio (Netflix Canada?). This to me looks like what the new creative economy will become, where tech meets film, and content can be repurposed for various distribution platforms.” That sounds like it could be a very compelling pitch — a creative hub, job creation, a knowledge economy, clean industries and the like.
There is of course another reason to promote Canadian independent production. It’s called the survival and development of Canadian-owned and -created culture, essential in my view to the survival of Canada itself. Is it not about time we told more of our own stories on film?
If that phone call doesn’t come as often or maybe not at all from L.A., maybe it will come from Vancouver, Surrey or Kelowna. Our film workers can still get out of bed, but this time go to Canadian productions.