Film production may be stalling in Los Angeles, where filming is down more than 56 percent in the first three months from 2008. But it's blossoming once again here in Vancouver, where film and TV crews are almost as ubiquitous as looming Grouse Mountain.
The worldwide recession is a faint echo among the TV and movie crowd of Hollywood North, where production activity is running well ahead of last year.
Here’s how film and TV production broke down year-over-year for April, according to the British Columbia Film Commission:
April 2008: 10 features, 3 movies-of-the-week, 2 pilots, 1 miniseries, 11 TV series.
April 2009: 15 features, 5 movies-of-the-week, 5 pilots, 2 miniseries, 7 TV series
Film and TV production spending in B.C. hit close to $980 million in 2008.
And though the industry was hit by the closures and uncertainty of last year’s writer's strike and declining domestic production, that was almost $205 million over 2007.
Peter Leitch, chairman of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C., was cautiously optimistic about a repetition of 2008 spending. “We're well on pace to meeting that or surpassing that,” Leitch told TheWrap. “It's almost still too early in the year to tell, but our facilities are full, and we're busy.”
A couple of major factors are helping revive Vancouver while L.A. continues to languish, including the extension in February of British Columbia’s TV and film tax credits and the decline in the Canadian dollar's value since last year's spike.
The city's triple threat of a favorable currency exchange, strong tax credits and established infrastructure may not be sexy, but it is proving highly effective.
On a bright sunny April day, cameras are loaded and equipment trucks are emptying out all over town. In front of the imposing columns of Art Gallery on Georgia Street, crews hustle inside with light rigs as craft services start laying out plates for lunch.
Over the Burrard Street Bridge, on the west side of town in front of the Ridge Theater, fans start Twittering away as Taylor “Jacob” Lautner and other cast members of the “Twilight” sequel “New Moon” are spotted in and around the art-house movie theater as shooting gets set up.
Stalwarts like “Battlestar Galactica” and “The L Word” may have come to an end and left town, but there’s more than enough to take their place -- not just “New Moon” but the CW's “Supernatural,” the Chris Columbus-helmed adaptation of “Percy Jackson,” the recently renewed “Psych,” the recently relocated J.J. Abrams' series “Fringe” (starring Vancouver's own Joshua Jackson) and Disney’s “Tron2.”
That’s a long way from when “21 Jump Street” and later “The X-Files” were the biggest game in town, and it might get even better soon. “When the new TV announcements are made in May, we're pretty positive that we'll see even more productions up here,” said Leitch, who runs production facilities at Mammoth Studios and North Shore Studios. “We've had good indications that we will.”
“We have tested crews, over a million square feet of stage space, we're in the same time zone as L.A.
