Vancouver: Needless to say, local producers were hastily adjusting their travel plans to l.a. this month after that city’s latest devastating earthquake which registered a whopping 6.6 on the Richter scale, convincing everyone from San Diego to as far north as Las Vegas that the terra is not so firma after all.

John Ketcham, who’s living in l.a. while developing his feature film Hurricane, was rousted up out of a sound sleep at 4:30 in the morning along with eight million of his fellow Angelenos. When contacted the following day, Ketcham said that in his incoherent state, he thought he’d put too many quarters in his vibrating bed.

Asked whether he is considering a relocation, he responds: ‘Hell, if I’ve made it through the riots, fires and now an earthquake, I’m staying here until the locusts arrive.’

Doing business in the City of Angels, however, was proving to be a tad more challenging in the days following the quake. ‘People are making an effort to get back to work, but even if they do, the elevators in their office towers are screwed up, their phones and faxes don’t work, the air conditioning is out, files and books are strewn on the floors – and that’s assuming they’ve been able to get back on the road to drive to work,’ according to Ketcham.

Meanwhile, he says his film about the legendary boxer Hurricane Carter, who was robbed of his world middleweight title when he was wrongfully convicted of a triple murder and imprisoned for 22 years, is progressing rapidly through script revisions.

Ketcham and his partners at Beacon Pictures and Columbia Pictures are now in preliminary discussions regarding cast and directors, and he has high hopes of getting the film into production by this spring.

He says he is paying close attention to audience reception of In the Name of the Father, a film with similar subject matter that opened in North America earlier this month. If that film does well commercially, says Ketcham, ‘it will show audiences in the u.s. will be very receptive to our film as well.’

Lloyd Simandl, president of Vancouver-based North American Pictures, was counting his lucky air miles after last-minute script revisions forced him to delay his flight to l.a. Now he’s assessing the situation on a day-to-day basis to decide whether it’s worth going back down. There’s not much point, he says, if no one is able to function in their offices.

Still, there were those who were not about to be deterred by things that go bump in the night. At least one agent was still busy dialing for dollars thoughout the aftershocks that rocked l.a.

Simandl says he was surprised, to say the least, when only a few hours after the quake struck, a Hollywood agent was calling up pitching him on a dop. ‘I guess these guys don’t stop for wars, riots, fires or earthquakes.’

Simandl also reports that he heard from the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, host of the annual American Film Market in February. Apparently the seaside hotel was left relatively unscathed and the market will be running again as usual. As for the rest of the hotels in Santa Monica, who knows?

Over at the B.C. Film Commission, Mark DesRochers, manager of production/location services, says scouting definitely eased off during the week of the quake, while phones to b.c. studios were practically ringing off the wall as Americans tried to secure studio space. Everyone is predicting there won’t be much happening in the way of shooting in l.a. for the next little while.