to admonish B.C. unions

Vancouver: A virtual who’s who of the b.c. production community gathered here earlier this month for a packed emergency meeting to place a wake-up call to local film unions: if you snooze, you lose.

The concerns of Vancouver producers, suppliers and service businesses over continued labor unrest in the province were heightened following a recent meeting in l.a. between the B.C. and Yukon Council of Film Union representatives and executives from the major Hollywood studios.

At the meeting, held during the American Film Market, execs from Sony, Universal, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox made clear their increasing apprehension over union inflexibility and disputes in Vancouver.

In 1994, Paramount moved its series The Marshall out of the province because of union hassles. What was seen by the American studios as a potential problem is now being labeled a ‘huge problem’ and one that must be dealt with ‘immediately’ if Vancouver wants to continue to service studio productions.

While the studio executives stressed they want to continue to work in b.c., several important issues are making it increasingly difficult. High on the studios’ beef list with Vancouver as a location are:

– The continued battle between actra and the Union of B.C. Performers for jurisdictional control;

– Inflexibility in union contractual negotiations over quad time, turnaround, fringes and staffing provisions; and,

– The constant turf warfare between Teamsters, IATSE Local 891 and rival union acfc that’s forcing studio lawyers, as one exec put it, ‘to learn more about Canadian labor law than they ever cared to know.’

At the l.a. meeting, Don Ramsden, president of IATSE 891, Vancouver’s largest film union, told the studio executives he would sort out the problems with his members and get back to them by September (when the Screen Actors Guild strike is expected to be over).

‘Too late’

To which the Americans’ responded: ‘If you come back to us in September, you won’t have any business, it will be too late.’

‘The single largest factor in all of this is that the toughest issues are often not the monetary issues but the ideology,’ says Ramsden. ‘We are now beginning to see the clash of ideology more than we are seeing the clash of money.’

Ramsden says he and other union representatives are taking the studios’ message back to their membership, ‘but at the end of the day, they are the ones who have to decide whether they want to continue to attract the major studios to Vancouver or draw a line in the sand as to the kind of working conditions they are willing to work under. The majors do not represent the bulk of our work here. They are a big chunk of our work, but not all of it.’

Justis Greene, a veteran production manager/producer who attended the emergency gathering in Vancouver, says local crews are in for a rude awakening.

‘Crews still don’t understand, they think (the slowdown in studio production coming to Vancouver) is just a lull. Despite what union administrators have told their membership, most crews are still not listening,’ says Greene, adding:

‘I think senior members understand the gravity of the situation now that the crew sheets are coming out and none of the top production managers have any work. But the junior ones who’ve never seen the lean times and had to waitress between shows to survive have a false sense of security.’

Among the productions Greene says shopped Vancouver this year but in the end opted to shoot elsewhere because of the labor problems are the $50 million John Badham feature Nick of Time and the $85 million Richard Donner feature Assassins.

‘That’s $135 million right there. I don’t think Vancouver can afford to continue to lose that much production,’ says Greene.

But, he continues, ‘there’s not much we can do to change the situation here as long as the attitude is that we’re invincible. There is such a major attitude adjustment that has to take place first. It basically comes down to greed. People here still feel we have the best technicians and we’re a bargain and they have to come here, but we’re not and they don’t. There’s lots of great crews in other locations.’

Tom Locke, president of Gastown Post, Vancouver’s largest post-production facility and one of the organizers of the emergency meeting, says the threat of lost studio business is very real.

‘If there isn’t production coming here, I can be a major post-production house but it won’t help me any,’ says Locke.

Management of the production industry, he says, is like writing in snow, ‘you have to keep writing in it or the snow just makes it disappear.’

Following the Vancouver meeting, the administrative heads of both actra and the ubcp released a statement to the effect that they had agreed to once again sit down at the bargaining table to try and sort out their long-standing dispute with the aid of industry observers.