Vancouver: Members of the B.C. Council of Film Unions have voted in favor of a historic master agreement that simplifies negotiations with workers on high-end features and American series.

On May 23, each of the three union members – IATSE Local 891, IATSE Local 669 and Teamsters Local 155 – ratified the agreement that is being heralded as a huge boon to the Vancouver film industry.

Tallies showed 62% of votes cast were in favor of the agreement that was hammered out earlier this spring between Canadian and American producers and the B.C. Council’s union members.

Budgets should rise

Insiders suggest that production budgets will increase $200 million over the next 18 months, enough to create 440 new jobs. Total production budgets for 1995 were $677.5 million.

Film commissioner Pete Mitchell of the B.C. Film Commission calls the deal the most significant development in the Vancouver industry in five years, since the opening of the North Shore Studios. ‘It will take us to the next level of production activity,’ he says.

Mitchell says nine features are currently scouting locations in Vancouver. Six of those qualify under the contract and four have production budgets in excess of $50 million. Last year, at this time, there were only two features scouting and none in the big-budget range.

In all, there were 35 features and 18 series shot in Vancouver in 1995.

Lack of capacity for the new work is the only notable pitfall from the new agreement, says Mitchell.

U.S. majors on hand

The B.C. Council represents 2,300 film workers. Negotiating American producers, meanwhile, represented Disney, Universal Productions Canada, Screen Gems, Warner Bros. Pictures (b.c.), Paramount Pictures Canada, Twentieth Century FOX Canada and Turner Films. Canadian producers were represented by Vancouver’s Crescent Entertainment and Pacific Motion Pictures.

The one-year master agreement covers all features with below-the-line labor costs exceeding $4 million and television series produced by the abc, cbs and nbc networks. Other work in b.c. is exempt from the contract.

On the street level, production manager Casey Grant says she has received more calls for feature work in the past three months than at any other time in her career.

‘To have an agreement the studios know and have approved makes it easy for them to budget Vancouver,’ she says from the production office of Excess Baggage, an ‘off-beat adventure’ feature for Columbia Pictures. ‘It will bring a lot of work here.’