Calendar 1996 was a blockbuster year for Alberta production, but there were no whoops of glee in celebration.

Record volumes for the year hinted at the promise of Alberta’s film and television industry, but that potential was squelched by the collapse of the Alberta Motion Picture Development Corporation, as a result of Premier Ralph Klein’s debt-reduction measures last March.

The bittersweet irony is not lost on the chair of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association: ‘The government turned the tap off, but there was still water in the line,’ says producer Margaret Madirossian.

The lingering effect of the defunct ampdc sparked a best-ever effort for Alberta producers whose projects totaled $50 million in budget value and represented one-third of all production in the province over the year. In all, there were 18 film and television productions with a collective budget value of $150 million, compared to 1995’s tally of $70 million.

With support for the Alberta film industry fallen to the cutting room floor, the projections for 1997 are sobering. The industry will likely be a fraction of last year’s size – totaling, essentially, whatever the renewed Alliance/Alberta Filmworks series North of 60 generates.

‘We are in danger of reverting back to where we were in the late ’70s,’ says Madirossian. ‘It’s possible there will be nothing in Alberta this year. We should at least know what’s coming down the pipeline and we don’t.’

The devolution of Alberta’s film industry is already beginning, she adds.

Labor is moving out. Infrastructure is in jeopardy. Producers are taking their work elsewhere. Momentum is lost.

‘This is the first year that we will have no provincial incentives,’ says Madirossian. ‘This puts producers here at a competitive disadvantage.’

What little work is being forged by Alberta producers is being done with coproducers from provinces with financial support – either government funding or tax credits, or both – and is being taken out of Alberta.

Madirossian, who is developing projects at Edmonton’s Anaid Productions, expects to take her work to Ontario. Calgary producer Nancy Marano is currently shooting her latest feature in Moncton, n.b. Edmonton’s Great North Productions is planning two projects that will end up in Quebec. And Kitchen Party, the latest low-budget feature from Calgary’s Gary Burns (of Suburbanators fame) wrapped recently in Vancouver.

The Craig/Baton injection

As bleak as the situation appears to be in Alberta, all is not lost for the independent, indigenous producer.

Craig Broadcasting, as the successful applicant for new tv signals in Calgary and Edmonton, is dedicating $14 million to secure program licence fees from Alberta filmmakers over its seven-year term.

A secondary source of broadcaster funding is the Baton-Electrohome partnership which will operate civt, the newest call letters in Vancouver and Victoria television. Prairie filmmakers will share in a $24 million production licensing kitty over the next seven years.

ampia, meanwhile, is continuing its aggressive lobbying campaign to convince politicians to support an employment-based tax credit.

‘It has to get bad before government will do anything to make it better,’ says Madirossian, remarking that a provincial election is looming.

Steve West, minister responsible for film, did not return calls.

Reality on the street

Established producers look to last year’s production tallies with bemusement. They say the bulk of the $50 million in domestic production budgets was recorded by the series North of 60 and Nelvana/Great North’s Jake and the Kid, while smaller operators were virtually shut out.

The ampdc collapse ‘sure has hurt people not a part of those big machines,’ says Calgary producer Nancy Marano. ‘It has really hurt me with development funds. I can’t properly develop my projects.’

Immediately affected was her new feature The Secret Life of Algernon, a story about a brain-damaged war veteran who is seduced by a beautiful archaeologist who wants the Egyptian relics buried in his yard. The $2 million-plus project stars John Cullum (Northern Exposure), Carrie Anne Moss (f/x) and Charles Durning (Evening Shade).

‘I tried to put the financing together without provincial money, but couldn’t,’ says Marano. ‘Other funding agencies expect you to access provincial money.’

So she shopped for a coproduction partner, and found Phare’Est Productions in Moncton where the show shoots until March 4. Phare’Est and Film New Brunswick own 20% of the film, the portion of financing that Marano could not raise through Alberta.

‘I would have liked to have stayed in Alberta,’ she explains. ‘I know the locations and the crews. But Moncton has worked out.’

She adds that she’ll take her next project to Moncton if the fit is right.

Marano says the lack of support from the province has her considering relocation. ‘I have to make a living,’ she says. And the governmental shutdown of incentives has her doubting whether she will ever shoot at home again even though the onset of A Channel and other private-sector money promise some relief.

Among the new breed of Alberta producers are those who weren’t weaned on the ampdc.

For example, Grant Harvey, a Calgary producer/director with Midnight Highway Film, pays his bills with commercial and music video production but is working toward a future filled with long-form projects.

Midnight Highway premiered its first feature American Beer at the Vancouver International Film Festival last October. The $45,000 film – about four Canadians on a road trip in the u.s. – was about to sign a distribution deal with Burnaby, b.c.-based TSC Film Distribution at press time.

The successful completion of American Beer, meanwhile, makes it easier for the company to do the preproduction on its next two feature projects: Master of Ceremonies, a 20-something romantic comedy; and Freeze, a sci-fi thriller about post-separation Canada. Both pictures are budgeted at about $1.5 million.

Master of Ceremonies, which Harvey says could go before cameras in the fall, is attracting interest from SuperChannel and will vie for Canada Television and Cable Production Fund money and try to woo distributors met during the selling of American Beer.

Harvey is ambivalent about the loss of the ampdc and its impact on his business, since he never received any money from the government agency.

American Beer, he says, was made with the producers’ own money, with some completion money from Telefilm Canada.

But now that he is getting into the funding game with larger-budget properties, he sees ‘the big hole in Alberta’ financing. ‘We’re even more dependent on broadcasters to provide the funding trigger,’ he says.

Harvey adds that he isn’t interested in moving to provinces that offer better incentives, opting instead to follow the lead of companies like Great North that have ‘made a go of it here.’

The spin-off effects

Colin Minor, vp and gm of Edmonton’s Studio Post – the only post-production facility between Toronto and Vancouver – is equally optimistic of the Prairie spirit.

‘Our producers are pretty tenacious, creative,’ says Minor, referring to the loss of the ampdc. ‘Funding is always a problem, but they always find a way.’

Studio Post – a wic-owned company celebrating its 10th anniversary – has been enjoying up to 30% growth in revenues for the past four years.

Last year’s gross revenues reached $3.5 million, says Minor. The company is full-service, doing everything from lab work to special effects and broadcast masters.

The growth in business, he says, comes from the increase in long-form projects on the prairies, rather than the more volatile commercial production sector.

Long-form production comprises 65% of revenues. Studio Post has worked on the series North of 60, Jake and The Kid and Destiny Ridge (Atlantis/Great North), the miniseries The Lost Daughter (Regina’s Minds Eye/Condor Films, Switzerland), Canadian features One of our Own and Portraits of Innocence and the b.c. animated show Kleo, the Misfit Unicorn (Gordon Stanfield Animation).

Minor says Studio Post – which employs 25 full time and 12 part time – should withstand the full impact of the ampdc closure since producers like Marano who leave the province to shoot their projects return home to do post. He’s also expecting to capture more of the u.s. work that is traveling to Alberta to shoot. ‘That’s our next target,’ says Minor.

‘We’re cementing relations with l.a.’

The marketing challenge

The new business climate for post-ampdc producers in Alberta is creating obstacles for the man charged with promoting the province as a location to foreign producers.

Last year represented a breakthrough in Alberta’s efforts to woo foreign producers, says Murray Ord, the man overseeing the bolstering of Alberta’s location virtues.

A Hollywood producers’ promotional junket to the province in 1995 netted two projects for 1996: the box office flop Wild America and the series Viper, which is up for renewal in March.

And Ord says that past successes – such as the Oscar-winning western Unforgiven and Brad Pitt’s Legends of the Fall saga – showed Hollywood studios that Alberta can handle the big shows. The feature Bookworm – with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin – shot in Alberta in 1996.

As a result, foreign producers working actively in other Canadian jurisdictions are starting to shop Alberta for new locations, he adds. And in a twist, b.c. production is beginning to slop over the border with, for example, Vancouver’s Pacific Motion Pictures shooting the mow Braving Alaska and miniseries In Cold Blood in Calgary last year.

But the momentum is severely affected by the cut in homegrown production.

At press time, there were no runaway projects slated for Alberta this calendar year and, except for North of 60, no indigenous shows. Producers report a dwindling in the number of members in the technical crews as filmmakers leave Alberta to find work elsewhere.

Darren Weber, business agent for IATSE Local 210 in Edmonton, confirms that technical crew members are leaving town. ‘Everybody is scared,’ he says, adding that his local is not growing past its current level of 300 members.

‘They see their livelihoods moving out of the province to b.c. and Saskatchewan. I’ve got one member who has moved to Halifax.’

Weber says the unions are active in counteracting the trends by supporting ampia’s lobbying efforts, government interventions of their own and marketing excursions to Los Angeles.

But Ord’s dream of the private sector building a studio in Calgary to ‘take the industry to the next level’ seems more distant when the work isn’t there.