Vancouver: For a bunch of people whose business is capturing fact and fantasy for the flickering screen, members of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C. have no illusions about the challenges of the Vancouver industry over the short and long term.

Representatives of the newly formed association suggest the West Coast industry is not the free-spirited bonanza it once was, even three years ago – that we face fundamental changes in attitude, the harsh reality of the growing global market and the cold truth that the bloom is long gone off the Vancouver rose.

And action must be taken now, say participants in Playback’s annual roundtable of Vancouver industry professionals, this year including: lawyer Arthur Evrensel of the firm Heenan Blaikie; Peter Leitch, GM and VP at Lions Gate Studios; Muriel Honey, manager of film and special events for the City of Vancouver; Don Cott, local VP of the U.S.-based Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Association; Tom Adair, executive director the BC Council of Film Unions; and Eleanor O’Connor, director of Canadian operations at Paramount Production Support.

Take, for instance, the formation of the MPPIABC, which for years was the ad hoc Community Marketing Group. In the wake of a new provincial government bent on cutting subsidies and Crown assets like The Bridge Studios, the CMG was transformed in April into a non-profit society with the mission to help industry growth and to deal with the ever-present issues of government relations, location angst and cooperation.

So, are atypically slow service production volumes in the first part of 2002 and the precipitous fall of domestic production indication that Vancouver is in trouble?

Arthur Evrensel: It’s constructive to frame the question this way: Is what we are going through a permanent structural change or a temporary cyclical decline? If it’s a permanent change, then this industry is not going to reach the $2 billion the minister (Rick Thorpe of the Ministry of Competition, Science and Enterprise) wants by 2004. My feeling is we are in a permanent structural change. Everyone is going to have to address his or her business paradigm. What their business plan was two years ago is not going to fly today.

Playback: Well, Don, is it structural or cyclical?

Don Cott: Both. There are some cyclical issues. Some of those are driven by the structural problems we have here and some of the issues we face in global competition. Take the political situation down south with the unions. The phrase coined lately is U-Turn Production, which is production scheduled for Canada but where the unions are finding ways to create a u-turn and keep production in the U.S.

Peter Leitch: Part of the permanence is that once Los Angeles discovers that there are other places it can shoot successfully, they continue to go back there. Just like Vancouver was discovered. We’ve got to fight a little harder to see where we have the competitive advantage and look at areas where we can get a bigger piece of the pie, like post-production.

Eleanor O’Connor: Our competition used to be Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. Crews in Sidney, Brisbane, in Prague, Munich, Budapest have now all had opportunities to hone their skills just like they have in Vancouver. What matters is the bottom line. If we’re not going to be competitive, we’re not going to be part of this industry.

Playback: Is it reasonable to think we can spark more double-digit growth?

Muriel Honey: The expectation of double-digit growth is right out the window. If we can sustain what we’ve done in past years, I’d be happy. We deal just with locations and unfortunately some of the stuff, especially lately, that’s come out about [the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users] and [the idea that] everyone should get paid is problematic.

I’m amazed at how supportive neighborhoods are, but the expectation that they can absorb twice as much activity is unrealistic. We’re 44 square miles. Size-wise, location-wise we can’t keep growing this rate.

Leitch: It’s more unusual for us to have maintained double-digit growth for as long as we have.

O’Connor: Five years ago no one felt the need for discussion. Everyone was doing so well. I sat in a meeting two weeks ago in Toronto with three executive producers from three different films and one of them said: ‘What is it about Vancouver? What’s going on there? Word on the street is ‘we just don’t want to go to Vancouver.” I hate to hear that. And I wanted to know why. He said, ‘Everything is too expensive. Everyone has their hand out.’

Honey: This whole issue with the hookers and drug dealers is going to have huge repercussions…

Tom Adair: We’re going to unionize them [laughing]…

Honey: It made the BBC News, CNN… But of more concern are the people in residential neighborhoods who are not used to getting paid, who ask now, ‘Am I supposed to be getting paid when they’re shooting down the block?’

We do a terrible job of communicating with the public the tenuousness of this industry, that it’s just as easily gone. We need a campaign to say to people that these are the benefits of the industry that we are going to lose if we don’t make it worthwhile to come here.

O’Connor: It wasn’t that long ago that a handful of people decided that Toronto was too arrogant for their liking. They simply decided not to send production to that city and Toronto for a couple years hurt very badly. They did the same thing to New York…Boston. This is not about the U.S. versus Canada. It’s all about attitude. I fear Vancouver has that attitude problem and a handful of people might feel Vancouver needs an attitude adjustment.

Adair: We’ve got a real problem when the government thinks the industry is a bunch of whiners. The nature of the [government] support is half-hearted. The message sent by the reorganization of the BC Film Commission and putting The Bridge up for sale is that the government doesn’t care. That’s the message they are getting in Los Angeles. It may fit with one set of criteria, but it doesn’t fit with the criteria of the people you’re trying to sell British Columbia to.

I talked to a producer in town now. He’s worked in Australia and he said that there everyone is [working in] the same direction, right from the top of the national government to the local government. That’s not what they get here. It’s ‘We’ll take our piece of the pie,’ ‘We’ll recover our costs,’ ‘We’re already doing everything we need to do.’ All those views reach down into the crews and up into the studios bringing business here.

Playback: What is stopping us from implementing what we need to keep the business here?

O’Connor: Greed. It’s what is preventing the door from opening to a solution.

Cott: I’ll give you an example. A movie of the week, if you budgeted for here and Toronto, it would be $100,000 less in Toronto.

Honey: What’s the difference?

Cott: It’s a little of everything. Location costs, equipment costs.

Evrensel: One of the things we can do is increase indigenous production and get our fair share [of funding]. We’ve never gotten our fair share. To the extent MPPIA can help with that process, we’ll be useful. At least the indigenous producer who lives here has deep roots and is not as subject to the production in Romania or Budapest or somewhere else. That kind of link to the province will be as useful in the next five years.

Playback: Couldn’t we be talking fad and fashion? Locations do fall in and out of favor.

Evrensel: It’s more than that. In terms of attitude, you have to shift not only the nature of what they think today, but show them what happens in two years if we head down this road. ‘What we have now, it’s going to be 30% less, 40% less. It’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse.’ We have to show [the industry] the worst possible scenario. We’re not there yet. Quite frankly, there is a lot of downturn that can still go on in this province.

O’Connor: For years we were the ecstatic recipients of increasing production levels. The reason work was coming here was because crews were becoming more skilled, the infrastructure was in place, and it was cheaper. And production left Los Angeles. The things we’ve built here are being built in other cities. If we don’t stop it, they will be as skilled or more skilled than we are and the infrastructure will be there as it is here, if not more so.