It has been just under a year since work started at Great Lakes Studios, one of the two giant production sites currently in the works in Toronto. Out at the old R.L. Hearn Power House – a long-dead generating station on the unfashionable end of the lakeshore – dignitaries and partners broke ground on a two-year, $100-million effort to build one of the world’s largest soundstages.

Ten months later, on the same spot of ground, a construction vehicle is smashing cable spools into bits while four guys, co-CEO and co-president Paul Vaughan among them, stand outside and watch.

‘Our wives think we don’t do any work,’ he says, nudging his site supervisor and laughing. ‘We’re gone all day but we come home with tans.’

But phase one, he insists, is done. The plant has been disconnected from the Ontario power grid. Now, the second week of July, begins phase two – removing more than 25,000 tons of generators, steel and equipment from the 27-million-cubic-foot main building. First to go, for some reason, are some wooden cable spools – the kind bachelors use for coffee tables.

The studio is on schedule to open in late 2004, he says, and may make ‘rough space’ available earlier than that, depending on the progress of Toronto’s other mega-build, the so-called Portlands project being backed by the city and the U.K.’s Pinewood Shepperton Studios.

Construction has not begun on Portlands and the $103-million project stalled in April when San Diego’s Sequence Development Group backed out, citing lack of tenancies and financing. Pinewood is still in, along with the Toronto Economic Development Corporation, HOK Architects and Shoot City, but many have doubts the build can go forward.

Reps from the Portlands consortium were not available for interview.

Great Lakes is a joint venture between Vaughan’s investor group Studios of America and The Comweb Group, a consortium of film industry companies headed by Paul Bronfman.

Some doubt that Toronto can draw enough business to support a single giant studio, never mind two. But the theory in both camps is that big facilities will attract bigger productions.

‘Building for the future’

Both shrug off talk of a crowded market and the production slump that is currently bogging down business in Toronto and Ontario. ‘We’re building for the future, not for the present,’ says Vaughan. ‘And so are our clients. They’re thinking ahead more than ever – because the present is so bad – and working that much harder.’

A few clients have already passed through Great Lakes. Chatelaine just did a fashion shoot and Mutant X used the machinery as a backdrop for its season three opener. A Fox TV crew scouted the site earlier in the week.

Clearing out the plant will take nine months, and looks to be a massive undertaking. The main room is astonishingly big, but, even if the lights worked, it is difficult to see more than 10 feet in any direction because it is so completely crammed with mountainous turbines and rotted, rusted God-knows-what. It’s also about as clean as the underbelly of a car. The plant was shut down in 1982.

Vaughan leads me into the gloom, up and down a bewildering Escher print of catwalks, pointing out features with a flashlight and rattling off specs. See those cranes? They can lift 150 tons. The ceiling peaks at 130 feet, high enough for a falling stuntman to reach terminal velocity and still land safely into a crash pad. The 350,000 square feet is almost eight times that of Pinewood’s famed ‘007’ stage. Production offices will go over there, conventional and high-capacity rail lines run through here.

We keep going, deeper into the dark, and Vaughan remarks that some of the machinery might be kept, if it’s cost effective, to be used as scenery.

‘We’re under some pressure to keep this one,’ he says, and opens a door to a ruined control room. Indeed, it already looks exactly like a movie set. The walls, institutional green, are lined with ’50s-era levers, dials and gauges, some of which have been smashed or blown out, as if by some disaster. Chairs are overturned. All it needs are some bullet holes, maybe a splash of fake blood.

‘Not bad, eh?’ he beams. ‘Just like The China Syndrome.’

-www.greatlakesstudios.com