Vancouver: Blame dive-bombing terrorists, stingy advertisers, runaway production lobbyists and reality television if you want, but the bloom is off the dogwood tree in Vancouver, no matter whether you toil in service or domestic production.

Vancouver is in a deepening declining trend, exacerbated by aggressive global competition for what little U.S. business is to be had. B.C.-made production, cut at the knees by national and provincial funding woes, has dwindled to a quarter of its volume of just a few years ago, with little chance of rescue without a lot of political will.

For the seventh annual Production in Vancouver Roundtable, Playback brought together production managers and line producers – people on the front lines who understand what brings business here. They are the first hired and the first to take the heat when things go wrong.

Warren Carr is a line producer with a long track record in big

U.S. features like Connie and Carla for Spyglass Entertainment and Universal. Gigi Boyd is the production manager at Cold Squad and is executive producing the teen snowboarding series Whistler 4+1, funding gods willing. Simon Abbott most recently production managed Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl remake. And Rose Lam, Showtime’s woman in B.C., is line producing The L Word, the latest series from the U.S. broadcaster, one of Vancouver’s keenest, long-term supporters.

They say Vancouver is no longer Hollywood’s darling because we are not the cheapest or hungriest. It costs $100,000 more to shoot an MOW in Vancouver than Toronto, according to an informal study done for

the Motion Picture Producers Industry Association of B.C.

We suffer from union tiffs that annoy the commissioning U.S. partners enough to look elsewhere: Like, who wants to go camping in a place full of bugs? In fact, depending on whom you ask, U.S. networks and studios are downright ticked at Vancouver for being smug and entitled.

Playback: What’s the prognosis, doctors?

Warren Carr: Foreign production is down in terms of numbers of productions. Features are up because we are fortunate enough to have huge facilities and the movies that have been here are huge: I, Robot, Chronicles of Riddick, Paycheck.

Simon Abbott: Television has flat-lined.

Carr: Television is having a tough time worldwide because of reality-based shows. And the Canadian dollar. On my show [Connie and Carla], between the times we locked our budget and the time we finished, we lost $491,000 in exchange.

Abbott: Generally, foreign sales are a big part of this [television downturn]. They have dropped significantly. There is not a lot of confidence out there.

Rose Lam: We’re never going to see the levels of production we did in the peak.

Playback: What about the Canadian side, need we ask?

Gigi Boyd: Things are pretty well documented. There was money, but not as much as needed or wanted. Some companies and a lot of projects went down because of the cuts to the Canadian Television Fund. For Whistler 4+1, because of the lack of equity from Canada, we have to try and make a presale, and they are very difficult to close.

Carr: The rest of the world is awake now. New Zealand has huge

incentives. Australia has incentives and is building multiple studios, some rivaling what we have here. They are all getting what that U.S. dollar means to the economy.

People are shooting Romania for California, for God sakes. Worldwide, we are no longer in the position of being this cool, inexpensive place to go. We’re the bad guys in respects to runaway production, but we’re suffering, too. The runaways are running away from us.

Playback: Is there a downward pressure on rates?

Boyd: We’re in a lucky position. Because we are so Canadian, people will really come off their rates for us. They even did me the same favor on an MOW I did that wasn’t Canadian because they knew it was low budget. I find the same with crew.

Carr: Recently, the U.S. producers negotiated a wage freeze for the new three-year agreement. And in the second year, a lot of the keys and

seconds are trying to compensate by getting more of an over-scale or

bigger kit rental. People don’t know their own contract. We got a crew. And we got people down to the 2002 and lower rates.

Abbott: Vancouver is recognized as the most expensive place to shoot in Canada. L.A. producers love coming here, and they will definitely come here when it’s snowing in Toronto. But a study compared Vancouver and Toronto, and overall, on an MOW budget, we cost about US$100,000 more.

Abbott: I found the camera rates a lot lower in Toronto – $5 to $6 an hour. And also the technician rates – $3 to $5 an hour lower in Toronto. And that’s because they have competition there between IATSE and NABET. There is no competition here. ACFC isn’t competing for the big shows because they are locked out [by the BC Council of Film Union’s exclusive arrangement for IATSE Local 891 and Teamsters Local 155].

Lam: My issue continues to be Teamsters… One guy will back into something and the only recourse we have is saying, ‘We don’t want him back.’ I would love to see all the positions picked.

Carr: We’re the only jurisdiction in North America in a dispatch situation.

Lam: By and large, our camera and film technicians are very good, but to be force-fed certain people is not productive. You can assume a series, for instance, will be grieved two or three times, and 80% of the time, the grievances don’t go very far. You deal with it before it gets to the point where it starts costing you legal fees.

Carr: The union is trying to implement on the floor what is not in the contract. I brought with me today an Aug. 19 ruling [by the B.C. Labour Relations Board] to the Teamsters, who had appealed a decision allowing producers, at their discretion, to decide how to drive foreign cast and directors – whether they let them drive themselves, let their assistants drive them or Teamsters.

The purpose of the Labour Relations Board and the Code is to keep a stable, harmonious environment in B.C. to promote business. And [the arbiter] said this isn’t happening. She writes: ‘If B.C. does not provide a competitive and attractive environment for producers, those productions will be done elsewhere in Canada, the U.S. and abroad. It is clear that it is ultimately not in… the Province’s interest to present a labor relations environment fraught with the kinds of difficulties which have come to light in this case. The difficulties reflect an anomaly that has long been tolerated. This question [is] whether it can continue to be tolerated, particularly in respect to the competitive pressures of the film industry.’

Playback: Rose, will Showtime’s commitment to Vancouver continue?

Lam: It’s too soon for anyone to say. My guess is that is going to change. It’s still cheaper for them to shoot in Canada, once you factor in the labor and the tax credit and the currency. On our show, we shot in L.A. for three days and I couldn’t believe how expensive it is. It was double. That really benefits us. Still, we’ve had our share of labor issues. And on the ground level, it doesn’t seem to me that we are dealing with a labor pool that is worried.

Abbott: Not worried and not educated.

Lam: We all should be worried, because the work is definitely going away.

Carr: Another issue is the quality of production management that exists here.

Playback: Are PM’s in Vancouver costing producers money?

Lam: Sometimes yes and sometimes they save you a ton of money. Overall, [PMs] need to get in there and negotiate and say, ‘That’s not acceptable, we’re not going to pay that, what about this?’

I wish there were more standards. Maybe it is an issue of exchanging information, but I find that some PMs, in particular some of the junior ones, instead of picking up the phone and saying [to someone more experienced], ‘I don’t know, but I’d like to know,’ they’ll make decisions. Small mistakes are being made on productions and now it becomes the norm, or precedent. It seems that we are creating the environment about what’s the easiest thing to do, not what’s the most cost-effective.

Abbott: The DGC is proposing a PM mentorship program, which will be coming into effect, hopefully later this year or next year.

Boyd: It’s very difficult to instill in people the fact that you don’t have much money when you see a lot of frivolous expenditures from above-the-line. It’s difficult on crews and people who are in charge of their money to then see something they perceive as absolute waste.

Lam: But producing a film is not a democracy. Let’s face it, stars and producers and directors, they are above-the-line and the studios and networks are prepared to give them much greater latitude than us with production money. With anybody coming to me and saying, ‘You’re squeezing me $4,000 or $5,000, but those guys are going out for dinner, and I heard through the grapevine they ordered 10 bottles of wine for $10,000…’ It’s not my place to judge, nor is it his.

Playback: Can we rebound?

Carr: If the currency drops mildly below US$0.70 and if the labor

climate gets some degree of stability, and if in future contract negotiations we get to expand the Zone some more so that more of the Lower Mainland is available without travel costs and if the labor tax credits stay in place, we will probably see a similar level of production we are seeing last year and this year. Personally, I don’t see a big boom coming.

Boyd: On the indigenous side, Vancouver has to stay classed as a region and eligible for the bonuses from the funding system. Otherwise, we will not be able to maintain the small amount of indigenous production we have now.

Abbott: What I would like to see is the [BC Council of Film Unions] come up with a TV rate that is comparable to Toronto’s, otherwise it’s going to be pretty lean.

Lam: We will have to work really hard to maintain this level of production in five years. We have to be attractive on many fronts: labor, location,

currency. If those aren’t in place, we’ll lose a little more work each year. We probably have too many people in the industry right now. Not by 30%. More like 5% or 10%.

Playback: Are people getting out of the business?

Boyd: Yes. Absolutely,

Carr: I would if I could

Boyd: There are a lot of rank and file who didn’t make it through the last downturn. They can’t afford to do it again.

Carr: Vancouver is quite different than Toronto in that there are

50% to 70% more individual entrepreneurships here. More grips and gaffers with their own packages. More construction coordinators who can outfit a shop for a 100 people. If production falls, then sooner or later this infrastructure is going to say ‘Jeez, I could rent my warehouse to

somebody else. I could sell my land and build condos.’