Not many people know this, but it took a scrappy, mucho-tattooed former nightclub owner from Sault Ste. Marie, ON to get City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon’s long-stalled 2002 directorial debut, off the ground. After seven years of fruitless pursuit in the Hollywood jungle by the veteran thesp, Michael Cerenzie, then a relative newcomer to Hollywood, pulled it together – in just one month.

‘It was one of those things where I think my naiveté helped me a lot,’ says Cerenzie on the phone from his office on the Paramount lot.

Never heard of Cerenzie? You will. With nearly a dozen Hollywood producer credits on his CV in just a handful of years, he just might be Canada’s next big thing we never knew we had. News is he’s coming home real soon, with plans to make a big splash.

Not yet 40, Cerenzie is best known for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, the Sidney Lumet psychological thriller starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei that made a splash at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. (William S. Gilmore, Brian Linse and Paul Parmar are the film’s other producers.)

Cerenzie arrived in Toronto as a teen, where he got into the restaurant/bar business and began an acting career that took him to off-Broadway, where in short order he began producing. That led to TV, which in turn took him to Hollywood in the early part of the decade. Chatty and affable, Cerenzie says the penny dropped when he became a member of The Grand Havana Room, a tony private cigar club in L.A., where he realized that most of the producers around him were just blowing smoke.

‘The whole thing to producing in Hollywood, especially if you’re an outsider, is three things: great material, access to talent, and, the way trends are going, you’re going to have to bring money.’

At that time, he says, there were still a lot of producers with studio deals sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. Cerenzie, meanwhile, knew the talent – in his theater days he had met lots of actors who went on to do well – had confidence in his eye for material, and, although he didn’t have a formal education, believed producing required a skill set, vocabulary and 24/7 work ethic similar to that of owning a night club.

‘I know a lot of financiers who do what I do, and I know a lot of producers who do what I do creatively,’ he says. ‘But I think the future is you have to have multiple skill sets. You either have to have a team with you or you have to have an ability to do more things.’

Prolific as he was in his greenhorn days, today Cerenzie’s a veritable machine. He and partner Christine Peters helm CP Productions, specializing in the adaptation of graphic novels, comic books and video games. They recently inked a deal with Mississippi-based Ghostrider Entertainment to co-finance a slate of 10 $8-million to $20-million horror films in the next three years.

In the meantime, he’s got a long list of films in various stages of production on the go, among them the recently completed Black Water Transit, Tony Kaye’s feature comeback starring Laurence Fishburne; the upcoming My Sexiest Year with Harvey Keitel; Chaos, another Keitel-starrer on which Cerenzie is working with exec producer Martin Scorsese; and Getting Out, the second of a three-picture deal with the 83-year-old Lumet.

Cerenzie is also planning to shoot a number of films in Canada in the near future, and is thinking of opening an office north of the border in the next three to five years. ‘A big thing for me is bringing production back to Canada,’ he says.

Cerenzie is all praise for Canada, which he calls ‘a sleeping giant,’ with its tax incentives and infrastructure – its crews in particular.

‘They have very seasoned crews,’ he says. ‘It’s not like 15 years ago when I was there.’ Indeed, he says that if things had been the way they are now when he was starting out, he might never have left.

The most imminent project heading north is the supernatural thriller Zen in the Art of Slaying Vampires, the first of a trilogy, shooting in Vancouver and Toronto. Then there’s François, which he describes as ‘a cross between Rocky and Cinema Paradiso,’ and which he’s lining up to shoot in Quebec City. And there are a couple others he says he can’t yet discuss.

Asked about whether this is the best time, given the parity of the dollar and concerns about a recession, to be setting his sights on a professional homecoming, he says, ‘I’m a funny cat. The harder it is, the more I like it.’