Few Canadians are as closely tied to the ebb and flow of Americans coming north to shoot movies and TV series as Paul Bronfman.

Bronfman’s Comweb Group, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, supplies soundstages, cameras, dollies and other production equipment to both Canadian and footloose foreign producers on sets nationwide.

Son of late Toronto business giant Edward Bronfman and cousin to Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., Paul Bronfman got his start in the music business during the 1970s.

He then segued into film production services after a pivotal meeting in an office at Astral Bellevue Pathé (now Astral Media) in 1987 with its late president and CEO Harold Greenberg.

Astral had been distributing Stephen J. Cannell’s TV shows in Canada, and the Los Angeles writer/producer of Baretta and The A-Team had invited Greenberg to invest in a proposed Vancouver studio.

‘Harold gave him a definite ‘maybe’ – he’d never say ‘no’ to anyone – and he put me in charge of researching the project on behalf of Astral,’ Bronfman says.

As Greenberg passed on the investment, he gave Bronfman the nod to pursue the studio venture with Cannell on his own.

So the risk-taker rolled.

‘It was a big leap for me, re-mortgaging the house, doing all the things you’d do to start a business at 30,’ Bronfman recollects, as he and wife Judy got North Shore Studios off the ground in 1988.

The next year, the newly established Comweb Group picked up film, TV and theatrical production equipment supplier William F. White International, which this year celebrates its 45th anniversary.

That was followed with the acquisition of Bulloch Entertainment Services (now Entertainment Partners Canada) to supply financial services to the film and TV industry.

Bronfman insists he didn’t set out to build a one-stop shop for film and TV producers. That’s just how it evolved as Comweb faced setbacks in the industry early on.

In 1991, for example, the Bank of Nova Scotia, seeing the Canadian dollar rise against the greenback and North Shore Studios go over budget, threatened to pull the rug out from under Bronfman’s feet.

‘It was touch and go, because the dollar went to 90 cents at the time, and the timing was really bad,’ he remembers.

But on Sept. 20, 1991, at 5:40 p.m. – a nerve-wracking hour etched in his memory – Bronfman had just refinanced his company through Barclays Bank Canada and bounded down to the lobby to give a Bank of Nova Scotia exec eyeing his watch a good-bye cheque.

By the mid-1990s, it was then flow-flow for Comweb.

Bronfman launched Comweb Productions to finance movies and TV projects, including the Canada/Australia copro miniseries Golden Fiddles, the late Peter Simpson’s Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, the CBC comedy Medicine River and the canine cop TV series Katts & Dog.

In 1996, he sold North Shore Studios to Lionsgate, and a year later launched Comweb Film Capital to provide advice on tax-credit funding to local and visiting producers.

‘We had a 70-cent dollar. We couldn’t keep up with demand,’ Bronfman recalls.

William F. White International also began supplying U.S. projects at studios in Los Angeles, North Carolina and New Mexico, and partnered with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond in Sparks Camera & Lighting, a Budapest-based production equipment provider.

That international expansion was prescient, because 9/11 and the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto wreaked havoc on the stream of Hollywood productions coming to Canada.

‘My wife and I were down in Los Angeles, and it was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times: the [World Health Organization] put Toronto on the SARS watch list. I remember returning to Toronto, and people were putting masks on before they got off the plane,’ says Bronfman.

Fast-forward to today, and, despite a still-precarious production sector, Bronfman is back in the studio business as a major investor in Filmport, the Toronto megastudio looking for studio tenants amid the current de facto Screen Actors Guild strike in Los Angeles. He also has a hand in a new studio slated for Calgary.

After two decades of business ups and downs that largely mirror the broader movements of the Canadian dollar and the global entertainment industry, Bronfman is optimistic about the Toronto studio’s long-term future.

‘Filmport will ultimately be successful. [Studios] are not ‘Field of Dreams’ things. If you build it, they might come, and only if it’s the right facility and if you price it accordingly. It will take a while,’ he explains.

What’s more, despite the stronger Canadian dollar and competing tax credits on offer stateside, Bronfman is bullish on the future prospects for the Canadian production sector, post-SAG talks.

He’s also looking forward to Nov. 6, when Canada’s business elite will present him and wife Judy a human relations award at a Canadian Council for Christians and Jews gala in Toronto. Bronfman’s charitable efforts include supporting the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

‘You reach a stage in your life and your career where you want to give back. It’s a big honor. It’s all about racial harmony and celebrating Canada’s diversity,’ he says.