Don McLean, a 40-plus-year veteran of the commercial production industry, is executive producer and president of The Partners’ Film Company, Toronto.

Most if not all of us in the commercial production industry are inclined to moan about things. We moan when we’re not busy, we moan when we’re too busy (not a problem in 2001) and can’t get quality support people, crews, equipment, etc. We moan when we lose jobs (big time), and when the budgets for production don’t meet the needs of the project and the aspirations of the creative team.

We moan about unrealistic schedules and director availabilities. In general, we moan about just about everything.

2001 has been a big moan year. The number of commercials being produced continues to shrink. The budgets for production are getting tighter. U.S. commercial productions coming to Canada for dollar savings, whether direct work from U.S. agencies or service work from U.S. production companies, has slowed dramatically since Sept. 11. The U.S. agencies, supported by the U.S. unions and guilds (IATSE, DGA, SAG), champion the cause of keeping most commercial work at home, which is completely understandable and appropriate. Some of that work will come back here eventually when the world hopefully gets back to some kind of normalcy and the lure of our dollar will once again attract under-funded U.S. commercial productions. In the meantime, we have no choice but to wait it out.

As a commercial production industry we cannot continue to close our eyes and subsidize under-funded Canadian productions. We suffer from a long-held client belief that we and the agencies are frivolous and have found any number of ways to piss away their advertising dollars. Only a fool would deny that this has happened in the past and occasionally still happens, but they would be amazed to know how many jobs production companies subsidize these days. Up to and including jobs that we not only don’t recover our markup on, but actually put our own money into the production.

All of us realize that at the end of day we have to deliver a satisfactory product or we’ll probably not work for that agency and client for a long while. So, we all suck it up, and close our eyes and spend money that was never in the original budget. It’s called staying in business. Strange as it may seem, we really do care about successfully selling the product, or service, that is being advertised, and we do appreciate how much the cost of advertising on television is and how important positive results are to the client.

If I had three wishes my first would be that we could develop relationships between client, agency and the production company that would eliminate the distrust that has built up over the years and be completely open.

My second wish would be that Canadian directors could get a little more of the action. There are many very talented Canadian men and women who have not been getting their share of the available work, and although that situation has been changing somewhat lately, there is still lots of room for improvement

After a lot of thought I’ve decided that I really don’t have a third wish but just a desire to get past the troubles of 2001 and move as quickly as possible into 2002.

I’m incredibly proud of this Canadian advertising world that I’ve spent the last 44 years of my life stumbling around in and I want it to return as quickly as possible to a time of stability, prosperity and a big dose of humanity.

-www.partnersfilm.com