Local film industry tops $90M in 2005

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/12/2005 (7520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LET’S face it: Manitoba’s most celebrated local filmmakers were not highly visible in 2005.

Guy Maddin’s short collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, shot in the ruins of the Metropolitan Theatre in March, was shown on the Documentary Channel in late October with a minimum of fanfare.

This fall, Jeremy Torrie (the producer of Cowboys and Indians: The J.J. Harper Story) directed his own low-budget adaptation of the book Just Another Indian. The film, titled Mr. Soul, was made in psycho-thriller mode with an American theatrical audience in mind. And producer Brendon Sawatzky brought indie queen Molly Parker to the Interlake to shoot the under-the-radar dramatic feature Summer Babe in July.

Anticipated indigenous productions from local directors Sean Garrity (Lucid) and Gary Yates (Niagara Motel) were completed in 2005 but won’t see general release until 2006, although they found places for themselves on the film festival circuit. (Both are being sought for Winnipeg’s upcoming FilmExchange Festival in March.)

After a splashy premiere at Venice in 2004, Noam Gonick’s unimpressive and underachieving aboriginal gang melodrama Stryker seemed to disappear from view after a weeklong run at Cinematheque in June.

Yep, in 2005, it was so-called “offshore” movies, produced by American companies, that dominated the Manitoba film industry… with one notable exception.

Those productions helped sustain the Manitoba film industry to the tune of an estimated $90 million in 2005, according to Manitoba Film and Sound chief Carole Vivier. That figure keeps the province in the $100-million range we’ve enjoyed since Shall We Dance shot here in 2003.

Consider these successes:

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Brad Pitt was certainly the biggest A-list actor to work in Winnipeg in 2005, even if he only put in a single day’s work on the $35-million (US) film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

While most of the movie was produced in Alberta, the production’s five-day shoot in Winnipeg in late October demonstrated the sheer transformative power a Hollywood movie studio (in this case, Warner Bros.) can wield over a city. Not the least of that impact is the estimated $2.5 million in economic spinoffs for the shoot, including 2,000 nights booked in Winnipeg hotels for out-of-town cast and crew.

Streets were shut down. Whole buildings were dressed in frontier finery and sidewalks covered with boards to accurately reflect urban life in Kansas and New York circa 1880. More than 70 permits were acquired from the city to facilitate the shoot, almost double the number required for the 60-day shooting period of Shall We Dance in 2003.

While onlookers were relegated to the sidelines, they got to watch this dazzling display, which included glimpses of Pitt himself, nattily attired in a sharply tailored black suit, strolling down Princess Street.

The irony is that this is precisely the kind of spectacle Winnipeg could have witnessed as early as 1993, when the Pitt movie Legends of the Fall scouted the Exchange District of downtown Winnipeg to portray turn-of-the-20th-century Billings, Mont. Notoriously, the production had to move to Vancouver’s Gastown after the producers requested that trees in the Exchange District be cut down to accurately portray a town of that period, and city councillors and local environmental activists went ballistic.

With Brad Pitt’s Jesse James movie, Winnipeg finally got a chance to see what we missed in ’93.

2. Capote

It was filmed here in southern Manitoba in the fall of 2004 on a piddling budget of $7 million US, but upon its release in 2005, Winnipeg finally got something it never had before: an Oscar-worthy offshore production.

The recipient of that Oscar buzz is Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose performance as In Cold Blood author Truman Capote impresses. But the film’s prestige is rubbing off on the province in which it was made, says Kyle Irving of the local film production company Eagle Vision, which is credited as Capote’s Manitoba co-producer.

Indeed, on the strength of Capote, Eagle Vision is now receiving stacks of scripts from American companies seeking Manitoba’s favourable tax credits and local companies that can accommodate their production needs. Given the quality of the work by Hoffman and director Bennett Miller, the movie is now a calling card for the province.

“Winnipeg provided this safe, controlled, isolated environment for them to work their magic,” Irving says.

3. Falcon Beach

Considering Manitoba isn’t known for its long hot summers, it’s deliciously ironic that the province’s most significant indigenous production would be a series set in a summertime beach community.

But Global’s 13-episode series Falcon Beach — Manitoba’s first prime-time, major-network TV series — suggests that youth-oriented mainstream pop entertainment is in our grasp. Indeed, the success of the series — shot on location at Winnipeg Beach and in Winnipeg from June to October — is all the sweeter in that it’s being exported to the U.S. via ABC Family, a cable channel that reaches an awesome 87 million homes.

On the speculative side of things, the possibility also looms that Winnipeg may host yet another sexy series.

HBO, the American cable network that brought you Sex and the City and The Sopranos, shot an hourlong pilot in October for a series titled sexLIFE. Canadian director Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park) directed the story of three couples — one young, one middle-aged and one older — all dealing with intimacy issues. The pilot starred Tim DeKay (Carnivale, Everwood), Ally Walker (Profiler) and Jane Alexander (Kramer Vs. Kramer). Executive producer Gavin Polone also brought Population 436 here.

HBO will soon decide whether the pilot merits a green light for a full season of production, but, alas, just because a pilot shoots in a given city doesn’t necessarily mean the whole series will. So cross the fingers of both hands.

4. Winnipeg: B-Movie Capital

Oscars and Emmys may not be in the cards for Manitoba-lensed projects such as the CBS miniseries Category Seven: The End of the World, or Population 436, starring Fred Durst, or The Plague, a Clive Barker-produced variant of the zombie movie.

But when you attract offshore production with lavish tax breaks, you have to expect the projects we’ll attract will include quick-and-dirty exploitation/horror movies, and, in the case of Category Seven, inexplicably popular cheeseball TV events. And the more we get, the more steady the work for local film crews and actors, says Winnipeg’s Film and Cultural Affairs honcho Kenny Boyce.

“It’s a good thing,” Boyce says. “It’s like the saying goes: Film productions are like in-laws. You never know when they’ll come and how long they’ll stay.”