Politicians hype benefits of Hollywood North
We're good and we're cheap, California moguls told
by Royson James
LOS ANGELES – Even as Americans fume over the loss of film and television business to Canada, Mayor Mel Lastman and Premier Mike Harris last night encouraged Hollywood bigwigs to make matters worse – and make more money doing it.
The two political leaders took turns wooing Hollywood producers and massaging the egos of TV executives at an invitation-only dinner at Consul-General Colin Robertson's home here last night.
The message is familiar, but it didn't stop Lastman from driving it home.
"We have an exchange rate that boosts your dollar's buying power by 50 per cent the moment you cross the border," Lastman said.
"If you stay at the Toronto Sheraton, the rooms are $139 Canadian a night, but you will only pay $92 U.S. Our low Canadian dollar means lower costs for financing. It means lower costs for labour, and it means lower costs for truck and equipment rentals."
Filmmakers have found it impossible to resist that bottom-line allure. The entertainment industry in Southern California lost as many as 18,000 jobs last year because of mergers, technological advances, globalization and deregulation, and there is widespread hand-wringing that other jobs are going abroad. Still, the movie companies travel to Canada because they can pocket more money shooting a film and lose nothing in artistic value.
And faced with protests that Canada is stealing business from the U.S., Lastman and Harris continued to press home Ontario's low-cost advantage by offering even more incentives and removing remaining obstacles.
They told their audience that complaints involving the need to travel to several former municipalities for film permits have been solved; now, the process is centralized in one location.
Concerns about the lack of large, state-of-the-art studio space for blockbuster productions have been addressed. Not one, but two huge Toronto studios have been announced since last February: a retrofit of part of the former Hearn generating station and a proposed new facility of up to 1 million square feet on the port lands.
And production companies can no longer gripe that they must wait two years to get tax credits back from the Ontario government. Harris told them they'll now get 85 per cent of the cash within six weeks of filing a tax return.
"I want you to know that our government will keep doing everything possible to get you to Ontario – and keep you coming back," Harris said.
It's that message that has worried the unions representing Hollywood labourers, stagehands, and those who rent equipment and studio space.
The Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America marked concerns about so-called runaway production in 1999 when they released a study claiming the U.S. lost 20,000 jobs to Canada in 1998 and more than $10 billion in revenues to productions in foreign locales, including Canada.
Rhonda Silverstone, Toronto's film commissioner, says the impact of Toronto on the U.S. movie industry is not nearly as big as Hollywood says.
"We are just the poster child" for their concerns, says Silverstone, who is travelling with the Toronto contingent and will stay on for the industry's trade show in Los Angeles next week.
Although she says Toronto is well-positioned to beat back lobbyists' efforts, Silverstone admits to being "a bit nervous" on the eve of the show.
The last time Lastman came to Tinseltown, in 1998, Toronto was doing $700 million a year in film and television production. Within two years, it peaked at $1.3 billion, before falling back to $1.2 billion last year.
A decade ago, 79 major productions were produced annually in Toronto; now the number is 235. Between 1999 and 2000, the number of U.S. productions grew from 19 to 75. On average, filming permits have jumped 76 per cent a year over the decade. |
