Labour Woes Spell Uncertainty For Vancouver Film Industry

The Latest From the Set

The film industry by definition is about money, celebrity and power. Lately it has also been about strikes, labour unrest and union power plays -- nothing too surprising there. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) labour impasse in Los Angeles has been impacting our film industry here in Vancouver in a big way. It has been a difficult time for many who depend upon the industry for a living or else for sales of lumber, hotel rooms and so on.

What’s it all about? What have the effects been here in Vancouver?

“Now is the winter of our discontent”, declaimed Richard III in Shakespeare’s immortal words. Our winter of industry labour unrest began when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) hit the bricks in November of last year. Who can forget the picketing New York screenwriter on the TV news with his sign reading, “We write, they wrong”?

The issue then for the writers, and now for the actors, is remuneration for the use of product in new media – Internet releases of movies and TV shows for example. After a devastating strike lasting three months, the writers settled in February. Staying with our Shakespearian theme, this was the curtain raiser before the main event, featuring the SAG negotiations. With these we are now (July) well into Act II of the drama.

In terms of the collateral damage inflicted by the WGA strike in Vancouver, a shortage of scripts has resulted in TV series here folding one after another during the winter. As a rule, about 60 per cent of our ‘pie’ has been TV series: think The X Files, Battlestar Galactica, Kyle XY - the list goes on.

The Hollywood actors union scenario is not at all straightforward. Two, often conflicting, unions represent actors. The American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA), the smaller of the two, settled with the producers in early July. It was hoped that the AFTRA settlement would provide a template agreement, some version of which SAG would then also sign. Nope.

Now the producers’ organization, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has suspended talks, and both sides are mainly engaged in public posturing. The SAG strike deadline was June 30th. At the moment there is no strike, no settlement and also there are no negotiations; or (I can’t resist it) there is currently “much ado about nothing”. The word is that the producers are in no hurry to return to the table as they have stockpiled plenty of shows, ‘in the can’, in the period between the end of the WGA strike and now. They figure they can hold out against the actors for quite a while.

Here in Vancouver, there was a flurry of production ahead of the SAG strike deadline. However, some other projects were put on hold in the Spring, pending the hoped-for contract settlement that was to have been forged ahead of the strike deadline – which, you will recall, passed back on June 30th. Is that all clear?

In terms of how this labour strife has affected our Vancouver industry, to say that the year to date has been a mite sluggish is to put it kindly. Barbara Ann Schoemaker is a local line producer and production manager with years in the business. She reports that many local actors and technicians are not working right now.

“Sometimes these days Vancouver feels like the Serengeti, and we are like the fish in a pond there that is slowly evaporating,” she says.

Things in the industry are not uniformly gloomy, however. To riff again on the words of the Bard (this time from Macbeth) “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

Around Town

Farewell Atlantis, a big budget feature film goes to camera this week for Warner Brothers. The project involves massive set construction and is keeping lots of local construction technicians on the hop. Filming of this extravaganza will end in December. Locally known as ‘2012’, it is an end of the world disaster epic with John Cusack and Danny Glover.

Another feature for Warner Brothers, Cats and Dogs 2, is prepping to go to camera in September.

Kyle XY, the long running TV series for Touchstone, wraps filming in two weeks. The sets are going into storage and there is no word yet on whether, or when, it will go back into production. CBS Paramount Television has brought a new series to Vancouver, Harper’s Island, which goes to camera in August. Still in production are some of our town’s standby TV series, including Psyche, L Word and also Smallville, now in its ninth season.

The successful Scooby Doo franchise is also in town once again, with Scooby Doo, the Beginning, a direct-to-video project currently prepping for an August/ September shoot.

So, given how strong some of the headwinds are we have been confronting, we aren’t doing all that badly in Vancouver.