Talk:Hollywood North/Archive 1

Note on some of my changes

Didn't want to re-lengthen this, so various comments that could be in aren't. But as to:

Part of the reason for the linkage between Hollywood and Vancouver is that Vancouver and Los Angeles are sister cities, and they are also only two hours apart. Typically, also, Vancouver productions are L.A.-based, while Toronto has the lion's share of Canadian production.

The point is that Vancouver is effectively an air suburb of Hollywood, which Toronto is not; Toronto's film industry is a world unto itself (as with everything else TO, including its habit of stealing other city's nicknames and industries et al.). Toronto may have coopted "Hollywood North" to the point where it's now necessarily part of the definition; but the reason the term evolved was partly Vancouver's proximity to LA, as well as the MUCH closer ties within the industry. Toronto only started making US-market film and TV after it saw Vancouver making money by doing so; to steal the term is one thing; to pretend to be the Centre of the Universe (when that's obviously Sunset & Vine in Hollywood) is naother. Similarly downplayed the Montrealite backpat that someone just added by, necessarily, mentioning Calgary, Halifax, Winnipeg, Victoria; and Calgary and Victoria are MUCH more part of the idea of Hollywood North, in its original meaning, than Toronto ever will be. PS I'm in the industry here, albeit in a minor way; but because of that aware of the domination/cooptation of TO vs Vancouver in the game.Skookum1 07:30, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

You really think that being "sister cities" is at all relevant in the real world? Aside from that point, some of your other points are valid but should be sourced. The way you write about this issue suggests a strong bias (e.g. your reference to cooptation of the term by Toronto). --Mathew5000 07:44, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

The sister city thing was already there; I just left it; and yeah, it's no more part of the meaning or genesis of Hollywood North than the FilmFest listings were. And I do have a strong bias - towards the truth, and hostile to Toronto's cultural imperialism towards the rest of the country; it's not just Hollywood North which TO has gone and taken and redefined to mean itself (in an older edit of this article it was actually mentioned first, with Vancouver only in passing), it's also another old Vancouver nickname, The Big Smoke, which was ours for years when Toront was simply "Hogtown" (now I know why - for hogging everything, including the national agenda/identity...). So yeah, I'm very POV on talk pages; but I'm also insistent on truth, not popular mythology, on article pages; and while it5 may be popular mythology (created and abetted by Toronto media shills) that now uses "Hollywood North" to mean Toronto's attempt to pretend it's NYC/LA film-wise, and wraps itself in fake glamour over the whole deal, the truth of the matter is that the term, as it was coined and properly used, derives from Vancouver's/BC's film industry operations and culture ONLY (speaking from living through Vancouver's transformations and the emergence of the branch-plant industry here - the real meaning of Hollywood North, plus the fact that this is the secret-second-residence of all kinds of actors and movie moguls...which TO also is not) I know I can't cite experience, and I don't have the time/resources to go over all the old magazines and newspapers to find the cites for what I'm saying; Toronto cites itself endlessly so those cites aren't hard to find; they're just not very real, except in the secondary-meaning sense and, even then, they focus on Toronto, not on all branch-plant productions. The term - at its inception and during its glory days of newness - did NOT refer to the "indigenous" Canadian film industry, not even those in Calgary except when the foothills were used as a location for a Vancouver-based shoot; or it does refer to those other cities but only as a spin-off from the shopping out of Hollywood productions northwards, usually via Vancouver (Legends of the Fall, for instance, where the locations were in Alberta, the offices AIRC were in Vancouver; unlike later Albertan productions where the offices are there); and believe me, it's easier to shoot a street scene that's supposed to be Anytown USA in January in Vancouver than it is in Toronto or Calgary. Our houses even LOOK like California houses (when it has to be California); Toronto saw a good thing happening in one of its colonies and made a good shot at trying to compete us into drydock; including with one-time union rules that made it more difficult for a British Columbian actor to get work over a Torontonian one (now no longer in the rules but still a de facto reality for more-than-five-line principal parts); that's one reason for the "bias" (hostility) you discern in my edit (if I wasn't being clear before I am now). Toronto's also fascinated with glitter and glamour; one trait of the Hollywood North thing in Vancouver is that it was anti-glitter, anti-glamour, and that's one big reason they liked to come here. People didn't fawn over their presence, they left them alone to do their work, and treated them like ordinary people; the media (Toronto-owned media) have changed all that in recent years, with more gossip columns and "celebrity sightings" coverage (what did Hugh Jackman order at Starbucks? Mark Wahlberg buy at The Bay? The Vancouver attitude is "who cares?", but shill media treat it as minor headlines); but all that is antithetical to the working/social environment which helped bring Hollywood North into being. How do I cite all this? Guess I'll write an article somewhere else than Wikipedia and then it can be cited...but finding Canadian media who would publish anything so critical of the Great Mothership City is pretty well futile....Skookum1 08:01, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Interesting. I agree with you about the ridiculous "e-sightings" crap on CTV every night.

What era are you talking about? What years approximately (in your recollection) did the term "Hollywood North" begin to be used in reference to Vancouver? Understandable that you don't have time to go digging in libraries and whatnot to get reliable sources (I don't either) but in case somebody does take it on themselves to find sources for this article in future, it would be helpful if you could narrow down the era.

As for myself, I've heard Vancouver referred to as "Hollywood North", as well as Toronto, but I've never heard the term applied to the Canadian production industry as a whole, or to places like Calgary and Montreal. --Mathew5000 08:32, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Discussion of requested citations

The term has been extended in recent years[citation needed] to include Toronto, Ontario, which is the third-largest production centre.

This is an easy one, but it will require some digging; Hollywood North was first used for Vancouver in the late 1980s, maybe the mid-1980s or before. The term was already current during the first few productions seasons of X-Files and has roots before that; partly because Vancouver was not only a location shoot for many productions (going back to McCabe and Mrs Miller, which helped establish Lions Gate Studios) and That Cold Day In the Park and Carnal Knowledge and Groundstar Conspiracy - all 1970s).

I first heard the term used for Toronto "and the wider Canadian production industry" sometime in the mid-, maybe early 1990s. It should be noted that the spin-offs in Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax were all byproducts of Vancouver's success (Victoria's is instrinsic to the Vancouver production environment, as with X-Files) and it was because of Vancouver's success that Toronto's media/film industry began to bid for the same kind of work, i.e. L.A. money looking for a cheap place to shoot and "fresh locations". Oh, and acquiescent unions. Before that Toronto had been geared around cranking out Canadian-format shows, which is to say Canadianized knock-offs of American formats (e.g. King of Kensington's rehash of All In The Family). There were no institutionalized American-market TV series or MOWs in Toronto, and there weren't the close links between Vancouver casting directors, production people, and technical crews that there were between Vancouver and LA. X-Files was in Vancouver a LONG time before Relic Hunter was in TO, let's put it that way.

And TO/Canada's appropriation/use of the term has a very different context from why it was coined within/about the Vancouver industry. In fact, the tag Hollywood North, come to think of it, might be a Province creation, like "Highway of Death" for Highway 99 (the one to Whistler); a casual phrase used in conversation that a reporter picked up and ran with. But the reasons were the same, as explained above: proximity to LA, a similar West Coast lifestyle/attitude (except for that sunshine/rain thing), lower costs, compliant and skilled crews (because of the commercials production industry), the laid-back attitude towards stardom, a factor which has also made BC/Vancouver a favourite hangout of Hollywood types since the Ratpack hung out at Painter's Lodge and Errol Flynn died in the arms of a 14-year oid in a cabin in Port Coquitlam. Hollywood types were discreetly living and recreating in Vancouver, without any brou-ha-ha, for decades, to the point where many in the industry (including the famous actors mentioned, and many more), were familiar with the place as much as if it were part of their regular ecumene in LA/Hollywood/Beverly Hills. It was this long-standing relationship which gave birth to the branch-plant production industry, because it was only a short flight and they all knew the place well anyway. They were at home here; it was similar to California (and deeply connected historically, if you knew BC's history, which most - nearly all - Canadians don't - and that includes academics and journalists). Altman's films and Groundstar Conspiracy and others just paved the way; the launch had to do with a lot of B-grade films in the 1980s (and many straight-to-videos are still made here; I know - I've auditioned for some of them and even been in a few; if I scratched my head a bit I could name you some directors and actors from that period, which pre-dated the advent of X-Files). I edited a small/start-up industry magazine, Role-Call, such as it was, in 1989; I don't think I still have a copy (we only made it to two, er maybe three issues) but I'm trying to remember if the term H-N appears in it, or was in use right then; seems to me it was earlier, as it was bounced around during Expo '86 as "migrating productions" began to come northward (thanks to the rock-bottom value of the $Can in the 1980s).

and other factors VERY different from the self-gloating use of Hollywood North by the city that otherwise likes to think of itself as The Centre Of The Universe. TO's version of Hollywood North is about the glitz, the excitement, the glamour of "being as sophisticated/glamorous" as LA/NYC - which, of course, it's not. The gee-whiz mentality expressed in Toronto's overblown self-promotion re the Hollywood North tag is opposite to the very reasons the film industry - which disdains overweening pretension (it's OK to be ambitious, just not to talk about it) - liked Vancouver in the first place. But ultimately it boiled down to the air suburb thing - the two-hour flight from Burbank or LAX

BC had a pre-existing American-style flavour to its technical crews, also, because it has been the home to advertising/commercials production since the early 1970s, and Vancouver ad agencies were even then considered in the same league as "Madison Avenue" (though they never bothered branding themselves as "Madison Avenue North"). (note comment above about commercials-production crews being able to provide the US visual standard for commercials; in fact, we helped establish it). One thing's for sure - they didn't get their skills and experience from Central Canadian productions that were shopped out here, as there weren't any (relatively speaking, in contrast to the regular volume from LA; this is other than things like Beachcombers and CBC Toronto's booking-up of all the studio time in the Pacific Broadcast Centre before CBC Vancouver had even a chance to move into the place). Anyway, I repeat - it was because of Vancouver's booming film sector that Toronto decided to bid on the same work and re-gear itself in that direction. I do remember articles about this very subject, although when and in which year I can't say; there were major concerns in the local papers' business sections (and, presumably in ReelWest and other industry communications) that Toronto's expansion to compete in the same market was going to hurt Vancouver. Around the same time there were also weird union struggles that wound up causing the creation of the UBCP (Union of BC Performers), a special ACTRA local in BC, which came into existence because of the high-handed behaviour of the central Canadian office of ACTRA. Hint, hint - these all had to do with Toronto copying what Vancouver was doing, i.e. "being Hollywood North", because Vancouver was already doing it. This is so self-evident if you're from here I'm amazed I even have to explain it....and it's more and more galling when one of those Toronto news shills introduces some article/piece on "Hollywood North", with glitter in their eyes, and the piece doesnt' even mention Vancouver because OF COURSE only Toronto is important and glamorous enough to be Hollywood North. So apparently/obviously it wasn't just the market that Toronto has tried to steal, but the very name itself.

But it can't steal the two-hour commuting time, the same time zone, the similar culture (we're still more Californian than Canadian, despite Canada's best efforts to re-colonize us), the old and very deep ties between Vancouver and LA "film people" (from actors to grips to production types), and it can't steal the origin of the term, which AGAIN I repeat was because the place was already connected to Hollywood; "Hollywood North" described a phenomenon, not created it. And it was once the term was established - and only once it was established - that American productions began to shop around the other Canadian cities and, also, Toronto's inherently acquisitive and envious nature put it on the campaign trail to get a share of the Hollywood North business for itself, even to the point where it scared the hell out of Vancouver's industry which already was known by the term.

So I'd say there's two definitions at work: the original context, which was an industry nickname (and a very casual one at that) for branch-planting in Vancouver (and only Vancouver). The second context is the broader one for the expansion of US-based productions throughout Canada. Toronto's self-definition and self-glamourization and cooptation of the term (as if it was its own exclusively, which is poppycock) is ONLY a subset of the second context. The industry has gone along with Toronto's preening itself; but if you go through old copies of ReelWest and the HollywoodNorth Reporter and newspapers from the 1980s, you'll find the context was Vancouver ONLY and that the tone of the film environment was VERY different from the starstruck gee-whizzing of the Toronto media.....Skookum1 06:56, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Some of the other citations I'm also going to reply to specifically; but I'll also source out some people ("my people will talk to your people") and see who remembers what, as to where to look and what dates etc. Could be even the then-film critic might remember (I know him) or another friend who runs the ticketing system for VIFF (among others). Still boggled that Toronto's rewrite of film-biz history has been so thorough that the obvious fact of the term's origin in Vancouver is even questioned...but that's effective propaganda for you....Skookum1 07:02, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

First, King of Kensington was hardly a knockoff of All in the Family.

OH yes it was.... ;-) Look, point is that a lot of Toronto's genre shows are blatant takes on US concepts; the sitcom, the detective/forensice show, the lawyer show; and often the scripts and characters are obviously derivative. Falcon Beach vs the OC or whatever (as for Whistler and Robson Arms, those are both Toronto-concocted shows with Vancouver settings, using Toronto writers with mostly Toronto actors...).Skookum1 18:36, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Second, the term "recent years" suggests the last four or five years, maybe six at most. But you say Toronto was called Hollywood North "sometime in the mid-, maybe early 1990s", i.e. 10-15 years ago. So I think we should take the phrase "recent years" out of the article. --Mathew5000 12:03, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, "recent years" would be better put in the context of "since" or Later on"...."relatively recent".Skookum1 18:36, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I understand the points you are making, but aren't statements like "it was because of Vancouver's booming film sector that Toronto decided to bid on the same work and re-gear itself in that direction" just someone's opinion?

That would include the business editor of the Vancouver Sun and some major "industry people", then; that debate/era is definitely source-able, but as mentioned I'll need the help of someone who remembers the timeline better; it was a big issue out here, and still is from time to time whenever TO changes its tax incentives or other measures; but when it started it was widely panned as cynical industry-theft, on a par with the shunting of aerospace from Winnipeg to Montreal as part of the pork barrel; since some of the policies involved in the Hollywood North Down East thing were federal, and there was federal doo-wop to help it out (something there's not a lot of for BC, despite Telefilm).Skookum1 18:36, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I assume that others would have a different opinion.

Yeah, those from Toronto, I suppose; and bear in mind that the industry is very political, and key players will not generally say the truth of any given complication - until years later, perhaps, in their memoirs or when the time comes to turn the dagger.

In any event, there were American films being shot in Toronto during the 1980s, for example Adventures in Babysitting (1987), Police Academy (1984) and some of its sequels, Millennium (1989), and Three Men and a Baby (1987). I take your point that the American industry shot films in Vancouver much earlier than that (e.g. Carnal Knowledge and McCabe & Mrs Miller) but didn't the amount of American productions really start to take off at about the same time in both cities? (i.e. late '80s/early '90s) --209.89.123.187 13:31, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, but it was Vancouver that got the hype in the form "Hollywood North" and it was the various aspects of VAncouver, in addition to the production schedule, that earned it the name. It may have been less than a year before the term was borrowed/stolen by T.O. and the rest of the Canadian offshore industry; I'm pretty sure I can get a source from Reelwest or HollywoodNorth Reporter or the union to come up with some dates; harder to ask about the politics....i.e. if someone has to be quoted publicly, by nameSkookum1 18:36, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I've added in the intro that it is a nickname shared by Vancouver and Toronto. If you search on google you will actually get more hits on toronto+hollywood north than Vanocuver+hollywood north. So it makes sense to include Toronto as a co-holder of the nickname. Overall this article is quite poorly cited. --Duhon 19 December 2006 (UTC)

flight time

Have a look at travelocity.com. You will not see any flights from LAX to YVR that take only two hours. The range seems to be from about 2 hours 42 minutes up to 2 hours 57 minutes. Southbound, it can take even longer than that. --Mathew5000 11:43, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Must have to do with taxi-ing timees in busier airports, i.e. waiting for take-off, or circling while waiting for landing priority. I flew the route a number of times, and my Mom (whose family lives in LA and Orange Counties) many, many more, and of course we had cousins up and down all the time. I always remembered it as two hours; but in terms of my travel this was before the major expansions of traffic in and out of Vancouver. It's only something like 1200 miles (1500?) - LA is closer than Winnipeg, for example - and airspeed is about 600-750 isn't it?Skookum1 18:19, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

You are misremembering. The LAX-YVR flight has never been scheduled at two hours. The Boeing 747 has a cruising speed of 650 mph but of course it takes a while to get up to cruising speed and then a while to come back down. And that's just a 747; most commercial aircraft have a cruising speed much less than that, around 500-550 mph. L.A. to Vancouver was never a two-hour flight for scheduled commercial air service. --Mathew5000 20:57, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Disambig. issue

Not that it matters, but there is also a film starring Matthew Modine called "Hollywood North." If there were an article about that movie, then at least a link to it could be provided.