American companies also gleefully benefit, in two ways. Ontario’s “northern” film generosity has soared to $3 billion under North Bay’s MPP, Finance Minister Vic Fedeli, as taxpayer money reimburses movie-making costs that ostensibly foster our home-grown film industry. Northern Ontario Heritage funds thus finance such U.S. Homeland flicks as “High School Brawl,” “American Hangman,” and “Riot Girls.” Second, Americans make movies in Canada for the currency differential, spending 75-cent dollars.
The film industry’s back-stage operations are complex. Few movie fans bother with them, any more than they check out the kitchens of a restaurant serving them a tasty meal. Have you counted the moviegoers lingering in the Capitol or Norwood to watch the film credits?
Instead, the buzz is all about what’s out front – the story, the stars. Its public relations department is as vital to a movie as its casting staff, camera crews, and special effects units. We all know that.
But PR is not confined just to promoting a new release. It’s also deployed wooing municipal “economic development” staffers and Business Improvement Area reps to facilitate providing, essentially for free, fairly elaborate movie sets. “Our movie will pump a lot of money into your community.” If a kicker pitch is still needed: “It will put your town on the map!”
It’s entertaining to watch things being made, and a movie easily surpasses a fresh cement sidewalk, or roads, sewers, and water lines being reengineered for poorer, more costly ones. Besides, that frisson of excitement seeing real movie folk up close working, rather than just vacationing as they normally do in Muskoka, is an uncommon treat.
Seldom is hard cost-benefit analysis conducted. Whether from vanity or naivety, many otherwise responsible locals suspend disbelief. “Muskoka is just so great who wouldn’t want to show us in movies?” Indeed, last summer when both Huntsville and Bracebridge officials bent over to expose their downtown cores as movie sets, many folks gleefully gasped, “We’re going to be in the movies. Isn’t that great for our town?” An otherwise clear-eyed journalist even trotted out the phrase “Tinsel Town” (Hollywood) to portray the action.
Some officials only realized how far they’d been suckered when the Stars and Stripes replaced our red maple leaf flag on a town pole. Others began doubting as landmark store fronts got makeovers and different names. Set designers can make a barren desert, or at least the part within a camera’s frame, into a flowering garden, so it’s easy making red-brick Canadian towns emblematic of America’s heartland.
While money is spent, other costs are incurred. Hard bargains drive down a local hotel’s $129 a night room rate to $79. A caterer is told lunches must be produced for $7. Who is conducting front-line research to determine the real winner with foreign films?
