Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest (review)

Canadian cinema has always existed in the shadow of Hollywood. In a situation in which Hollywood treats Canada as part of its North American domestic market and largely controls the distribution system, Canadian films (outside Quebec) rarely appear on our local cinema screens. The advent of video and satellite television has made the work of Canadian filmmakers more accessible, but most Canadians remain unaware of, and indifferent to, the extent and variety of mainly low-budget films produced in Canada every year. In the last twenty years, however, the Canadian film industry has experienced a phenomenal growth with the emergence of Hollywood North - 'runaway' productions made for Hollywood or US television in Canadian cities that provide tax incentives and modern studio facilities. As a result of this development, Canadian filmmakers must now coexist with Hollywood on their own soil and compete with their much wealthier visitors for services and public attention.

Because of its location, British Columbia quickly became one of the major sites of Hollywood North, and two recent books have explored the effects of this development. David Spaner's lively account of the Vancouver film scene follows hard on the heels of Mike Gasher's Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia2002). Whereas Gasher offered a thoughtful academic exploration of the social, cultural, and economic processes that created the present situation, Spaner is a journalist, a film critic for the Vancouver Province, whose book consists mainly of anecdotes about and interviews with the people involved. In this way, his book is an ideal companion to Gasher's more theoretical and probing work, and it pays much more attention to the work of local filmmakers.

The organization of the book reflects its subject matter, as it moves back and forth between the Hollywood connection and the Canadian 'indies.' A chapter devoted to the scandal surrounding the death of Errol Flynn in Vancouver in 1959 is followed by an account of how Larry Kent, a South African student at UBC, managed to make a series of low-budget films in the early 1960s. Many chapters include sidebars listing some prominent - and not-so-prominent - British Columbians who moved south to work in the American industry, but the author's sympathies are clearly with those who remained and helped to create a film community that is now producing some of Canada's most accomplished movies.

The most interesting chapters are those dealing with 'The Sweeney Group,' a close-knit community of filmmakers whose best work appears in three films directed by Bruce Sweeney - Live Bait (1995), Dirty (1997), Last Wedding (2001) - and with the collaboration between director Lynne Stopkevich and actor Molly Parker on Kissed (1996) and Suspicious River (2000). If these filmmakers must compete with Hollywood North, there is also some resentment that their counterparts in Ontario and Quebec seem to get more attention and support, and Spaner describes an alleged incident at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, at which Last Wedding was selected for the opening night gala, when Bruce Sweeney felt that he was snubbed by Atom Egoyan. Spaner then notes the fascinating irony that 'the filmmaker who is the heart and soul of the Vancouver scene grew up in Ontario (Sweeney is from Sarnia) and the filmmaker who is the heart and soul of the Toronto scene grew up in BC (Egoyan is from Victoria).'

The contradictions between the service industry and domestic production are, in fact, far more clear-cut than those within the fragile yet thriving entity known as Canadian cinema. However, most Canadian filmmakers would share Bruce Sweeney's view that 'for me, a film has a lot more truthfulness and validity if it's actually set somewhere,' as opposed to the Hollywood North films in which BC becomes an anonymous setting or passes for somewhere else. Spaner's book, while it makes only passing reference to the films themselves, is itself a testimony to the way in which attention to local detail...