Glittery · 24 September 2002
Other than a brief stretch in Kitsilano and a few months on the East Side (we didn’t quite get along), I lived in Vancouver’s West End for 17 years. I liked it there. You might like it there, too.
Late one night about ten years ago I was coming home over the Burrard Street Bridge; I was feeling, oh, moderately misanthropic, and eager to get home to bed. Swinging around the long curve by the old Coca-Cola building, traffic suddenly came to a dead halt. I was boxed in on four sides. After several minutes tapping the steering wheel and punching buttons on the radio, I got out and saw that cars were held up not because of something terrible like an accident, or merely inconvenient like road repairs: it was a film crew, shooting a scene for Highlander.
And thus began my long and progressively more hostile relationship with Hollywood North
Somehow over the years the filmed entertainment industry managed to install itself everywhere you turned in Vancouver, particularly the West End. Turn around a corner on a walk, and boom, there would be the trucks and trailers, the catering table, the fat cables on the ground, and some mousy PA in a crew bomber, one hand holding a walkie-talkie, the other held up, exhorting you to stop breathing until magic was made. You’d go out to eat and find the restaurant completely overtaken by a wrap party, cocaine jittery youth in ill-fitting affordable glam, looking like they just showed up for the party after a month in the bush and a quick stop at Eaton’s. After a while it seemed that all phone conversations began with some variation on ‘Hi, this is [name], yeah, I’m working on [crap TV movie]’. Talent agencies boomed.
The dominant ’tude, of course, was that a connection to the Industry implied Hollywood once removed, so get the fuck out of my way. Tenuous cred, that, and indeed many of us outside the business couldn’t help but notice that the movies and shows we liked – vehicles for ideas and voices – just weren’t being made in Vancouver. While the Industry was purportedly injecting a billion US into the British Columbia economy every year, what it made there was crap: TV movies, straight-to-video disasters, quickie HBO ‘auteur’ garbage, eye-glazing network series; so many products cynically tailored to licensing agreements and syndication, and, yes, that terrible, horrible, witless, conniving abortion known as The X-Files.
So when asked if I miss Vancouver, the response is that I miss my family and friends, and I miss the Cheese Deluxe with Fries at the Varsity Grill on 10th Avenue, though Mr Bing closed that years ago. I’m kind of glad, however, to be far away from the Industry.
And then this morning, walking with Oliver on our usual route, I was told I had to stop and go back by someone with a crew bomber and walkie-talkie.
A film is being shot in Pompignan. Seems half the population of the village has a part, including the Little Red-Haired Kid, who has an 8 AM call tomorrow.
Flipping around late night TV a couple years ago, I happened upon the Highlander scene shot that night on the Burrard Street Bridge. It was a sword battle, presumably betwixt the forces of good and evil. The villain was that huge bald guy who played Bull on Night Court.
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