Scene change

Chad Hershler

On a crisp October afternoon at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in downtown Vancouver, close to 150 delegates from the first-ever Reel Green BC Forum find their seats. After a brief slide show, the B.C. Film Commission’s Gordon Hardwick – mid-40s, goateed, in suit and tie – introduces the keynote speaker. Shelley Billik, vice-president of environmental initiatives at Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.’s California studios, smiles and calmly approaches the podium.

As top gun at one of the first Hollywood-studio environmental departments, Billik, a brunette middle-aged mom from the L.A. suburbs, is at the centre of Hollywood’s green storm. Following the popularity of documentaries on global warming by Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, NBC Universal Inc. launched an environmental education program in tandem with parent company General Electric Co. (GE) in May 2007; that same month, Rupert Murdoch went on record promising that his entire company, News Corp., will be carbon neutral by 2010.

Billik’s environmental initiatives at Warner Bros. preceded GE’s and News Corp.’s by a good 15 years – beginning in 1992 as a one-person recycling crew, and evolving into a multi-faceted department that counts solar-powered studios, sophisticated recycling schemes, carbon audits and a building certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard as a few of its recent accomplishments. But for industry players here in Vancouver, Billik represents far more than her accumulated green wisdom: she represents L.A., and L.A. represents 80 per cent of their business. If 80 per cent of your business is talking green, the thinking goes, it’s best to start learning the language.

The Reel Green BC Forum is the industry’s first attempt at setting up some lessons. An initiative begun by Hardwick and the B.C. Film Commission in early 2006, Reel Green BC has become the communication arm of an ad-hoc environment committee formed within the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C. The MPPIA is a North American first: an industry-wide organization in which the interests of unions, government, businesses and service providers are collectively represented. Its emergence in 2002 came from the realization that B.C. – not just the individual industry players – was competing with locations around the world and that the industry

Increasingly, success also includes sound environmental policy. With American studios now making green policy decisions that affect those with whom they do business, the MPPIA and its environment committee have turned their energy toward lobbying its own members for action. “We have a lot of enthusiasm at the grassroots,” Hardwick tells me on the phone, one week after the forum. “Reel Green is a strategy that acknowledges we have a scattered industry.”

The B.C. industry may be scattered by its diverse and independent workforce, but it is also united by its overall dependence on one big customer. Between 1992 and 2006, money spent on film production in B.C. – including wages, goods, equipment and space rental – grew sixfold, from approximately $200 million to $1.2 billion annually. The billion-dollar gain comes almost entirely from what the B.C. Film Commission officially classifies as “foreign spending” – according to B.C. Film Commissioner Susan Croome, that means American spending, with approximately 98 per cent of foreign spending coming from south of the border.

The influx of American business has earned Vancouver the moniker Hollywood North, but unlike its southern counterpart, Vancouver does business with virtually no deal-makers in town. B.C.’s $1.2-billion film industry employs 20,000 directly and another 10,000 indirectly in large part as a service provider, an outsourcing production centre for the major American studios. But with the Canadian loonie soaring and cheaper production locations springing up across Eastern Europe and Asia, B.C. will soon have to rebrand itself as more than just another cheap production centre. But rebrand itself as what?

Comments