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Surey’s Film Industry
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 by GetawayBC.com
Douglas Smith chuckled at the memory of blowing things up real good.
Take that house on Bell Road, for instance.
“It was slated for demolition,” Smith explained, “so we rigged it up and blew it to smithereens.”
Now before you start thinking that Smith is some kind of menace to society, it should be pointed out that the reason for all that destruction was so it could be captured on celluloid. And Smith’s involvement had more to do with permits than plastic explosives
The movie in question was Chaos, starring Wesley Snipes, Jason Statham and Ryan Phillippe. For Smith, as the City of Surrey’s manager of filming and special events, it was just one of many projects that kept his office busy during the first half of 2004.
“We’re off to a roaring start this year,” Smith said, adding that revenue was up more than 150 per cent over the same time period the previous year.
Considering that one report showed unionized crewmembers alone made more than $40 million in taxable income in 2003, we’re talking big bucks here.
“Obviously we’re delighted with what’s happening,” Smith said. “But we always take this with a grain of salt because things can drop off quickly. You can be roaring along with three or four major motion pictures back-to-back, then, all of a sudden, it just dries right up. It’s a very unpredictable situation.”
Case in point: Stargate SG-1. The TV series practically claimed Stokes Pit as its home planet, but now construction on the Campbell Heights Industrial Park has forced the production to seek alternative shooting sites.
Sharp-eyed audiences can spot Surrey locales in such big-screen fare as Miracle, Catwoman, I, Robot and Walking Tall. Along with Stargate, other TV series taking advantage of Surrey’s unique look include Smallville (which has put Cloverdale on the map,) Jake 2.0 and the Stephen King miniseries Kingdom Hospital. In the day, The X-Files and Millennium were frequent visitors as well.
It’s no accident that film crews love Surrey. It has everything to do with being welcomed with open arms.
“We’ve developed an attitude within the industry that the Surrey film office is a one-stop shop for filming,” Smith said. “Everything that goes into setting up the movie shoot, you can come to us and we’ll take care of it.”
We’re talking about such items as electrical permits, insurance, site location fees, parking, traffic control and coordinating with the police and fire departments.
“It allows filmmakers to, very seamlessly, get the job done in quick fashion, and without the kinds of hassles that you’re going to get elsewhere,” he said.
Surrey tends to be kinder to a production’s budget than some other municipalities. Smith related how the Catwoman crew was charged $350 a day for parking during filming around Central City. The shoot moved to Vancouver for some scenes and the only place it could find to park was charging nearly $6,000 a day.
The idea, Smith said, is to not let greed interfere in the equation.
“We take every shoot on a case-by-case basis and, at times, we’ll waive fees,” Smith said. “We feel that the critical thing is getting the business in Surrey. The ancillary, offshoot revenues for the community are significant, and we don’t want to let prohibitive fees get in the way of the business.”
It also doesn’t hurt that the scenery here is so diverse.
“It’s a huge area – we’re one of the top 10 cities in Canada in land mass – and there are a lot of locations, a lot of different looks,” Smith said. “We’ve got farms, we’ve got an urban look, we’ve got beach front at Crescent Beach. We’ve got forests and parks and even abandoned places.”
When Smith isn’t schmoozing with location managers, he also has such events as the annual Canada Day Celebrations at the Cloverdale Amphitheatre on his plate.
“We want to lift the event up to the level in keeping with where the community is at in its growth,” he said.
“Surrey is a big city. Within 10 years it’s going to be bigger than Vancouver, with a half-a-million people. So we can’t put on some rinky-dink little country fair. We have to put on a big-time Canada Day.”
Exploding houses. Exploding fireworks. How much excitement can one man possibly endure?
Apparently it’s not all fun and games and Halle Berry in skin-tight leather.
“It’s one of those things where, when you get 10 things done, you’ve got 20 more to do,” Smith sighed. “I’m always really, really busy.”