The West Coast wave an excerpt from dreaming in the rain: how Vancouver became Hollywood North by Northwest

Twenty years ago, Vancouver didn't exist on any map of the film world, but today is at the heart of two. The city's American-based film industry is powerful enough to inspire loathing and threats from Hollywood, and its Canadian--based film scene is among the most acclaimed and provocative independent filmmaking communities anywhere. Vancouver's The Province movie critic David Spaner's Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, is the story of West Coast Canada's emergence as a movie capital, from its early days as a Hollywood studio backlot to its status as one of North America's busiest production centres for films and television series like The X-Files. It's also home to filmmakers such as John Pozer; Ross Weber, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Bruce Sweeney and others, all of whom remain resolutely independent. This excerpt describes how the West Coast wave of independent filmmakers came about.

The Vancouver of 1963, when Larry Kent gathered together his friends and his cameras [editors note: see the previous article], in some ways barely resembled the city of 1989, when a second University of British Columbia filmmaking group emerged. In between, there had been a quarter-century of cultural upheaval, but Vancouver feature filmmaking, apart from the American-constructed infrastructure that was now in place, was practically as underdeveloped in 1989 as it had been twenty-five years earlier.

"There was a lot of film--industry service television. You know, MacGyver, 21 Jump Street--American--style shows," says John Pozer, who would play a pivotal role in the second UBC group. "There wasn't really anything Canadian to touch on other than My American Cousin and The Grey Fox--two great movies. So, there wasn't a lot of identity or a track record to build on."

Then, in 1989, something remarkable happened at the University of British Columbia. That year, a particularly talented group that would become the heart of the Vancouver independent film scene of the 1990s was enrolled in the TJBC film studies program. The gathering at IJBC and the subsequent production of the student film, The Grocer's Wife, were not only the nuclei for the first Vancouver indie scene, they were crucial to the development of a cross-country Canadian cinema, adding a West Coast Wave to the Canadian film scene that had emerged in Toronto in the mid-i 980s.

The Grocer's Wife would play Cannes. Even more impressive was the lineup of I.JBC film studies students who worked on the movie. The production involved eight future feature directors: Pozer; Bruce Sweeney (Dirty, Last Wedding), boom operator; Lynne Stopkewich (Kissed, Suspicious River), production designer; Mina Shum (Double Happiness, Long Happiness & Prosperity), assistant director and casting director; Ross Weber (No More Monkeys Jumpin' on the Bed). sound; Reg Harkema (A Girl ft a Girl), editor; Gregory Wild (Highway of Heartache) and Kathy Garneau (Tokyo Cowboy), art department. And there were more than directors involved-future cinematographers Greg Middleton (Kissed, Suspicious River) and Brian Pearson (Dark Angel) were camera operators, and future producer Steve Hegyes (Double Happiness, Last Wedding) was a producing consultant.

"John's feature caused a chain reaction," says Sweeney. "His feature was made and everything fell like dominoes. Everyone just got their features out after that. I didn't realize you even could make a feature until after The Grocer's Wife. It didn't cross my mind. I go to LTBC and just happen to meet John and then we made this film. I thought, 'Shit, I could make one.' But I didn't go to school thinking, 'I'm going to make a feature.' That wasn't my goal going in, but it was my goal after the first year."

The film students who met at LTBC in the late 1980s would become a close community who partied together and made movies together and by the middle of the 1990s were making films as smart and tough as any indie scene anywhere.

John Pozer was born in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1956 and moved to Vancouver before starting elementary school. Although he graduated from the Vancouver west side's Prince of Wales high school, he spent much of his youth with relatives in the small towns of B.C.'s Interior. By age nine, Pozer was a member of the Equity actors union. He performed in professional musical theatre productions at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Stanley Park's Theatre Under the Stars and Ottawa's National Arts Centre. After high school, Pozer moved on to UBC, studying photography, sculpture, painting and, finally, film.

The first time Mina Shum applied to UBC, she sent her application ransom-note style, with cut-out letters like the album cover of the Sex Pistols's Anarchy in the U.K "I thought they'd think it was artistic," she says with a laugh. Maybe the IJBC film program wasn't looking for artsy kidnappers--Shum's application was rejected twice. But she would eventually be accepted and become one of the most renowned filmmakers to come out of any Vancouver film program. Shortly after Shum was born in 1965, her family left Hong Kong for Vancouver. At 18, Shum was already immersed in the arts--singing in the punk band Playdoh Republic and attending theatre school--when a screening of Gallpoli turned her toward film. "I saw that and I realized you can make art and film."