British Columbia is celebrated as Canada’s principal centre of audiovisual production. Its billion-dollar industry trails behind only California and New York, the most well-established film production sites on the continent. Prior to the mid-1970s, however, British Columbia had little in the way of film production that could properly be called an industry.
This timely book recounts the story of British Columbia’s rapid rise from relative obscurity in the film world to its current status as “Hollywood North.” Mike Gasher positions the industry as a model for commercial film production in the twenty-first century – one strongly shaped by a perception of cinema as a medium, not of culture, but of regional industrial development. Addressing the specific economic and geographic factors that contribute to the province’s success, such as the low Canadian dollar and BC’s proximity to Los Angeles, Gasher also considers the broader implications of the increasingly widespread trend towards location service production on national cinema and cultural production.
Hollywood North is an important book that brings into focus the tension between globalization and localization in the film industry. It will have great appeal to those with an interest in debates on Canadian national cinema, the notion of cinema as industry, and the highly nuanced relationship between cinema and place.
