(Photo: Simon Carr/Toronto Standard Flickr Pool) There’s something kind of pleasantly whorish about watching your city get sold, right in front of you. Maybe not when it happens on the near-daily, when Mayor Richie Rich slashes wildly at whatever’s around–Trees! Art! Books!–for no plausible reason. But sitting in on a tour of Toronto for the purpose of convincing film producers, most from Europe but some from here, to use the city–use it, turn it inside out–as a location for their movies, it feels sort of good. I’ve lived in Toronto for exactly eleven years plus one week and minus three, six, or however many months elsewhere every couple years, usually California, where everybody’s local bodega has very likely been cast in something. In the fall of my first year in town, shitty TV shows were constantly being shot around my dorm at Victoria College (remember Relic Hunter?) and TIFF happened across the street in Yorkville and both served only to irritate me; the second city–or third, or fourth–was clearly a stand-in for someone else’s drama. Then, ten or eleven years pass, and at some point during Toronto’s cultural adolescence, TIFF became truly international and Toronto started to play itself, sometimes. For every deeply and specifically Toronto-ish Take This Waltz, the newest Sarah Polley film and a hot choice at the festival (my review: dismally twee couple that doesn’t talk to each other in adult voices gets what’s coming to them; great shots of College and Queen and the 401; Sarah Silverman sounds like she’s from here), there’s a million (unofficially) more that stand-in for somewhere else, as they should: Toronto’s music, and fashion, and literature, and surely other things I don’t know about, have earned the “world class” stuff that everyone likes to talk big about, but our reputation is mostly the same. Really: Europeans have been my obsession this TIFF (especially oooooone in particular), and none of them are as feelingsy about this city as we have been, are, would be, about theirs. Apparently, it’s easy to shoot here. It’s “too easy” to make movies in Toronto, a European producer tells me. “Too easy.” I’d asked him if Toronto was an appealing place to film: I know that the city is as accessibly lovely and availably bland as a teenage model; I know where and how often the city appears in movies – Total Recall has been filming near my office, so I’m basically an expert – but is it good business? “Too easy.” I don’t even get it, but he’s kind of spooky so I drop it. Promoting Toronto for this very purpose is why he and a variety of other producers, whoever wanted to go from a group of 12 European and 12 Canadians involved in a TIFF-related project called the Producers Lab Toronto, plus me and two other journalists and some people from the Ontario Media Development Corporation, our hosts and who you may recognize from the thank-yous before the boring/medium-OK Take This Waltz, are on a London-style tour bus–yes, red; yes, embarrassing–being driven around the city on a soft, soft sell of Toronto highlights. The European producers have all attended a similar program in Cannes; the project intends to hook them up for financial and physical and creative collaborations. Also, drinking, oui? It starts badly. On the upper deck of the bus, at one in the afternoon on a hot Saturday, I feel myself burning. Sunblock is passed around, but reporters shouldn’t be grabby even when their delicate nose-skin is at risk, so I stay in my seat, overwhelmed by my TIFF press pass, my OMDC media lanyard, an americano and the OMDC-provided boxed lunch from Acqua Fine Foods, which I immediately drop, step on, and kick forward so that a chickpea salad, a plum and a Nanaimo bar (Canada!) explode under the bench seats. And we’re off. The tour goes west from the TIFF Bell Lightbox. There are two guides, one for Toronto whateversies like controversial pronunciations of “Spadina” and translations of “Toronto”, and that this is one of the few North American cities–or maybe, just, cities? I was bored–that uses streetcars, the other guide explains what was filmed where. Turning east onto Queen Street, the tour guide says that Queen West was listed in the top 25 neighbourhoods in the New York Observer–maybe?–but especially from a second story perspective Queen Street from Spadina to McCaul is nobody’s top anything. It’s when the bus moves toward OCAD, and the building nicknamed “the flying Dalmatian”–is it?–that the producers look, almost uniformly and almost uniformly in some kind of awe, at the black-and-white box poked by mammoth pencil crayons. This, from the second floor, is cool, but diminished for the European contingent when the AGO is explained as the second-largest art gallery in Canada. “It’s free on Wednesdays after six!” the guide says. “It should be free all the time,” says an Irish producer behind me. At my request, Daniel, a producer who is Romanian and cute and sitting beside me on the bus, gingerly unwraps the Nanaimo bar, takes a bite, and either wipes his mouth or spits it out (Europe!) because it’s “too sweet.” Then, he opens a film industry magazine and puts it on his head like a hat. From so many feet in the air, Chinatown is without the inebriating sensory assault of its sidewalks and those gnarly pigs in the window. The guide mentions that RED was filmed here, but from this high it looks just and overwhelmingly shitty. Turning north on Augusta, the tour again recovers, this time courtesy of Kensington Market. A Rastafarian guy holds court on a lawn, to the perfect effect of a central casting ringer. It/he is a sellable element, after all: on the City of Toronto’s website that lists incentives for international productions to film in Toronto, “multicultural acting pool” is mentioned. So too is the fact that Toronto “has doubled for New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago and other U.S. locales as well as international cities such as Paris, London, Tehran and exotic locations such as Morocco and Saigon [as if!].” I tell somebody that Road House was filmed at the El Mocambo (it wasn’t); driving down University in between the hospitals, Toronto has its first real moment–yes, it could be Chicago; yes, it could be New York–that kind of makes it for the producers, most of whom are as randomly interested as you would be on a direct-sunlight bus tour three days into the most insane week of the year; the tour guide says that the Royal York Hotel on Front Street is scouted by most film crews that pass through; that it was built to resemble a throne commands more audible interest. The tour ends with a cold glass of white wine in the Distillery District, but the real last stop (the martini shot!) (Look, I haven’t slept very much this week) is Pinewood Studios, beside the lake in the east end, where we disembark and drink bottles of water and tour around the Total Recall set. “No pictures, obviously” says Pinewood guide to our group, after I ask if I can shoot the costume room with my iPhone. C’mon, man. This part of the tour isn’t so much “Toronto” as it is evidence of what Toronto has become, what Toronto can do. Total Recall is a huge movie, with a $200 million budget and actual, international movie stars, and easily makes the argument about Toronto’s range, maybe more than Take This Waltz, which, for all of its inherent Toronto-ness could, to the untrained eye, just as easily be New York, could be Chicago, could really be anywhere. Kate Carraway writes the ‘Thirtyish’ column for the Grid and the ‘Girl News’ column for Vice. This is her first item for the Toronto Standard. __ Brought to you by the Alliance Film, Abduction, in theatres September 23rd. 
