CANADA GOES HOLLYWOOD

The locals talk about which restaurant here is the Spago or the Polo Lounge.

That’s a sure sign of Hollywoodization, but only one of many other sure signs in this busy film production center.

You see it in the new-found wealth--the stunt man who carries a cellular phone with him on his new 30-foot Campion cruiser . . . or the movie-set caterer who tools around in a Mercedes 450 SL . . . or the film production manager who bought a four-bedroom, five-bath town house but has been working so hard that she hasn’t had time to buy towels for all the bathrooms.

You hear it from a bread-truck driver who, halted by a U.S. film company shooting on city streets at 2 a.m., remarks knowingly to a passer-by, “What is this, ‘Night Heat?’ ”

Meanwhile, Canadian actors struggle with their accents--specifically, learning to pronounce the two telltale words out and about . “They say oot and aboot ,” says Peter Katz, producer of “Kay O’Brien,” the recently canceled CBS show that was the first U.S. prime-time network series to be filmed here. Casting agents consistently send scripts to the States to be read and taped by average Joes, then played back for the Canadian cast members to help them get the accents right. (Examples: the Matt Dillon film, “The Arm,” or the recent TV movie “Unnatural Causes”--both set in Chicago.)

Directors likewise scramble to make the scenery a suitable stand-in for the United States--as on the upcoming ABC miniseries “Amerika,” for which they built walls in front of Toronto’s well-planned urban greenery so the scene would look more Midwestern.

“I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as Hollywood North,” says Naish McHugh, film liaison for the city of Toronto. “I think it’s a derogation.” McHugh says that he prefers Toronto to be known as the third busiest film production center in North America, right after Hollywood and New York City.

He is not, however, unfamiliar with the city’s growing glitz game. A recent Sunday found an ascotted McHugh and his wife as brunch guests at the posh Sutton Place Hotel, seated with honeymooning “Amerika” star Cindy Pickett and her husband, actor Lyman Ward. Upstairs on the tony 18th floor, suites were occupied by as diverse a screen-star clientele as Loretta Young and Matt Dillon.

Insists Michael Levine, whom everyone seems to agree is the show-biz attorney here, “The Canadian marketplace does not have that neurotic stylishness” that Los Angeles does. Still, “There is a fascination in this town with glamour, with power, with the industry.” Levine is no exception. When he pulls out a thick black ledger to find the phone number of a famous director, he says, “This book could make somebody a lot of money!”

Six years after a film-making wave inspired by lucrative tax shelters ground to an ignominious halt, Canada is the Hollywood studios’ hottest branch plant. Production centers in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and especially Toronto, charged up by their generous bargains and ready supplies of eager-beaver crews, have made Canada a magnetic north for American producers.

Production in Toronto alone has doubled since 1983, reaching a recent high of about 33 simultaneous film and TV productions, more than half of them American in origin.

Most of the allure is provided by the current monetary exchange rate: $1 U.S. is worth about $1.38 Canadian. Labor is also less expensive, and unions are considered more flexible, offering, for example, to work a Wednesday-through-Sunday work week with no overtime charge. That helps a producer secure locations that might only be available on weekends, thereby eliminating the need for costly set construction.

Producers expect to slice about 40% off the cost of portions of their projects filmed in Canada. Even after factoring in any U.S. shooting plus post-production and so-called above-the-line costs--fees for stars, writers, producers and directors--they typically save about 20% on their total budget.

Or, says Norman Jewison, who will shoot interiors on “Moonstruck” in Toronto starting next month, “they may spend the same money but they’ve got 30% more on the screen.”

Those figures practically glow in the dark for U.S. producers facing escalating costs at home. They’ve brought a record number of features, made-for-TV movies and episodic series across the U.S. northern border this year, dropping a cool $200 million U.S. in Canada’s production centers, accounting for about 75% of the country’s film production revenues.

You know movie production is booming when waiters can rattle off stories about their star clientele as confidently as they recite the plats du jour .

At Beaujolais, said to be the Toronto clone of Spago, waiter Gerald Martin recently recounted this incident:

“Mariel Hemingway was in here and asked for a vegetarian platter, and they kept it on the menu, calling it Vegetables Mariel. Two weeks later Steve Guttenberg came in and asked for it. He’s a vegetarian, I think.”

Has Martin noticed an increase in business around town from all the production going on? Yes, he says. “The spin-off has been terrific.”

Local lawyers like Levine and other deal makers through whose fingers the money flows can be seen power-breakfasting at places like the Park Plaza Hotel or the Courtyard at the Windsor Arms.

Elsewhere around town, dinner hot spots with names like Bistingo and Joe Allen and Bellair are popping up. Guttenberg and some of his “Police Academy 4” co-stars recently occupied a corner booth at the Bamboo club on trendy Queen Street West, right near where Bob Dylan was spotted out for a stroll.

It is the Sutton Place, however, that perhaps best symbolizes Canada’s growing preoccupation with Hollywood.

The hotel regularly sends sales execs to Hollywood to pitch production people on its facilities and negotiate group rates. Since a recent refurbishing, there is an entire floor of $500-a-night suites specifically for the celebrity trade. Two butlers, on call 24 hours a day, reside on the floor.

On a typical weekend at the Sutton, Matt Dillon strolled into Ron Leibman’s suite to watch a ballgame. Leibman, like Loretta Young, was in town to shoot NBC’s “Christmas Eve,” one of the many U.S. TV movies to be shot in Canada. Elsewhere in the hotel were Tom Skerritt and Tommy Lee Jones from “The Arm” and “Benson’s” Robert Guillaume, starring in “John Grin’s Christmas,” which aired Saturday on ABC.

Cher and Nicolas Cage arrive at the Sutton soon for “Moonstruck.”

“I see more of my friends here than I do in L.A.,” says Cindy Pickett, who lived at the Sutton during the “Amerika” shoot.

“I’ve been up here two months in the last seven,” says Leibman, who last April was before the cameras with George Segal for the Toronto filming of “Many Happy Returns.” “When I realized I was going back to Toronto, it hit me personally that there’s a boom here.”

Some call Toronto “a clean New York,” a reference to its combination of urbanity and civility, an unlikely mix in most U.S. metropolises.

Film liaison Naish McHugh calls it “a real model in governmental organization.”

As a result, different sections of the city have retained much of their original and diverse charms, free from the ubiquitous pod malls of Los Angeles or the urban blight of New York or Chicago. Depending on the project, Toronto can stand in for Manhattan (“I’ll Take Manhattan,” “Kay O’Brien”), Chicago (“The Arm,” “Unnatural Causes,” “Amerika”), Pittsburgh and the fictitious Pennsylvania town of Dunston (“Hearts of Fire,” the Bob Dylan film), New Jersey (“Many Happy Returns” TV movie) and any-city U.S.A. (“Police Academy 4” and CBS’ late-night shows, “Adderly” and “Night Heat”).

At 2 o’clock one recent morning, the street signs at the corner of King Street West and Cowan Street a few miles west of downtown read “W. Harrison St.” and “N. Racine Ave”--as in Chicago. With only very minor cosmetic changes, the shops across the street have become Lana’s Silver Comb (“dial MONROE 6-2454”) and Devra Bonded Havana Cigars (“Racing Sheet sold here”).

The intersection is being shot as the Windy City in the mid-1950s for “The Arm,” which stars Matt Dillon as a math whiz who’s a natural at craps.

“In many respects, Toronto of 1986 bears a better resemblance to Chicago of 1957 than Chicago does,” says Don Carmody, who grew up in Montreal and is co-producing with Martin Ransohoff. “Quite frankly, there’s more here than in Chicago in terms of crew, studio space and acting talent.”

Within a three-mile radius of the downtown core, “Christmas Eve” found four key New York settings for its story of an estranged family: A canvas awning transformed the Canada Life Assurance building into Loretta Young’s Park Avenue apartment; a stand of fir trees in Hyde Park became a corner of Central Park; the tourist attraction Casa Loma, an authentic castle, served as the mansion home of Young’s clan, and an ultra-modern Mies van der Rohe skyscraper, office of Toronto Dominion Bank, stood in for the headquarters of the fictitious Kingsley International.

Says executive producer Michael Filerman, perched in a stairway at the Casa Loma set, “Our main reason for going to Toronto was we can’t afford to go to New York.”

The impact here is almost palpable.

“Life has gone from 20 grand a year to 80,” says stunt man Duane McLean, who coordinated the stunts on NBC’s “Christmas Eve” and the “The Arm,” both of which recently shot here. Most of any American shoot’s payroll goes to locals--because Canadian immigration authorities work with the craft unions to restrict entry of any U.S. worker whose duties can be performed by a resident.

The result, says McLean: “We’re working day and night.”

Support services are flourishing, too.

John Cocks was a crew member on the film “Deadly Business” when he complained about the set-side food, and the L.A.-based caterer challenged him to do better. “So I bought their truck,” he recalls. He’s now building two more service trucks and an overnight production kitchen.

Producer and theater-chain mogul Garth Drabinsky recently felt the impact of Hollywood bucks in a big way. MCA, parent company of Universal City Studios, bought a 50% stake in his Cineplex-Odeon company, including the Toronto International Studios sound stages in nearby Kleinburg and Film House, a post-production facility.

Kleinburg is so busy that there was no room for Jewison’s “Moonstruck.” So the production will settle in Toronto’s old industrial district, where vacated warehouses have been converted to makeshift sound stages.

Local actors are seeing cold careers start to sizzle.

Jeff Wincott and Scott Hylands of “Night Heat,” which airs in prime time here and on CBS late-night in the States, are bona-fide stars in their home country after years of kicking around New York and Los Angeles.

Wincott, who plays Det. Giambone, “went on 54 auditions in a matter of five months” in Los Angeles. “It just didn’t click. Now, even my agent in L.A. says, ‘Stay up there.’ ”

Still, film making Hollywood-style often butts head-on with Canada’s. Hence the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the American assistant director who takes his seat only to find a lit cigarette under him, courtesy of the Canadian crew.

It has to do with culture clash. Canada, with its ties to the British Commonwealth, has many crews trained in the British system, a slower-paced, looser method than Hollywood is accustomed to. “The assistant directors here are usually all over the set, nudging here and moving this thing here,” explains Carmody, who also produced “Porky’s.” “They really get into it. Whereas the American a.d. sits by the camera and issues orders, which is a very authoritarian system.”

Meanwhile, U.S. demand for film crews is so great that Toronto’s film-making capacity shows signs of cracking at the seams.

Ian Smith, producer of “Hearts of Fire,” says that the still-young film industry couldn’t handle 33 simultaneous productions. Crews are well-trained but often inexperienced. “It’s taking its toll in the amount of unexpectedness day to day. You might find there’s a truck and the keys have been left behind. It makes life a little more difficult.”

Carmody says that he’s visited his sets “and seen carpenters with pink hair. I know they’re not card-carrying union members.”

Others speak of a phenomenon he calls “location burnout.” It happened to the city’s Cabbage Town section with its quaint refurbished homes, when too many film crews began using it as a shooting location.

At first, neighbors consider location shooting “amusing,” says Wayne Clarkson, chairman of the Ontario Film Development Corp. “A second time it’s an inconvenience and the third time it’s unbearable.”

Canada also gets cold-- mighty cold.

U.S. producers stuck in Toronto haven’t forgotten the sunny weather that drew the movie industry’s founders to Southern California in the first place.

Stephen J. Cannell Productions, shooting new episodes of “Stingray” for NBC, recently moved the series from Calgary to Vancouver because of freezing temperatures. “It was the only way to continue shooting unless we want all our episodes to look like Eskimo shows,” says Michael Dubelko, executive vice president.

Even the more moderate clime of Vancouver, however, brings with it this time of year something Walt Disney Studios executive Gary Barton calls “mizzle.” “It’s halfway between mist and drizzle,” he says. Barton, who is in charge of “The Disney Sunday Movie” on ABC, has sent seven of 19 two-hour TV-movies up north this year, but he recently held one back because dark skies would have made exterior shots “claustrophobic.”

Still, what was once a seasonal industry now continues year-round. “Adderly,” for example, cheats the cold by writing scripts to be shot during the winter with only two days of exterior scenes instead of four.

For all its various guises, Canada often can’t help but look like Canada.

Donald Wrye spent four months last summer shooting “Amerika” here in order to save money. But he found that the essential look of Chicago, the setting for much of his tale’s Soviet-American conflict’s, just isn’t in Toronto’s makeup.

“Chicago is an enormously vital and incredibly exciting and sometimes scary city,” says Wrye, the miniseries’ writer and director. “Toronto is a safe and a controlled and comfortable city. These things show up in the texture of what is possible to shoot.”

Was he satisfied with the “illusion” he created?

“Let’s put it this way,” he says. “There wouldn’t be a film if we didn’t use Toronto. We saved a considerable amount of money on the dollar exchange. That amount of money was the difference between being able to make the film and not being able to make the film. And that becomes a real question for film makers.”

With American production fueling the current boom, Canadians must ask themselves, “How long will it last?”

“What you have here is a service mentality,” says producer Ian Smith. “It makes it much more vulnerable to whimsy.” Canadian film liaisons got a glimpse of that whimsy in recent months when a tax bite by Revenue Canada--the Canadian version of the IRS--scared off a new NBC Perry Mason movie, “The Case of the Lost Love.” Viacom, the producer, opted to shoot in Denver instead of Toronto as originally planned.

Revenue Canada has since backed off from its brief insistence on withholding 15% of all income paid to U.S. actors and other talent working across the border; it now ignores per diems and excludes substantial chunks of U.S.-paid services.

But the incident exposed the shaky ground on which the American boom rests.

On the other hand, the indigenous film-making boom from 1977-80 known as “the Bubble” turned out “for the most part bad films,” says Wayne Clarkson. Lathered up by a 100% tax write-off, doctors, lawyers and accountants became overnight “producers,” typically of films that involved a requisite amount of Canadian talent to qualify for government subsidies.

The films often lacked distribution deals and went unseen. But the Bubble gave Canadian crews the experience they’re putting to use today, notes Cineplex-Odeon’s Drabinsky.

To bolster home-grown production and make Canada more than “just a service industry to foreign producers,” Norman Jewison has been the driving force behind the newly opened Canadian Centre for Advanced Film Studies. Modeled after such institutions as the British Film Institute, Cinematheque Francais and Hollywood’s own American Film Institute, the Toronto-based center starting next fall will train between 12 and 30 young film makers a year. Right now, however, the current influx of American producers shows few signs of abating. “I don’t foresee any upturn in the Canadian dollar,” says Drabinsky. “As long as producers are seeking out more cost-efficient locations for their productions, the boom should continue.”