Hey, what’s big old Orson Welles doing in my little hometown in Canada?

Georgetown, the burg in southern Ontario where I grew up, used to have a knack for getting itself into Hollywood movies. I was never quite sure why, but my hometown didn’t really seem the casting-couch-slut type, so it must have been the scenery. Or something else its citizens were unable to spot as readily as the filmmakers.
We had Richard Burton and Orson Welles there, and Robert Duvall. Jane Fonda was just down the road. Plus Michael Douglas and the Sesame Street muppets. That’s not bad. For us, I mean – God knows what they thought.

I’m guessing that someone from the first American film crew to shoot in Georgetown went back to Tinseltown and dutifully entered the location details in some cinematic database. Then future directors and production designers, knowing it was always cheaper to shoot in Canada, looked up “small town in countryside setting, with classic early-20th-century main street that’s viewable from up a hill”, and a-bing-and-a-bang, there was a photo of and directions to Georgetown.

Tax incentives still make Canada a preferred place to expose American celluloid, though of course among the hundreds of big-name flicks made north of the 49th parallel, most are done in British Columbia, which is due north of California (drive to Seattle, keep going ’til you see Mounties). But if they come to Ontario, Ontario builds them a film set.

As a newspaper reporter in Georgetown, I once asked one of the Yankee directors, “Hey, what are you doing here, eh?” (We loved to put on the hoser accent for them, eh?) He listed the appealing bits: (a) the way you could look all the way down Main Street from a little hill was way cool, complete with church towers, and (b) there were some very photogenic things in the rural outskirts.

I thought I was going to hear a farmer’s-daughter joke, but he meant stuff like the Barber Dam, which is a decrepit piece of 19th-century architecture built to power a paper mill that was supposed to make Georgetown rich but instead made it very polluted and landed it in debt, a suitable fate for a community founded on Credit – that is, the Credit River.

Actually I have a sneaking suspicion that Norman Jewison is behind it all. I could call it the “Jewison Conspiracy” but the joke’s not worth the likely furor. I think he might have had something to do with the first location shoot in Georgetown, when it was used in 1973 as the backdrop for an episode of the Canadian television series “Quentin Durgens, MP”, starring Gordon Pinsent.

Jewison still lives not too far away actually, so it was a decent commute for him when he returned a decade later to film “Agnes of God”, although that was in Rockwood, a village about 10 kilometres up the highway from G’town.

Considering it’s full of nuns, “Agnes of God” is an edgy lizard of a film that has Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, plus a mesmerising Meg Tilly in the title role. She was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar and Bancroft for the Best. The main film set was the historic Rockwood Academy, which was a gallery last time I looked, for the resident sculptor Josef Drenters.

In ‘76, several spots in downtown Georgetown, including the Main Street premises of the newspaper I would later join, were used for “Equus”, starring the magnificent Richard Burton and the tubby Colin Blakely and directed by the great Milos Forman. I don’t believe we supplied the barn for those freaky animal humbuggery scenes featuring Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter and some studly nag, but Sir Dick was at his charming best chatting up the staff of The Herald between takes.

In this photograph from the archives of the newspaper, he’s saying, “BeHOLD these grrrimm WALLLS that tell such fanciful tales in the fetid INK of thy prrrinting mechanisms!” and Dave Hastings, the head printer, is saying, “Huh?”

Burton, who was between Elizabeth Taylors at the time, won the Best Actor Golden Globe for “Equus” and Firth the Best Supporting Globe, but neither got past the nomination stage at the Oscars. He died in 1984, and the Herald not long after that. Their souls must have been intertwined, as they say in film scripts.

Then, in 1978, who should come jogging across the paper mill dam but a young Michael Douglas, as the fleet-of-foot star of Steven Stern’s “Running”. Susan Anspach co-starred. Part of the movie’s marathon action was shot on Main Street, and on adjacent residential streets when the mob of challengers thinned out.

On the Internet Movie Database website, a punter insists unconvincingly that it’s the latter shots, with kids flocking after Douglas, that inspired a similar sequence in “Forrest Gump”. Surely that’s a bit of a cinematic cliche, though, and one that was played out again on those same quieter streets of Georgetown, for another “running picture” — 1983’s “The Terry Fox Story”.

It seems a shame to call this great little piece of work a mere “TV movie”. It was, in fact, history’s first made-for-cable film, but it starred Robert Duvall and was, after all, the true tale of a truly great Canadian hero, the cancer-fighting cross-country runner who’d hopped through Georgetown three summers earlier and had a considerably bigger impact there and in neighbouring Acton than he did in most other places he visited.

Eric Fryer played Fox, and his brother was played by Chris Makepeace, a Canadian child star best remembered as Bill Murray’s young protege in the original “Meatballs” (filmed elsewhere in Ontario), in which he ran like a deer himself.

In 1979 Georgetown hosted its biggest movie spectacular ever, the filming of “Never Trust an Honest Thief”, starring Orson Welles, but this saga is to be posted separately. It was that good.

And that bad.

After the Orson Welles debacle, Georgetown seemed to resign itself to passive backdrop chores for forgettable television movies, and although there was always a surge of interest if there was a local casting call for extras, most people were happy enough just to read about it in the paper. Or not. Whatever.

In 1983 Wayne Rodgers, who of course played Trapper John on TV’s epochal “MASH”, was earning his living making daft small-screen fodder like “He’s Fired, She’s Hired”, which was being called “Paper Castles” at the time.

His co-star was the ridiculously cute Karen Valentine, no doubt taking time off from “Love Boat” tapings with fingers crossed for something better. It was a husband-and-wife-job-swap comedy that involved Georgetown’s commuter train station. Didn’t see it.

Rogers must have liked the town, though, because he came back in 1988 to shoot “Drop-out Mother”, this time with Valerie Harper. I would have liked to have seen their co-star, Carol Kane, but that’s about all I can say about the flick. Rogers’ career was evidently in serious decline; he should never have quit “MASH”. Didn’t see the finished “Drop-out Mother” either.

In 1986 we had another return visitor, director Steven Stern, who apparently wasn’t doing too well in the resume department either because by now he was making TV films. This was “Young Again”, and I remember it much better because it parked Lindsay “Bionic Woman” in my chair. I was working for the other Georgetown newspaper, The Independent by then, when it was still based downtown, and a scene involving Wagner was shot in the office. She asked me if she could use my phone to call LA. I said, “Habahabahaba.”

Didn’t see this movie either, as it happened, but I read by the glow of the Internet that “Young Again” was about Robert Urich (who I never spotted at the time) wishing he could be 17 again, and when he gets his wish, he’s Keanu Reeves! Imagine that, the future Matrix monster right there in Georgetown, even before he’d had his Excellent Adventure.

By 1985 our little “Hollywood North” had its head screwed on again enough to try another big-screen feature film with another car chase. “Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird” filled downtown with the amazing talents of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Chevy Chase and John Candy and most of the rest of the cast of “SCTV”.

There are always plenty of Canadian actors in American movies filmed up north because the government (and unions) insist on a healthy percentage of “Canadian content”. Fair’s fair, eh? Oh, and Waylong Jennings was in that movie with all the muppets too. Wish I’d seen him lurking on a street corner – I loved his tunes.

“Follow that Bird” appearently earned $14 million at the box office, which sure doesn’t seem like much considering it came out of a television series that had bajillions of viewers all over the world (even Russian kids in the gulag got to see “Ulitsa Sezam” occasionally, while Chinese toddlers trekked the Great Wall to catch an episode of “Zhima Jie”). It was all after my time – I’m from the Howdy Doody generation.

Throughout the late ’80s there was a chunk of woody property a short hop up Highway 7 from Georgetown, at Silver Creek, that was the permanent location set for “The Campbells”, a series made for and by CBC television. It was sort of “The Waltons” for survivalists, but not so dreadfully melodramatic. Among its stars was young, handsome Montrealer John Wildman, who at one point looked like he was going to make it big in the title role of the US-Canadian movie “My American Cousin” (not shot in Georgetown), but ended up settling for Genies (Canadian Oscars) and with “Humongous” still being his best-known picture.

“Humongous” was made in Georgetown, or at least in neighbouring Limehouse, at a big, abandoned, water-filled rock quarry where I often conducted hazardous experiments in my youth that involved mixing deep-water swimming with various quantities of beer.

“Humongous” takes us back to 1982, and thus almost full circle. Since I packed my bags and left town to pursue stardom of my own, there’ve been a few more films shot there. In 1997 the late, marginally missed Chris Penn was there making “The Boys Club”, and then in 1999 both “Amplifier” and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Universal Soldier: The Return” were shot in part there. The Canadian flick “Raymond Radcliffe” came in 2004, and I hear it’s pretty good. Georgetown’s done all right for itself, obviously, even if other communities around southern Ontario do considerably better.

Toronto itself, of course, gets top billing. According to the city’s Film and Television Office, at the end of March, Julie Christie was there filming “Away From Her”, Dustin Hoffman was making “Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” and Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci and Paul Giamatti were shooting “Shoot ‘Em Up”. All in the same dull-spring week. “Cinderella Man” and “X-Men” are among the recent blockbusters filmed in other spots around Toronto, but Georgetown had its day in the sun with Orson, and even if we don’t have the useable footage to prove it, that’s plenty good enough for me.