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December 16, 2004
Campaign stop: One-time Emmy juggernaut The West Wing takes a detour to Stouffville, Ont.
National Post
Small-town Ontario got a sniff of the big time yesterday when The West Wing popped into Stouffville, Ont., for a day's shooting. The Post's Rob McKenzie, who lives in Stouffville, files this chronology:
FRIDAY, NOV. 26
Wife steps in the door with news of a "Guess what? You'll never believe it" nature. Says she just heard The West Wing will be filming at a local restaurant, The Fickle Pickle.
Fickle Pickle? West Wing? As if.
Moments later on Friday, Nov. 26
Um, it's true.
TUESDAY, DEC. 7
Breakfast meeting with Nick Paraskevakos, owner of Fickle Pickle, a cozy spot with booths and a waitress who calls people "hon."
This is the first time fame has touched the Pickle, which will be subbing for the Merrimack Restaurant, a real-life diner and occasional political hotspot in Manchester, N.H.
"First they called me," Nick recounts. "Then about 10 people showed up to see if they liked it. They liked it." After that, "They brought about 20 people looking the place over, checking the lighting, inside the kitchen."
The pastorals of Greece hung on the Pickle walls will have to come down, perhaps replaced by portraits of the show's President Bartlet. And the location people took a copy of his menu, presumably to Americanize its prices. But they'll keep the Pickle name.
Is Nick a West Wing fan? "Tomorrow I'm going to make a point to watch it."
I'm no better -- when the Stouffville shoot was confirmed, my first thought was someone might want to give the local school board a heads-up that Rob Lowe is coming to town.
Lowe left the show a year-and-a-half ago.
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 8
Sit in on a noonhour planning session between Ruth LeBlanc, manager of the Stouffville Country Village Business Improvement Area, and Drazen Baric, assistant location manager for the shoot. Drazen has just come from the town offices, where he was working with roads guys to figure out how to divert traffic during the shoot -- whether to entirely close off Main Street, or to instead let vehicles through except during filming.
This is all about details. The wreaths and Christmas lights on the block of the shoot will have to come down. Ruth has to get stores whose signs might appear on camera to sign a Warner Bros. waiver. The production trucks can park in the municipal lot to the east of the shoot and in a smaller lot by the old town hall. In all, some 100 people are working on this project.
Drazen says he and location manager Neil Lum Lock spent days driving around Southern Ontario, looking for places that met The West Wing's needs. Besides Stouffville, they also struck gold in Dundas, Port Perry and Uxbridge, among others.
Stouffville's moment in the sun will occupy three or four minutes of airtime, Drazen says. Jimmy Smits (as a Democratic congressman and potential president) and Bradley Whitford (as Josh Lyman, White House strategist) will walk the half-block from Guardian Drugs to the Pickle. Then they'll go inside the restaurant and talk.
Drazen has been a location scout for eight years. What he really wants to be is a writer. A few years back he sat down with the great Canadian jockey Sandy Hawley and wrote a screenplay based on his life -- his many successes and his fight with cancer. But when Drazen pitched it, everyone told him nobody wants to watch a story about horse racing.
Then Seabiscuit made US$150-million.
Drazen is pitching his screenplay again.
THURSDAY, DEC. 9
Top-rated show on television, CSI, airs tonight. It has the buzz West Wing enjoyed from its debut in 1999 until around 2001. Now West Wing sits a middling 23rd in Nielsen Media Research rankings.
CTV stopped showing The West Wing after this season's premiere to make room for CSI: New York. Its return is indefinite.
As ratings go down, shows become zanier in their plotting. On last night's episode, President Bartlet was paralyzed by his multiple sclerosis during a summit in China and Josh had to deal with an asteroid headed not just for Earth but specifically for the United States.
MONDAY, DEC. 13
Marcia Snively is executive director of the Manchester Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. Extremely gracious is she, saying she begrudges Stouffville not one little bit for scoring a well-paying gig as her city's stunt double.
Marcia tried hard to convince The West Wing to let Manchester be Manchester, spending two weeks building her case and scouting possible locations. She figures that in the end, Canada's lower dollar was the difference-maker.
West Wing producers did ask Marcia to collect some props for use in Ontario shoot. They wanted 100 business cards (some will show up on a bulletin board in The Fickle Pickle) and a Manchester flag. Marcia describes these -- this is so poignant -- as "New Hampshire artifacts."
Nobody's shooting any big-name TV shows in Manchester today. About all that's being shot around Manchester lately are white-tailed deer. When I ask Marcia what productions the state bagged recently, she mentions On Golden Pond (1981).
Is Marcia a West Wing fan? "I have seen it," she replies diplomatically. "I don't watch it every single week."
Wednesday, Dec. 15
Smits, who grew up in Brooklyn and Puerto Rico and knows to dress for the weather, seems entirely content in the early-morning cold. Whitford, who grew up in Wisconsin and should know better, is lightly dressed and appears approximately as warm as Captain Scott during the final moments of his doomed 1912 Antarctic expedition.
The instant makeover of Stouffville's Main Street is most impressive. CIBC is now Revolution Credit Union. U.S.-style blue postboxes are all around, as are American flags, and newsboxes not only for USA Today but for The Hippo, a Manchester alternative weekly. A statue of Jefferson stands outside the old town hall (though the lofty quotation on its plaque misspells "altar" as "alter"). New Hampshire licence plates are screwed onto all vehicles in camera range.
The hours of shooting consist of much standing around, interrupted by spasms of activity.
Producer Mike Hissrich says in an interview on the set that the Ontario trip was about two months in the making. He says these towns were chosen not because of lower labour costs but because they can look like both New Hampshire (rolling hills; cold) and Iowa (cornstalks; flat; cold), dual sites of The West Wing's upcoming presidential primaries. Further, the scenes take place in winter, and Ontario has "guaranteed weather" that its American rivals do not. "We knew," he says, "we would get some snow and cold."
The episodes shot in Southern Ontario will air in three episodes in January.
Posted by Jo at December 16, 2004 05:20 PM