Quarantine Series: Film & Television
One of the most fun things we do at The Barn is supply film and television productions with furniture, props, household goods, and lots more. We’ve been working with the film industry for so long we don’t even know how it started. We do know it started sometime in the 1970’s. Let’s just call it the movie business because film and television production is a mouthful. Plus it’s not just movies and tv, its also commercials, and content created for dozens of online platforms. Plus they don’t often use film these days.
Like most industries the movie business has changed tremendously over the years. Today, before the recent Covid19 shutdown the movie business was booming in southern Ontario. Its been booming for a long time now. Toronto is always in the top five of North American cities with the most productions every year. Before production shutdown in March there was over 100 productions of various sizes on the go in Southern Ontario. Everyone wants new content for their platforms these days. The movie business employs 30 000 people in Toronto and is worth two billion annually to the economy.
In the 70’s and 80’s the industry was smaller and not as well established. That was great for us because the studios didn’t yet have well stocked prop warehouses. They needed just about everything and we were happy to supply them. Back then it was a big deal for TV shows to get to 100 episodes because that meant they could go into syndication. One day a show we had been working with for years showed up with a fleet of trucks and rented approximately a quarter of our inventory. They told us that they needed three more shows to get to 100 and syndication. They were going to shoot all three in one week before the production ran out of money.
These days production companies have their own permanent prop warehouses. Many long running shows even have their own permanent prop warehouses. But they still show up at The Barn looking for new items and things that are hard to find. Murdoch Mysteries was probably our best customer for many years. But now that they are thirteen seasons in they are showing up less. But they still need new items even as their prop warehouse has grown. A set decoration buyer once told us that he guessed that half of the of their prop warehouse was purchased from The Barn over the years.
We rent and sell to the movie business. It depends on the production and how long they will be needing the items. In the old days the majority of the productions were movies, so rentals were more common. These days TV shows represent the majority of productions, so they mostly buy. Also antique prices have dropped so much over the years that they can now buy most pieces for less than it used to cost to rent them.
The people we deal with are called set decoration buyers. They move from production to production searching for the pieces they need to fill out their sets. Many of them have become friends over the years. The way in usually works is they come in and take a lot of photos. They show the photos to a set decorator or production designer or director. Then they email us all the photos of the pieces they want to buy or rent. Sometimes they just grab what they want right away because they are trusted and don’t need to get approval. If you have ever been in The Barn and seen someone walking around taking an enormous quantity of photos, they probably work in the movie business.
Because we know so many set decoration buyers, and they know that we have a large inventory that is not on display. We often get phone calls asking for specific, hard to find items. One such memorable phone call from last year went something like this: “I need a chair that can be used to torture someone in an asylum circa 1850.”. I thought about it for a couple of seconds and said “Yeah we got that.”. “Great” she said and came in the next day a bought the chair I had in mind. This is a common occurrence. And more often than you would think we get asked for torture devises.
We have supplied more horror movies than I can count. The Saw movie franchise as well as The Friday the Thirteen movie franchise were both terrific customers. A horror movie called The Marsh was particularly memorable because they took all our antique garden tools. We were told they were going to be dropped from the roof of a barn to murder people in the film. They also turned an old carousel horse into a demonic rocking horse. We’ve also supplied a pile of Stephen King movies and TV shows over the years.
We like to be as environmentally friendly as possible at The Barn and the movie business comes in handy there too. We often buy out large estates and have to take everything, even some items we don’t want. We donate what we can and often items that would otherwise have gone to landfill we give to set decoration buyers. We had a piles and piles of old bundled up newspapers that we were going to recycle. Instead we gave them to the hit remake of Stephen King’s It from a few years ago. We’ve given lots of damaged pieces of furniture to post apocalyptic productions over the years, including the TV show 12 Monkeys. Ann of green gables even took the ashes out of our fireplace.
When we do the math, average number of movie productions we supply every year, times the number of years we have been supplying the movies. We come up with a number that is well over a thousand. Before I started writing this I sat down and wrote out the names of some of the more memorable productions we have supplied over the years. I stopped writing when the page was full. Here is a list of a few of the movies that came to mind: The Fly, Chicago[yes it was filmed in Toronto], Cinderella Man, the Resident Evil series, The Virgin Suicides, John Q, Twister, Death to Smoochy[a truly horrible film], Scanners, Existenz, Exotica, the Police Academy series, American Psycho, Canadian Bacon, The F Word, Capote, Blizzard, X-Men, A Map of the World, The Recruit, Red, Shazam, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Owning Mahowny, Pacific Rim, A History of Violence, Chloe, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and The Shape of Water, to name a few.
The Shape of Water is one of my favorites. Not only is it a great movie that won the Oscar for best picture in 2018. It also won for best production design. In his acceptance speech the fellow who accepted the award thanked a bunch of our favorite set decoration buyers. We couldn’t have been happier for them, they are lovely hard working people who are very good at their jobs.
Some of the TV shows we have supplied that came to mind were: Night Heat[ a Canadian Law & Order before there was Law & Order], Degrassi, The Strain, The Handmaid’s Tale, Shitt’s Creek, American Gods, Bitten, What we do in the Shadows, Bomb Girls, Being Erica, Beauty and the Beast, Traders, Nikita, Hannibal, Counterstrike, Lost Girl, Frankie Drake Mysteries, Mary Kills People, Due South, Flashpoint, Shadow Hunters, King of Kensington, Rookie Blue, Ann of Green Gables[ too many different versions to count], Locke & Key, Star Trek: Discovery, The Umbrella Academy, Orphan Black, See, Workin Moms and Little Mosque on the Prairie, to name a few. I started watching Hannibal because they kept renting piles and piles of our table pads and I wanted to see what they were doing with them. That was a mistake, that show was too graphic for me. It turns out they were using stacks of table pads to look like stacks of antique binders.
An old friend of mine who is an actress told me once that when she watches TV she often gets distracted from what she is watching because she sees all her friends on the screen. Well if I spend an evening flipping through the channels I will sometimes notice all of the furniture from The Barn. Not the same as seeing your friends on the screen, but it keeps me amused. I can never make it through a dozen scenes before I spot something that came from The Barn. Of course I know which shows to choose.
Hopefully movie production will resume shortly in southern Ontario. They are allowed to start up again as part of the stage two reopening. But I imagine starting up major productions after so much down time is not easy. There have been a lot of people out of work for too long due to covid19, so we are pulling for them. I’m sure they will find ways to operate safely. After all they are used to finding creative solutions to complicated problems, its a big part of their job.
