Trivia abounds about Kamloops’ connection to Hollywood

Apr 1, 2017 | 5:00 AM

KAMLOOPS — Harrison Ford, in his own words, is a “schmuck.”

He’s been in the news lately, for the wrong reason — getting in a scrape with one of his airplanes as he came close to an airliner while he was landing at a California airport. Audio has now been released in which he tells the control tower, “I’m the schmuck that landed on the taxiway.”

While the actor hasn’t impressed U.S. aviation officials with his flying skills, quite a few people in Kamloops remember him much more fondly.

He’s just one of many movie stars who have come through here, and while we aren’t exactly Hollywood North in this neck of the woods, the film industry is a pretty big deal.

Two new things have happened in that regard in the last couple of weeks, one of them that everybody knows about and the other that almost nobody has heard of.

The first, of course, is the release of the new Power Rangers movie, which is still playing at the Cineplex Odeon. Whether or not you’re a Power Rangers fan, or even know anything about it, you had to have been curious enough to hang out on Victoria Street a year ago when parts of it were being filmed here.

And going to see a big-production movie to do some Kamloops spotting is always fun. There’ve been quite a few of them, ranging from Monster Trucks to army sagas and romance at the ranch.

That other thing I mentioned, the one that came and went with no one noticing, is the re-structuring of the Thompson-Nicola Film Commission that’s responsible for bringing movies and commercials to Kamloops, Merritt, Ashcroft and other towns in our region.

As of last week, the film commission no longer exists, at least not in the form it did for almost two decades since it was established. The commission is now a film commission advisory committee, with film-industry experts getting more clout. They’ll meet twice a year and report through the TNRD board’s Economic Development, Tourism and Parks Committee.

The difference won’t be noticeable, of course, to anyone outside the process but it’s supposed to work better. The commission was set up in the late ‘90s as the result of a consultants’ report entitled “Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead” and which recommended that the TNRD take the plunge into the film industry.

A piece of trivia is that one of the co-authors was Barb Duggan, who later became my campaign manager for my first mayoral election, and who was in a movie with George Clooney called The Descendants shot in Hawaii just a few years ago.

Anyway, back to Harrison Ford, who spent quite a bit of time in Kamloops while filming Firewall, released in 2006. If you watch the trailer you can catch a couple of fleeting moments showing some action at a set that was built out at Tranquille.

You may or may not know that the set was constructed largely with materials salvaged from some Lorne Street heritage houses that were torn down.

I got to meet Ford twice while he was here. The first time, I was having lunch in Rick’s on Victoria Street with a young movie producer, as it happens, who was interested in optioning my book The Wild McLeans (it never happened).

Somebody tipped us to the fact Harrison Ford was also there having lunch with some of the crew. Thing is, you’re not supposed to intrude on movie stars in their private time, but I couldn’t resist introducing myself as the mayor of Kamloops, welcoming him to our town, and joking that if he had any parking tickets he needed fixing to let me know.

I met him again later on the set at Tranquille, where he presented a donation cheque to the United Way.

Another bit of trivia involved Martin Sheen when he was here filming Cadence at Mount Lolo way back in 1989. He was the director, but had to take over an acting role when Gary Busey became indisposed. Charlie Sheen, who was also in the movie, used to spend some of his off hours at a North Shore nightclub. Martin tended to be more relaxed, and would chat with shoppers in the super market or play basketball with neighbourhood kids near the private house he rented.

Others will have lots of their own stories and trivia about the film industry here in our home town — about Jennifer Lopez and Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood and others. That’s one of the fun things about our local communities having a connection to the movies.