Sam Wiebe's new book maps Vancouver's rise as Hollywood North production hub

Crime author Sam Wiebe has written a history of Vancouver's film and television industry, tracing its evolution from the 1970s "tax-shelter era" to its current status as a $3-billion-a-year production hub. The book, "Shot in Vancouver: Adventures in Hollywood North," examines how the city became one of North America's busiest centres for making everything from car commercials and Canadian crime dramas to international box-office hits.

Wiebe, an award-winning crime fiction writer who created the Wakeland Mysteries series and lives in New Westminster, said the book emerged from wanting to read something that didn't exist. "There just wasn't a book like this, and it's the kind of thing that I wanted to read," he said. "I wanted a book that looked at TV shows and movies that were filmed in Vancouver, whether they were set here, whether they were made by Canadian independent filmmakers, or by Hollywood, or overseas. I wanted a book that would wrap its arms around everything."

Wiebe conducted what he calls "a PhD's worth of research," designed the book as a "bathroom reader" that lets you dip in for a favourite film and then discover a strange corner of local screen history. The tax-shelter years of the 1970s and 1980s—when Canadian investors could write off money invested in films—produced barely-seen disasters but also established B.C. as a production centre and yielded films like "The Changeling" and "Out of the Blue."

A decisive shift came in the late 1980s when major studio facilities like The Bridge and North Shore Studios arrived. Vancouver already had skilled crews, remarkable scenery, and talented workers, but purpose-built infrastructure made it possible to sustain multiple TV series at once. "The X-Files" then showed what Vancouver could contribute beyond efficiency: its damp forests, grey skies, and Pacific Northwest atmosphere became part of the show's paranoia and supernatural unease. The pilot for the upcoming "X-Files" reboot, directed by Ryan Coogler, was filmed here this summer.

X-Files creator Chris Carter, whose new film "Queens for a Day" was shot in Vancouver, has called the city "Hollywood's greatest backlot." Later productions including "Stargate," "Supernatural," and "Smallville" deepened an industry that had moved beyond boom-town novelty. In five-plus decades of filming, Vancouver has largely hidden in plain sight, playing pretty much every major U.S. city, Russia, and even other planets—but rarely itself.

Wiebe highlights "Da Vinci's Inquest" and "Da Vinci's City Hall," the CBC crime dramas created by Chris Haddock and starring Nicholas Campbell, as the first major productions to treat Vancouver's institutions, neighbourhoods, history, and social problems as their actual subject. "Da Vinci's was really the first big one that was about the city—how the city works, the social problems, the people," Wiebe said. The show's attention to civic politics and the missing-women crisis demonstrated what Vancouver stories could do when they weren't forced to masquerade as somewhere else.