Hollywood North is, of course, A Cruel Ilusion

The local press loves to wax rhapsodic about all the great successes of the local movie industry.

But no one that I know has gotten below the shimmering surface of this nonsense.

It is difficult to get excited by Brightlight's announcement that they made $100 Million on one of their recent, desperately bad projects.

Yes, millions of dollars flow into the local economy and that's a good thing.

Thousands of truck drivers, caterers, cab drivers, costumers find work.

But let me tell you the truth about Vancouver actors.

The best of the best are starving.

Most Vancouver film and television actors, even those with long and exemplary resumes in the Biz, get little work. And the work they do find is tragically underpaid.

Brightlight and other local companies have been paying actors 25% below scale and getting away with it for years. "Small budget," is what they'll cry in their notes to agents and actors.

And, if longshoremen and city garbage collectors had a union like the one that pretends to take care of local actors, they'd all do a Jimmy Hoffa right soon.

I know of at least half a dozen actors who have said, "Thanks, folks, that's all." Most have moved on to completely different careers where they are, oddly enough, well paid and treated like human beings and not necessary evils.

The next time you read about Hollywood North, just remember that reading either a press release or a Valentine from a newspaper writer who is just blindly sick with love for Show Biz.

The poor sap.

The Guilty were Always Known. JUst Couldn't Close the Case - Air India Revisited

It's always reassuring to learn that what we knew all along is what we knew all along.

Thus, how happy and relieved are we to learn that a retired CSIS agent (More! More! Retirement suits this gang.) confirms that everyone knew from the first day that the Maliks and Bagris were the lunatics who murdered 331 people in the Air India massacres.

Little catch. Couldn't prove it.

Yes, we noticed.

$50 Million of courtroom and trail and heartache later.

What an invitation this case must be for all the bombers-in-waiting.

"Hey, come to Canada. You can blow up hundreds of people, and their police are so stupid, even if you're caught with detonators in your hand, they'll believe you were on your way to your daughter's Halloween party. Hahahahaha."

Any Cost Overruns on Anything is OK for 2010

From the day it was announced, we denounced the new Trade and Convention Centre expansion, knowing instinctively that the projected costs were as real as the Wizard of Oz.

Vaughn Palmer's coverage today details (the devil is in the details) the sheer incompetence and running comedy of this sideshow.

Here are two highlights:

"The Liberals...began building the foundation before designs were complete for the upper floors."

"They also budgeted for "know unknowns" and unknown unknowns."

Now, only satirists and science fiction writers can come up with stuff like that. But no, it's award winning Gordon Campbell, whose TV show, Uncle Gordo, kept children around the world howling for so many years. Remember the big floppy feet and the red rubber nose? Hahaha, weren't they great?

Of course, now that the costs have doubled - yes, doubled - we can all sit back and admit what we knew all along.

The machinery that drives almost all public policy in this province has 5 rings and some artificial snow. It's called the 2010 Olympics.

Campbell will do, push, shove almost anything to get his party to be lots of fun.

Lucky us.