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TV Pilots

Stephen Amell is Arrow for TV pilot ARROW in Vancouver

Arrow, based on DC Comics The Green Arrow, is one hot TV pilot. And by all accounts, Stephen Amell is one hot Arrow in this more Jason Bourne-like and less Smallville-ish production. Like The Dark Knight’s re-imagined Batman, Arrow’s vigilante superhero fights crime with martial arts and technology plus the special skill of archery. “Working theory: The most expedient way to shoot a show where I’m an expert at archery is to become an expert an archery,” Amell tweeted in late February. And he must have hit the gym too. “You should see what’s under that hood……you’ve never seen ripped until you’ve seen this guy,” tweeted Arrow fight coordinator James Bamford.

None of my photographs do justice to how much Stephen Amell resembles a Jason Bourne-type action star. This is the closest I came with Amell in character as his secret identity Oliver Queen, crouched in Gastown before filming a take with Katie Cassidy as his former love Dinah “Laurel” Lance.

Pre-production set up on the same lot near a Burnaby Skytrain station that served as a Smallville permanent set for years. Filming on the Arrow pilot started on March 10th inside the Terminal City Ironworks complex in east Vancouver. The next morning, I missed an exterior scene of Oliver Queen jumping over the gate at the TCI entrance on Victoria Drive, but did spot the Oliver green arrow production sign on a walkby.

The next day, March 12th, Arrow set up at the foot of Gore Avenue in the Downtown Eastside during a wild west coast windstorm. Background performers dressed as homeless street peoople huddled around a fake fire and tried to keep their costumes intact in the wind. Stephen Amell and Colin Donnell, as his best friend and trustafarian Tommy Merlyn, were more sheltered, filming scenes inside Merlyn’s ride, a Mercedes 2012 SLS AMG ,with two wings and cockpit, as the ad says. Tents almost went airborne and Amell and Donnell looked like they were finally feeling the cold while waiting for their ride back to circus.

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NBC Pilot MIDNIGHT SUN Filmed in Squamish as Alaska

It’s not the first time Squamish has played Alaska for American TV. NBC pilot Midnight Sun, which Deadline.com says is getting some solid early buzz, spent much of last month filming in Squamish as Alaska.

This thriller about an FBI cult specialist investigating the mysterious disappearance of a group living on a commune in Squamish as Dugan, Alaska, stars Julia Stiles (the Bourne trilogy) as the cult specialist Leah Kafka, whose investigation uncovers a larger conspiracy, and Titus Welliver (Lost’s Man in Black) as cult leader Bennett Maxwell, the charistmatic and manipulative head of Midnight Sun.

I came close to seeing some of the filming of the Midnight Sun pilot, but arrived a day or two after they’d wrapped at the Squamish dock and then found them a couple more times at inaccessible locations. Luckily Michael Raymond-James, who co-stars as an Alaskan lawyer and second-in-command of the Dugan Police, is a tweeter and kept a sort-of running set diary with photos attached.

The cast did a network table read on March 8th. Then three days later, Raymond-James tweeted, “Prep is over. The hands have been shook, the drinks have been drunk. Tomorrow, we start shooting. Boom”. It looks like Midnight Sun started filming the pilot on the Squamish dock, judging from a photo which Raymond-James captioned “Look at where I go to work”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get up to Squamish until Friday, March 16th, just missing the shoot there.

As you can see from the fresh snow above, the weather wasn’t co-operating much with the production. Glacier Air at the Squamish Municipal airport tweeted on March 14th about Midnight Sun not getting the sun they wanted to film a scene with a Beech 18 plane. The attached video showed a serious snow squall in progress. On March 16th, the day I was looking for Midnight Sun at the Squamish dock, someone from the crew tweeted a photo of a green screen Beech 18 scene, announcing “Today we get to fly!”

I returned to Squamish the following Monday, March 19th, spotting Midnight Sun’s GEP Pro production signs on the drive up the Sea to Sky highway, just past Lions Bay. Midnight Sun was filming in a private gravel pit, with nothing to see except a beautiful view of Anvil Island and a couple of prop Dugan Police suburbans parked nearby.

Michael Raymond-James had settled into on-location routine by then, tweeting “In my life me Tweeties, I’ve drank with rogues [sic] and revolutionaries. And now I can also say that I’ve done laundry in Squamish, BC.” Read More »NBC Pilot MIDNIGHT SUN Filmed in Squamish as Alaska

ABC TV Pilot RED WIDOW About Russian Mob – Updated

ABC pilot Red Widow, inspired by a popular Dutch TV series, is about a San Francisco mobster’s widow forced to replace her husband as head of what appears to be a Russian crime syndicate, judging from the filming at Lana Lou’s restaurant dressed as Cafe Rossiya in Vancouver’s downtown east side last month.

Australian Radha Mitchell stars as the widow Marta who takes her mobster husband’s place to protect her family, with Sterling Beaumon and Jacob Salvati as her sons and Erin Moriarty as her daughter. Luke Goss (Hellboy II) plays bodyguard to her mob father Andrei Lazarev, a bodyguard who is then assigned to look after her and the kids. Lee Tergesen (Oz) plays a foot soldier in the crime syndicate and Suleka Mathew (Hawthorne) is Marta’s best friend Dina, while Jaime Ray Newman is Marta’s younger sister Kat.

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Matt Davis Has Wrapped Filming TV Pilot CULT in Vancouver

Matt Davis took time out of playing history teacher/guardian Alaric on The CW’s hit show The Vampire Diaries to film the pilot Cult in Vancouver in March. Even for a pilot, it was a relatively-short nine day shoot, which wrapped last Thursday night so that Davis could be back in Mystic Falls on the Atlanta set of The Vampire Diaries by Friday.

In this meta pilot, Matt Davis is a blogger named Jeff investigating the rabid fans of a cult horror TV show who have taken the series too literally. But relax, TVD fans. Even if picked up, Cult will be a short, 13-episode series, leaving room for Davis to return to Vampire Diaries. In other words, this pilot doesn’t mean the death of Alaric. Although it might.

I found Matt Davis — looking far too fine for a typical blogger — filming a scene on the pilot’s first day of shooting, March 20th, in Victory Square in downtown Vancouver.

From Victory Square in the morning, Cult moved production that afternoon into an empty heritage bank building with a glorious stained-glass ceiling on Pender Street, the same building that Supernatural turned into a vampire nest.

After this downtown sighting, Matt Davis fans looked for him on location but couldn’t find him. Some had better luck tracking him out and about enjoying Vancouver, which he tweeted about falling in love with –“Dear Vancouver, In spite of your rain, I think I may love you…. The only thing missing here is my Vampire Diaries family.” He then demanded that The Vampire Diaries return to the city where it shot its pilot — “#ByThePowerOfGreySkull!!!!!! I command the CW to move TVD back to Vancouver!!!!” And later Davis reunited with David Anders and Sara Canning here (Anders was in town guest-starring on Once Upon a Time and Canning is the lead of a new series Primeval: New World).

I didn’t find Cult again on location until its last day of filming, March 29th, when crew shot some scenes of Matt Davis sitting at the bar and at the window of the Alibi Room in Gastown. A film notice suggested that the last scene Read More »Matt Davis Has Wrapped Filming TV Pilot CULT in Vancouver

Mamie Gummer of TV Pilot Emily Owens, M.D. (formerly First Cut) at University of British Columbia

Students at the University of British Columbia did a double take last Friday entering their Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which had suddenly been renamed Denver Memorial Hospital in preparation for Saturday’s shoot. It featured Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter) filming some scenes for The CW’s hospital drama pilot Emily Owens, M.D. (formerly First Cut).

Read More »Mamie Gummer of TV Pilot Emily Owens, M.D. (formerly First Cut) at University of British Columbia