I’m dreaming of a…Winnipeg Christmas City has been home to more Christmas movies than Santa has elves By: Declan Schroeder Posted: 3:00 AM CST Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020 Last Modified: 11:03 AM CST Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020

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This article was published 29/11/2020 (2099 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ever stumbled upon a storefront or square block decked out with Christmas decorations and glittering with fake snow in the middle of summer?

It’s probably for a made-for-TV movie shoot.

You know the movies. The ones that feature a heroine who used to be crazy about Christmas but has lost the Christmas spirit because she’s too focused on her white-collar, big-city job, or maybe because someone died.

The ones where the heroine is forced to spend the holiday season in an idyllic small town — often the hometown she abandoned for New York City or Chicago — because there’s a blizzard, or because she gets roped in to saving a small business or community centre, or because she’s writing an article for a magazine.

The ones where she falls in love with a handsome townie during a snowman-building or cookie-making or tree-decorating contest and finds the Christmas spirit again. The ones where the ex-boyfriend comes back to complicate things. The ones that end with a tame kiss. The ones that air all day, every day, on the Hallmark and Lifetime channels from before Halloween through the New Year.

They’re not cinema verité by any stretch, but they’re a harmless guilty pleasure for many.

You may be thinking: “Aren’t there enough winter months in Winnipeg to shoot Christmas movies when it’s actually winter?”

As it turns out, the answer is ‘probably not.’ Because there have been a whole whack of them shot in Winnipeg throughout the years, in which some of our most beautiful neighbourhoods and historic buildings masquerade as other places. Many are also planned to be shot in October and released in time for Christmas in the same year.

We love when our city is referenced or seen in pop culture. That’s why “That’s it! Back to Winnipeg!” and “Now entering Winnipeg. We were born here, what’s your excuse?” are still well-used memes despite The Simpsons episode Midnight Rx having aired 15 years ago.

It turns out watching made-for-TV Christmas movies can serve a purpose during a pandemic (other than providing mindless entertainment.) They can help you take a Christmas tour of our city — or at least make for an engaging game of “I Spy” (insert Winnipeg landmark here) — during a time we’ve been asked to leave our homes for essential trips only.

Perhaps the most common locale for Christmas film shoots is among the Exchange District’s well-kept, historic buildings.

For example, much of the outdoor action in 2019’s The Christmas Club takes place on the Exchange’s streets, which stand in for The Big Apple. That offering sees former ballerina and widow Olivia and too-busy-for-love business consultant Edward team up to help a poor elderly woman recoup her lost Christmas savings. The former Royal Bank of Canada building at 460 Main St., now a dance studio, is also used for both exterior and interior shots.

The Exchange is also prominently featured in 2019’s Merry & Bright, where it shows off its versatility in doubling as both the quaint small town of Britewell, Ohio (not a real place) and New York City. The lead of that story is candy cane company CEO Cate, who must work with a consultant named Gabe who wants to optimize the family business’ operations.

In a scene set in New York, the characters stand at Albert St. and McDermot Ave. to discuss the fate of the company. In scenes set in Britewell, we are treated to repeated exterior shots of the Mariaggi Hotel (just a block away on McDermot from where the NYC scenes were shot) as the candy cane shop’s storefront.

In the movie Journey Back to Christmas, starring Top Gun’s Tom Skerrit and Candace Cameron Bure, Bure plays a Second World War-era nurse who travels in time to 2016, where she falls in love with a man who shows her how family is the true meaning of Christmas.

In Christmas at the Plaza — which centres around an archival historian and her project to make an exhibit on the history of the Plaza Hotel’s Christmas tree alongside the handsome hotel decorator — you can see Albert Street’s Telegram Building — built in 1889 as a warehouse and the headquarters of the Winnipeg Telegram in the early 1900s — act as a New York City toy store.

The scenes at the “Plaza” themselves were shot inside the regal Fort Garry Hotel, which was elegantly and elaborately decorated for the film. The Fort Garry (and the Exchange, once again) can also be seen throughout A Shoe Addict’s Christmas. One of many starring Bure, this movie has the main character inadvertently locked into a department store after closing on Christmas Eve and encounter her guardian angel.

Moving to Princess St., Red River College’s Exchange District Campus has been featured in a few different films, with the striking, well-preserved Romanesque facade fitting perfectly into the look these movies go for.

In Lifetime flick No Time Like Christmas, the streetscape in front of RRC plays host to a big Christmas festival in Vermont. In Our Christmas Love Song, the main-floor area serves as a sprawling candy store owned by the sister and mother of Nashville-based music starlet Melody Jones, who has been accused of plagiarizing her hit holiday song and must return to her hometown of Madison, Indiana (actually a real place this time) to find the sheet music that will prove her innocence.

While there will be no Legislative Building open house this year — an annual tradition where Winnipeggers tour the building when it’s decorated to the nines — you can still see the Manitoba Legislative all togged up in Two Turtle Doves.

In that film, the neoclassical Broadway building is unmistakable. The main character, neuroscientist Dr. Sharon Hayes, spends time in the rotunda before and after a crucial meeting with a panel considering her for a big grant (spoiler alert: she gets it.)

By the way, the website hallmarkforallseasons.com (one of a surprising number of sites reviewing made-for-TV Christmas movies) ranks Two Turtle Doves No. 1 among 45 2019 Hallmark releases, so if you’re going to watch just one…

Other Downtown locales used as shooting locations include the Pantages Playhouse Theatre and 374 Main Street’s now-closed Antiques and Funk. Both show up in No Time Like Christmas, a 2019 Lifetime movie.

Other commons filming spots are the Wellington Crescent and North River Heights areas. 6 Ruskin Row, built in 1910, was featured in both Merry & Bright as the “Britewell Inn” and in Radio Christmas as the “North Star Inn” of Bethlehem, Penn.

It would probably take an entire holiday season just to watch all the movies with a Winnipeg connection, to be honest. A Dream of Christmas (2016) also featured Winnipeg connections in the cast, with Winnipeg actor Mike Bell co-writing the script and appearing in a small role.

Christmas Connection (2017) and Once Upon a Christmas Miracle (2018) were also shot here, as was Lifetime’s Always and Forever Christmas (2019). In the latter, the ruins at the Trappist Monastery in St. Norbert act as the venue for “The Great Christmas Pudding Toss,” the oldest town tradition according to hunky love-interest Scott (spoiler alert: Scott and protagonist Lucy win.)

So too was One Winter Weekend (2018), where our prairie city’s ubiquitous flatness doesn’t prevent it from doubling as the “Clara Lake Lodge,” a ski resort main character Cara heads to on a “dating detox,” only to be double-booked with not one, but two handsome and available men (another spoiler alert: she ends up with Ben, not Sean.)

While the majority of these movies were shot in the past couple of years, Winnipeg’s history as a Hallmark destination goes back a ways. The Hallmark Channel dates back to 2001 — and they did produce a couple of Christmas movies every year in the early 2000s — but only in the past 10 years or so have pumped out dozens of yuletide flicks per year.

The first Hallmark movie shot in Winnipeg (to this author’s knowledge after poring over the Internet Movie Database) is 2012’s The Christmas Heart. The movie focuses on a group of neighbours in Cleveland who decorate their street with paper lanterns every year, and how the lanterns help a guide a plane transporting a surgeon and a heart so a young man (Winnipeg’s own Ty Wood) can get a life-saving transplant.

That film, unlike many others, was actually shot during winter, in March 2012. However, an unexpected hitch arose: that March was the warmest in 140 years, clocking in at 8.3 Celsius above normal.

At one point, Winnipeg recorded highs at least 15 degrees above normal for a week straight, and the city saw its warmest March temperature of all time, as well: 23.7 Celsius on March 19. Who would have thought fake snow would be necessary to complete the shoot?

“The weather is the story on this movie,” writer Michael Heaton told the Free Press at the time. “My line is that the cast and crew are battling a lack of elements.”

Winnipeg isn’t limited to Hallmark or to Christmas movies as a go-to filming location, either. Shall We Dance, starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, used buildings in the Exchange to fill in as a Chicago dance studio. In The Lookout, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels and Matthew Goode, the Ambassador apartment building on Cumberland and the Millenium Library, among others, are all visible landmarks.

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman spent part of 2004 filming Capote in Winnipeg, chronicling the life of novelist and playwright Truman Capote.

Unique architecture makes city stand out

So why exactly is Winnipeg the belle of the Christmas ball when it comes to being a made-for-TV Christmas movie location, if most of them aren’t even shot in winter? There are a couple of reasons.

A big one, according to Winnipeg Film Group’s executive direction Greg Klymkiw, is that Winnipeg’s “exquisitely unique architecture” makes it extremely versatile.

The Exchange District, for example, “is happily intact for the edification of our citizenry’s eyes, (and) also delivers great exterior urban locations to film productions requiring those special qualities that indeed recreate the glories — both period and current — of many locales in North America such as New York, Chicago and many others,” Klymkiw wrote in an email.

“Both the weather and general topography of Winnipeg, surrounding areas, and by extension, Manitoba, provide… a myriad of locales that allow for an affordable variety of ‘one-stop shopping/shooting’ options to filmmakers from across the globe,” Klymkiw continued.

The other reason is simple enough: the Manitoba Film and Video Production Tax Credit provides “a huge incentive to production companies” and makes Winnipeg an inexpensive place to shoot, Klymkiw wrote.

The credit was created in 1997 and has been enhanced in recent years. It now provides filmmakers a 38 per cent credit on all production spending in Manitoba, or between 45 and 65 per cent of all eligible labour costs.

When you consider that each Hallmark movie has a budget of only about $2 million, according to Business Insider, you can see how enticing that credit would be.

On the labour side, there’s a frequent-filming bonus. The tax credit to jumps to 55 per cent from 45 per cent on a producer’s third film shot within a two-year period. Each Hallmark movie only takes about two or three weeks to shoot, so you can do the math there.

The credit contributes to employment opportunities for local talent, both in front and behind the camera, Klymkiw explained, saying that each film could potentially employ 150 or more locals. Klymkiw said in 1992, he produced a $1-million dollar Guy Maddin film and the entirely-local crew was about 100 strong (excluding 100 extras), but said crew and cast sizes “can be much larger these days.”

The credit was set to expire at the end of 2019, but the current provincial government made it permanent in this year’s budget, so expect to see plenty of Christmastime in Winnipeg on your TV screen in the years to come.