The made-in-Vancouver TV series Timeless is about travelling into history, but the show's production designer says recreating the past can be hard to do in Canada's third-largest city because of a relatively short supply of old buildings.
John Marcynuk, a Toronto-trained architect who got into the production sector about 20 years ago, says the series, now in its first season, gets by but it's a challenge. "There are certain locations in Vancouver that have sadly disappeared," he said, referring, for example, to warehouses in North Vancouver.
Their absence creates hurdles for a show where scripts have taken the series' time-travelling heroes to such locations as 1930s New Jersey, Watergate-era Washington and 1960s Las Vegas
Timeless has to use creative angles, and occasionally CGI, to find the past in modern Vancouver.
"The disadvantage of Vancouver is it doesn't preserve its history. It reinvents it," says Marcynuk, who has just come off an 11-year stint on the made-in-B.C. TV series Supernatural.
He rhymes off properties, some of which he says the public likely saw as "dumpy warehouses," but have been reliable for producers looking to evoke the past for the cameras.
"They're actually gold for the film industry. It's becoming a little more challenging to do period stuff here," he says.
But the show must go on. With the right angles, and visual ingenuity, the Timeless crew has found the past in a modern city.
Production designer John Marcynuk loves the art-deco look of Vancouver’s 1930s-era Marine Building skyscraper and Vancouver City Hall.
Alexander Street in Gastown stood in for 1937 New York in an episode about the demise of the Hindenburg airship, and the Boundary Bay Airport, about 16 kilometres southeast of Vancouver, worked as the Naval Air Station in New Jersey where the German aircraft went down.
The Pacific Gateway Hotel in Richmond was key to an episode set in 1960s Las Vegas, though period-era slot machines were provided by a collector from the Fraser Valley.
Watergate-era Washington was evoked by relying on some of the few neoclassical buildings left in town, notably the Pacific Central Station, which handles train and bus service, as well as a few bars. Some computer-generated imagery was also used.
Robert Wong, vice-president and acting film commissioner at Creative BC, says that prospective producers sometimes bypass Vancouver because it lacks older architecture.
However, Marcynuk says he is wary about CGI. "CGI is expensive so if you can find a location, light it practically, shoot it practically, it's a lot less work for [postproduction] to do because basically what you shoot is what you see on the screen."
B.C.'s film and TV production sector, which employs about 20,000 people largely in Hollywood-funded productions, is in the midst of a boom. However, the acting film commissioner for Creative BC – the provincial agency that oversees the production sector – concedes it can be challenging to sell the region as a location for producers looking for old settings because its looks are not as as historic and settled as Toronto, Montreal or elsewhere.
Vancouver gained a reputation for being able to look like anywhere in the United States during the production of The X-Files in the 1990s – a chameleon-like quality that has lingered as a calling card to the present day. However, it can be tough to make that sales pitch when the script calls for settings in the past.
"We just never had that opportunity to have that architecture here in Vancouver and in B.C.," says Robert Wong, vice-president and acting film commissioner at Creative BC. "It is the nature of our region that we don't have that older architecture, that older look."
Timeless, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on Global, was co-created by Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan.
He said the issue does occasionally come up when prospective producers come calling. "We have difficulty duplicating the brownstone look of New York for example," he said. "Sometimes they bypass us and we just don't know about those projects."
Wong said clever crews do their best. And Creative BC offers producers access to a database of 500,000 images of various streetscapes, buildings and landscapes to provide them with options. (There is one other time-travel series shooting in the region, DC's Legends of Tomorrow.)
Marcynuk says there are some vintage gems in the region.
He cites the 1930s-era Marine Building skyscraper on Burrard Street whose art-deco look has been featured in the Fantastic Four feature films and the TV series Smallville. In particular, he loves the building's lobby.
There's also Vancouver City Hall, built in 1936, and whose south entrance serves as the exterior of police headquarters in the made-in-B.C. series, The Flash. "Another wonderful art-deco location," Marcynuk says.
Timeless producer Shawn Williamson says Sony decided to produce the series in Vancouver because of its varied locations.
"And there are a few others dotted around. Over the last 15 or 20 years of doing television, I have learned where they are and used them extensively on the show."
Timeless, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on Global, was co-created by Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan. Kripke previously created Supernatural and Ryan created the acclaimed police drama The Shield.
The Timeless premise has a former U.S intelligence operative stealing a private-sector-created time machine as part of a mysterious campaign to go into the past and rewrite history. Federal officials recruit the pilot of a prototype machine as well as a historian and soldier to go into history to stop him.
When the right angles or CGI don't work for the camera, dramatic measures are necessary. For one episode, it was necessary to "bite the bullet" and build the interior of Ford's Theatre where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. After canvassing Vancouver's 1927-era Orpheum, the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, opened in 1930, and various New Westminster theatres, the production team realized none of them worked. They couldn't find the "presidential booth" that was a fixture of the well-photographed Ford's complex. New Westminster's 1892-era Galbraith House was also used for that episode.
On another occasion, a convincing replica of the Alamo was built on a parking lot and its surroundings enhanced with CGI effects. The result was convincing. There's also a backlot in Burnaby that has been redressed for locations ranging from 1860s Washington to Chicago in 1893.
Shawn Williamson, a Timeless producer, said Sony decided to produce the series in Vancouver because of the varied locations available in the region. In Vancouver's favour, he noted that a recent western-themed episode set would have been impossible to shoot in Toronto or Montreal because neither city has similar easily accessible rugged locations. "We really haven't limited the writers creatively because of the city at all," he said.
Marcynuk, who salutes the series locations manager Michael Roberts among other members of the production team, said he isn't in a position to say no to story demands. "I've said 'maybe' a lot, but we always sort of managed it."