It’s a common enough sight if you live in downtown Hamilton.

Everything is normal when you leave for work in the morning, but when you come home there are orange pylons with FILM printed on them in front of your house. Up the street are trailers and scaffolds and people busy with wires and lights and all sorts of strange gear.

You know it’s good for the local economy (whatever ultimately becomes of the film, the production must bring some money into Hamilton) but it’s easy to wish this stuff was happening on someone else’s street. Hamilton, as we all know, is cinematic. It’s a rust belt city. The fact that it hasn’t “kept up” with the look of the contemporary urban world makes it perfect for “period” movies. The city supplies blue collar chic and satisfies nostalgia for an age when North Americans manufactured things, and didn’t just buy goods made in China.

And so, during the week of August 7, the mega-trailers, film gear, caterers and – obviously – actors (though I personally never saw one) arrived on Hunt Street. They were shooting scenes for a film called Angel Duty. The shooting site was The Staircase theatre on the corner of Dundurn and Hunt Streets.

As a Hunt Street resident, the title was fitting. On the morning I discovered them, crew and equipment seemed not to have driven in, but rather to have descended from above, an arrival that is, in itself, unsettling.

A lot of the resistance to local film work, of course, comes down to the feeling of being invaded. To be honest, I can’t say the film shoot inconvenienced me all that much. The reduction of the street to a trailer-buttressed single lane was a deterrent to the steady – and moderately annoying – flow of commuters who routinely cut through Hunt Street to avoid the congestion of Dundurn and King. So despite the narrowing of the street, getting in and out of my driveway in the morning was faster that week.

I managed to obtain a shooting schedule, from which I learned that the movie would be appearing on the Hallmark Channel before Christmas this year. I don’t have cable, let alone reception of the Hallmark Channel, so I’ll never see it. Maybe they’ll tune into it at The Staircase when it airs, so that while watching it, guests to the staircase can also feel like they’re in it.

Most of the shooting was inside the Staircase, which I obviously couldn’t get in to see, so I am left to imagine the scenes based on the descriptions like this:

10A INT. RESTAURANT

Carrie meets Abby and Betsy, Carrie wants to help out

10B INT. RESTAURANT
Decorating Montage

If one has any imagination at all, one can daydream something wholesome and warm and accented by the seasonal sensations of indoor pine and eggnog.

A neighbour on the street reported the deployment of simulated snow which, sadly, I missed. Some mornings catering offered free coffee to residents, which I also missed. (I am starting to feel my quality of life would improve if there was always film work on my street).

On the last night of shooting, I went to see if I could get hold of a media kit. A small crew was setting up Night for Day cameras (putting light through the windows at night to simulate an interior scene during daylight hours).

So there I was, wandering around near midnight trying to be casually friendly and inquisitive with people who actually have to get a lot done on a tight schedule. My inquiries finally brought an officious and cautiously friendly production assistant outside to field my questions – none of which he was authorized to answer – at the end of which I was politely given a phone number for the production coordinator.

I called the number the next day and asked the same questions, saying I wanted nothing more than promotional information about the film. I was put on a very long hold. When the production coordinator returned he simply said: “No, we have nothing like that.”

That, too, seemed mysteriously fitting for a film entitled Angel Duty.

When I awoke and stepped onto my porch the day after the shooting finished, the crew had vacated without leaving so much as a gum wrapper behind. And I stood under the brilliant morning sun wondering if I had seen angels or just imagined I had.

Mark Fenton grew up in Regina and Edmonton and graduated from the University of Alberta in 1986 with an Honours English B.A. Since 1990 he has lived in Ontario and worked extensively as a book editor and magazine publisher in Toronto and Hamilton. His photo-essays are a regular feature in raisethehammer.org.

Mark lives in downtown Hamilton--a city he absolutely loves--with his wife and two daughters. He is currently at work on a children's novel entitled Pim. Examples of his work and information about current projects can be found at markfenton.ca