“Rooted” is all about the people and places that make us proud to call our community home.
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It wasn’t a lifelong dream for Jim Calarco, but there is a moment he remembers when becoming an actor was what he wanted to do.
“When I got hired as a high school teacher, I was looking for something extra to do and my wife was an actress in Sudbury and she had me go out to a production that the Gateway Theatre Guild was doing,” says Calarco.
“I had never intended to be an actor, I wanted to go and run the lights or something, but the director had me read some lines and I got the lead in the play. As soon as I walked on stage, I fell in love with it, that’s all there was to it.”
That was in 1973 and Calarco spent the next decade performing in theatres in northern Ontario while getting his specialist teaching degree in drama and communication arts. In 1983, his focus turned from the theatre to the screen.
“I was on sabbatical studying French in Montreal in 1982-83 and I ended up getting this small part in a film called Street Smart with Christopher Reeves and Morgan Freeman and I just had one line but to me, that was pretty impressive. That was one of Freeman’s first movies, but everybody knew Superman, and when I walked on to that set with those lights, I knew that I didn’t want to do theatre anymore.”
The movie business in North Bay has taken off since Calarco moved back up north from a stint in Toronto in 2000.
“The business has really changed, it's competitive with Toronto now. We’ve gone from one or two movies a year to 17 or 18 a year in and around our city. We’re at the stage now where a good actor can find work in northern Ontario.”
But it wasn’t always that way and Calarco recalls a meeting with a friend that he feels was one of the first major productions that really kick-started this wave.
“One day I got a call from a guy at the university named Bill Plumstead who had a screenplay. He asked to meet for coffee, and I read the screenplay and said ‘we should do the movie here.’ So we went looking for a director and we found a young guy named Robert Budreau and we did this movie called A Beautiful Somwhere and that was one of our first feature films.”
Budreau has gone on to direct and produce over 30 films and TV movies and has won nine different awards including the 2019 Outstanding Directorial Achievement from the Directors Guild of Canada for his feature film Stockholm.
But in 2006 when A Beautiful Somwhere was being made, there was still a lot of untouched territory for northern representation in a film.
“Originally we had no crew up here,” says Calarco. “When we did A Beautiful Somewhere both Plumstead and Budreau decided that they were going to start a mentor system. They got local people who were interested in being a crew and we put a kid with these people to learn the business. But it worked out so well that when the movie wrapped up, they still left to go find work in Toronto and we were still stuck with no crew. However, Canadore College has come along and built terrific programs and they have pushed out people who are very experienced in those positions. I know on the last season of Hard Rock Medical, Derek Diorio used a lot of Canadore students. I walked on set and I recognized probably 90 per cent of the people working there. The Canadore students work really hard. They have a great work ethic and they are eager to learn.”
But Calarco also wanted to find a way to get more people in front of the cameras and that eventually led to the creation of his own talent agency.
“I put out some feelers seeing whether or not someone would like to relocate up here and cast northern people, and there were very few professional actors in this area at the time (In the early 2000s). By 2011 they started to come up and started looking for talent and I thought maybe I should start a talent agency because there were some actors in northern Ontario that had to get representation in Toronto,” says Calarco.
“They suddenly started to realize there was talent up here and my agency went from about 10 actors to 85 actors and then films started to come in. Diorio was shooting in Sudbury and I had worked with him on a couple of his shows and I kept telling him to come to North Bay. He finally did come to North Bay and fell in love with the place and he decided to do all of season four of Hard Rock Medical in North Bay and now he’s working out of North Bay full time.”
It also helped that more production companies outside of Canada were starting to look at North Bay as a viable location for their own productions.
The beauty of it is, we are attractive to producers from the south because they are hiring locals. That means they don’t have to pay for hotels or transportation or a per diem, and so it makes it cheaper on that side. Additionally, they apply for a grant from the NOHFC (Northern Ontario Heritage Fund) which gives them some extra cash,” says Calarco.
“When we started getting inquiries from companies in the states, I didn’t really know where they were coming from or why they were looking at northern Ontario but then I figured out the money exchange was pretty good for them. But that just goes to show that actors don’t have to leave North Bay anymore and I encourage them to stay and build a resume and then go to Toronto. People from Toronto don’t want to see actors who don’t have a single credit on their resume. You don’t have to go to Toronto, you can get just as much work down there as you can up here.”
As an actor himself, Calarco says there came a point when he thought that helping other actors achieve their dreams was the right direction to move in.
“I was a retired teacher and I did like earning some extra money as an actor, but I looked at how hungry some of the people up here were who had no representation. So, I decided close to 12 years ago that I would start North Star Talent and I actively went out and was really pushing to get northern people to sign with the agency,” he says.
“I tried to make it as attractive as possible. I worked with them as much as I could. If they were auditioning, I would sit down and go over the script with them, I would tape them, and this is all before we had a lot of movies coming up here. For me, it was just the love of working with people. As a teacher, I was used to dealing with 1,000 kids a day in a high school and I kind of missed that when I retired. A lot of them were a lot younger than me so when I got the chance to call them and say ‘you just got cast in this movie’ the joy and excitement made it really fun for me to hear it and it felt good that I could play a small part in getting them that opportunity.”
If you have a story suggestion for the “Rooted” series, send Matt an email at [email protected]
