Foreign production has gone flat in Montreal this summer, having hit what appears to be not one, but two roadblocks put up by the APFTQ.

Hollywood has balked at shooting in la belle province, say sources, because of the $14,000 entry fee put up by the Quebec producers association and to protest its ongoing efforts to represent U.S. film and TV shoots.

The long-running turf war reached a new stage late last month as Hollywood moved to block an application before Quebec's labor tribunal that, if approved, would hand exclusive bargaining rights for all film and TV shoots in the province to the APFTQ.

Slow summer in Montreal

The dispute "is a preoccupation for everyone working in Montreal," says Fortner Anderson, business agent for the Directors Guild of Canada's district council in Quebec.

The standoff has made for a very slow summer in Montreal, which has hosted only a handful of service shoots this year, while Toronto and Vancouver, bouncing back from last year's Canada-wide slump, are bursting at the seams.

The few studio projects in Montreal so far this year include Lucky Number Slevin, which shot during the winter with Bruce Willis and Josh Hartnett, and The Last Kiss starring Zach Braff. Vincent Perez is also currently directing David Duchovny and Lili Taylor in The Secret.

Montreal is used to hosting at least one would-be blockbuster per year - something on par with The Sum of All Fears, The Day After Tomorrow or The Aviator. This year's pictures are more modest.

Toronto and Vancouver, meanwhile, are hosting the new X-Men, the Michael Douglas thriller The Sentinel, the videogame adaptations Dungeon Siege and Silent Hill, and the cop story 16 Blocks, again with Willis.

Montreal studio operator Michel Trudel of Mel's Cité du Cinéma insists that the major studios simply went elsewhere on creative grounds.

"They found the location they needed in another city," he says.

But privately, studio and producer reps insist that Hollywood wants to stop the APFTQ from taking control of production rates in Quebec. They fear the APFTQ wants to stop the major studios from paying higher fees for experienced actors and technical crews - fees that local producers feel hard-pressed to match.

"The studios love Montreal. But they're upset and they want to make a point that they want to control their own house," says one Toronto-based production executive.

Quebec's labor tribunal, the Commission de reconnaissance des associations d'artistes et des associations de producteurs, is considering the APFTQ's application. Quebec is alone among the provinces in having laws that grant collective bargaining rights to self-employed artists, and the CRAAAP has jurisdiction over workplace rates and conditions for provincial film workers.

The Alliance of Motion Picture Television Producers, which represents U.S. studios, was recently to appear before the CRAAAP tribunal to oppose the APFTQ's application, but that hearing has now been postponed to late-November.