It's been a long wait for a megastudio in Toronto, and the city's production community will have to hang on at least two more years, according to the head of the proposed FilmPort studio, who alludes to more news forthcoming about the project.

Toronto Film Studios president Ken Ferguson behaves as though he would love to divulge the latest details about FilmPort, the much-ballyhooed megastudio to be built in Toronto's dilapidated Port Lands area. He hints and he hums and he haws that he has good news. "We have an announcement coming soon, but it's a bit premature," he sighs.

What he will say to skeptics who wonder if the studio will ever actually happen is that, yes, FilmPort is still a go. The shovel is scheduled to hit the dirt in the fall, and, early in 2008, a year later than previously projected, the doors are set to open at the highly anticipated, hotly contested and oft-delayed megastudio that Toronto so desperately needs to lure Hollywood blockbusters.

"More than ever, Toronto needs FilmPort," says Paul Bronfman, chair and CEO of production services conglomerate The Comweb Group. "It's going to happen, but it's taking Sam Reisman [CEO of Rose Corporation, TFS' parent company] and Ken Ferguson a little longer than anticipated."

Bronfman and partner Paul Vaughan were until recently associated with a parallel project, Great Lakes Studios, a retrofit of the nearby RL Hearn power station. Leaky roof and all, that facility at least managed to open for business, hosting Paramount's Save the Last Dance 2: Stepping Up and the Don Carmody-produced horror flick Skinwalkers. But now there's talk of facility owner Ontario Power Generation starting up the old machinery to make electricity again, and in late June Vaughan walked away from the project, and with him so has Bronfman.

In a surprise twist, Bronfman reports that he's in talks with Ferguson and Reisman to join forces on FilmPort.

"There is a chance that Comweb will be a partner in that project," he says. "I'm focusing on that, as opposed to trying to salvage something from the Hearn. I don't want to jinx it, but I'm not out-of-school in saying Sam and Ken and I are discussing our involvement. We'd like to be involved with them. We just have to work out the deal."

That deal is now known as FilmPort Phase One - 260,000 square feet of studio space covering 11 acres of Port Lands in southeast Toronto, with seven soundstages and a 45,000-square-foot clear space. Quadrangle Architects of Toronto is handling the design, and in addition to Comweb and Rose Corp., other potential partners include ROI, which recently invested $3.4 million in TFS. The Phase One price tag is $45 million.

A megastudio for Toronto has now been in the works for so long that Ferguson understands why many in the industry are cynical about it ever really getting off the ground.

"It's just a very difficult project to do, and there's a lot of people whose livelihood is dependent on the soundstages, so it's frustrating for people to hear these announcements and not see something happen," he acknowledges.

Aborted plans for a megastudio go as far back as a decade, with Norman Jewison's name attached to a proposal linked to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. Another no-go was to be located in Downsview, and Alliance Atlantis was rumored to be attached to yet another plan.

The present site, fingered by the City of Toronto Economic Development Corporation and former mayor Mel Lastman, has been the host to a number of false starts. The U.K.'s Pinewood Shepperton and Sequence Development Group won the initial bid, and then pulled out in 2003. When Vaughan and Bronfman began work on the nearby Hearn retrofit, many speculated that the Toronto market couldn't sustain two megastudios.

Meanwhile, FilmPort was announced with great fanfare after TFS bagged the bid in 2004. It is slated to be a sprawling $175-million, 30-acre facility to include 13 soundstages totaling 1.25 million square feet, streetscapes for exterior lensing and a set for underwater filming, as well as living, working and retail space. British architect Will Alsop, known for his work on the Ontario College of Art's unusual building-on-stilts, has been associated with the "outside the gate" design, but Ferguson calls that a "secondary priority" to Phase One.

"We've sort of stopped promising, and action speaks louder than words," he says. "When we put a shovel in the ground, that'll be the best statement that we can make that it's going to happen."

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