There is precisely one person in the stark Venn diagram of people whom Joe Rogan and I have both interviewed. It’s British Columbia-born Edmonton film producer Adam Scorgie of Score G Productions. He’s a documentary filmmaker with credits that include the likes of Danny Trejo, Michael Bisping and soon-to-be Dolph Lundgren. He has covered topics in his films such as the legalization of marijuana, the role of enforcers in hockey and the lives of actors and athletes. He has a new true-crime documentary directed by Calgarian Guillaume Carlier about late Canadian boxing legend Arturo Gatti. But the most exciting thing to me about Scorgie is his different perspective on success in the film business.
Across from me in Remedy Cafe, Scorgie taps the table. He keeps coming back to the same idea: “Learn the business side of things.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Understand the budgets, understand the tax credits.” Tap. Tap. He looks right at me like he knows what I need to hear. “If you’re producing out of Alberta, and you don’t understand how to use the film and television tax credits? Good luck.” Tap. Tap. The finality of the last tap adds the necessary drama to frame this idea, that Alberta has something more valuable than most Hollywood producers can provide — risk mitigation.
Alberta tax credits have increased steadily over the last couple of years. In the wake of major productions like The Last of Us and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the province has recently decided to keep stacking those numbers up, with the 2023 budget boasting an increase of $100 million over three years. “That’s how we survive. We don’t make movies without that,” Scorgie says again. In addition to these provincial tax incentives, which offer refundable tax credits of up to 30 per cent on production costs, the federal tax credit offers up to 25 per cent and a slurry of various grants and funding from the provincial and federal governments. It’s easier than ever before to get money for a movie. But how does that stack up against Hollywood?
Scorgie says there is a clog of content jamming up the gears of the film industry. Globally, more productions are being made than ever before, many of which are trying to sell to the same buyers — buyers like Universal Pictures, to whom Scorgie has sold back-to-back productions. What makes Scorgie’s films so valuable to titans like Universal and local broadcasters like Super Channel is how much cost he can mitigate, which increases how much profit they can make overall.
Scorgie explains that if he has a budget of $800,000 and follows the rules right, he’s got $400,000 coming back to him in tax credits. If he gets the right grants, he’s got even more covered. Then, to pay his team, pay himself, and make a profit, he only has to cover a tiny margin. This means big broadcasters can spend less and still give the same profits to studios. “When you do it the American way, they just go borrow a million dollars, and then they have to get a million dollars plus interest to break even,” says Scorgie. But Albertans can create value by mitigating costs with tax credits, giving us an edge over Hollywood. But it’s important to keep in mind that Alberta is now competing with a global film market trying to absorb some of the saturation bleeding out of film Meccas like Hollywood, New York and London. So guys like Scorgie still need to be tight on budgets and create commercial appeal.
In addition to what he calls the lifeblood of the Alberta film industry, Scorgie credits his successes to his overall strategy and ethos on filmmaking, which is both blue-collar and business savvy. “I do open budgets with my team,” he says, contrasting against Hollywood producers who often don’t disclose budgets. But this gets his team out of the dark and into a problem-solving workflow, which Scorgie says is something he looks for in collaborators.
Scorgie also capitalizes on the current “Golden Age of Documentaries” by producing high-quality projects at lower costs (thanks to digital technologies) than typical feature films. “When we do a doc, we always try to do something that already has a big built-in audience that is going to bring people there,” and his strategy pays off. Combining all these factors, from cost mitigation with credits/grants, open budgets, and a winning formula for driving interest, he ends up with a business model that simply works. At the end of the day, the folks at Score G Productions aren’t taking millions to the bank, and they aren’t buying mansions and supercars, but they are producing world-class films and making good livings for themselves and their families.
The first real film guy I’d ever met was the Edmonton-born Hollywood cinematographer Barry Peterson. I was an 11-year-old munchkin at the time, and his son and I were friends through hockey and school. I remember their multimillion-dollar house on Westbrook Drive, with its enormous ceilings and personal movie theatre. In that theatre were the posters of all these major Hollywood productions he’d been a part of, like Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch, and Jumper. We’d hang out and play Call of Duty and other violent video games on that larger-than-life screen. I also remember the day the whole family packed up and moved house back to a beachy paradise in California, closer to Barry’s work. I never saw the Petersons again after that.
But then, over a decade later, the next major film guy I meet is Scorgie, and he’s not about the California sunshine. He’s about the grindstone hustle of the up-and-booming Alberta film and television scene. He started in a similar place as Peterson, just a bit later and closer to when Canada would kickstart its film industry with tax incentives and grants. But they both shared the same goal: finding a way to make it in the movie business. Fresh out of film school in New York, Scorgie could have bombed out to his own beachy paradise in California and tried to do what Peterson did about 10 years before him: find breakthrough success with a major director. Instead, he came back to Canada and found a different way to do this business. Something closer to home, not just in location but also in mentality.
Check out Scorgie and Score G Productions’ next film from director Guillaume Carlier. Thunder: The Life and Death of Arturo Gatti makes its Edmonton premiere on May 3 at the Metro Cinema and airs on Super Channel on May 14.
