Pictured above: Jon Montgomery made his way down Russell’s Main Street as a crowd followed him under the arches for the beginning shots of the fifth episode of The Amazing Race Canada on CTV.
If you were lucky enough to be in on the filming of The Amazing Race Canada on Russell’s Main Street in May, you might have been a little surprised to see how many ‘takes’ are necessary to make everything you see on your television absolutely perfect to take to air.
Still, few people won’t have any idea of how much work was done behind the scenes in preparation for the arrival of the crews from CTV and Insight Productions.
While they’re both hesitant to take credit, the work done by Wes Anderson (town councillor, Emergency Measures coordinator and all-round marketing guru for this area) and Adrienne Falloon (Planning and Development Officer for Tri Roads Planning District and mom extraordinaire) were right there from the very beginning.
While it was something that Jon Montgomery had pushed for-shooting an episode of The Amazing Race Canada - which Jon has hosted for ten seasons - his wish to showcase Russell and area came true in November of last year, Wes Anderson explained.
“Over the years, Jon has really wanted to bring The Amazing Race Canada back home to Russell, so back in November of 2023, we were approached by The Amazing Race Canada’s executive producer Mark Lysakowski.”
Anderson then spent a day in November touring Lysakowski around the area, scouting for possible sites. “We went to look at every nook and cranny showing him all the wonderful sites in this area,” Anderson explained. From there, there were four or five site visits from other members of the CTV team.
“They came back with ‘all these sites are really cool and they all work with we want to do and we love the fact that we have an airport one minute from the hotel where we can land and start and make this just one heck of an episode about Jon’s hometown’”.
“Then they came here and all of them were just blown away by the hospitality of our town and our people.” The only catch, Anderson said was that in an effort to ensure no contestants would know plans for their stops, everything had to be kept entirely secret. (That same level of secrecy still holds until after the episode airs.) We’ll be able to talk more in depth about the specifics of what organizations who worked so hard to bring this together in our coverage of the viewing party at the Geo. P. Buleziuk Centre (date to follow) starting at 6 pm in time for CTV’s 8 pm episode featuring Russell.
The next step, Anderson said, was finding a local production coordinator who could organize the whole thing from the ground up. That decision, Anderson said, was easy. As a town councillor, he’s worked with Adrienne Falloon for years and knew automatically that she would be the perfect choice. The only slight hick up was that Adrienne was still on maternity leave from her position as Planning and Development Officer for Tri Roads. But with lots of family support, that wasn’t an issue at all. “I told them, ‘I have one perfect person for this that you need to pitch this idea to so she’ll take the job,’” Wes said. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“Wes texted me one morning and said ‘Hey, this person’s going to reach out to you about something that’s really interesting. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s not a scam’,” Adrienne Falloon said with a laugh. From there, the highly secretive mission was on. The clandestine video chats between Adrienne, Wes and the production crews began there. “They sent me an email and the next day I jumped on a Zoom chat,” Adrienne said. “I was still on maternity leave and I was feeding Walker a bottle and they were asking ‘is that a baby I hear?’”. “They were all really cool and easy to work with so it really was a fantastic experience.” From there, came the very secret scouting mission for the eighty or so area people it would take to make this work. “For everything from transportation to preparation and cataloguing of costumes for each of the contestants and preparation and delivery of snacks to all the locations, it took a lot of people,” Wes said. “And everyone - the production teams and the contestants - were just blown away by how welcoming and friendly everyone was,” Adrienne added. They asked if everyone was like this because this was Jon’s hometown but we told them all that this is just how it is here, we work together and get everything done not matter what it is.”
Along all those months, right up the day that the production crew came to town, there was a tremendous amount of planning and secretive work that had to be done. “We needed so many different rental vehicles to be picked up in Winnipeg and Brandon and brought back here,” Adrienne explained. “And everyone was so wonderful and so accommodating and they managed to keep it secret too.” Pulling out a booklet given to the production crew, Adrienne pointed out the meticulous scheduling for each of the crew members and the contestants. “Everything was scheduled right down the minute,” she said. “Their transportation coordinator Ron knew where everyone had to be at all times.” “It really was incredible to watch him pacing around and thinking, making sure that everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be.”
As always, lining up people to work at the various set locations was not an issue, Wes Anderson stressed. “There were so many people who did so much work behind the scenes for months,” he said. “Tyla Betke and Taneal Semeniuk and their crew had to create a routine with music perfectly recorded on a loop and timed right down to the second. “They and their entire crew worked so hard for so long to create what really was one of the main focal points of the episode.” Both Wes and Adrienne said that the production teams and the contestants were struck by the fact that because we were in a small town – where everyone knows who to contact to make things work easily and quickly – so many aspects of the production went so smoothly. “We’d be having a Zoom meeting about how to get something done and we’d always know who to go to in order to make it happen,” Wes said. “And I think they were really impressed by the fact that in a small town, things really do happen much faster because of that.”
One of the first examples of that, came right as the contestants landed at the airport just to the west of town. There, several members of the local RCMP and Fire Department showed up and blocked off Highway 16, allowing the contestants to cross safely. Later, as the action moved into town, those same RCMP members showed up in red serge to represent our area in true Canadian style. All of that, came together for what was truly memorable event for everyone. The contestants – and all of the crew members, both Anderson and Falloon said, were absolutely thrilled and raving about Russell. “Every one of the contestants told us that so far, Russell was by far the best stop they’d made,” Adrienne said. “And that was great to hear because we know that they and production crew will be talking about this place for a while.”
With that, Wes said, there needed to be a keepsake for everyone to take home. “The municipality decided we needed to have a keepsake from us,” Wes added. “So we asked Jeremy Ewbank from Never Better Studios what he might be able to do for us and he came up baseball caps with our name on it and had about 60 of them done in a day.” “And they really loved all the O’Lifty’s swag too.” For all the secrecy behind the production – and even now as the Russell episode sets to air - Jon let the proverbial ‘cat’ a wee bit out of the bag, last week. As he so often does, he mentioned his love for his hometown of Russell in glowing terms on a recent episode of CTV’s The Social. After being asked by the hosts for a bit of a hint on where The Amazing Race Canada’s 10th season might be taking us, Jon reacted with his customary praise for Russell. “We’re going to more amazing places. To one of my favorites (places) in the entire world,” Jon told the hosts. “Can anybody imagine where that would be?,” Jon asked the crowd. “It’s Russell, Manitoba. It’s my hometown - a community of 1,632 peopleish’ – we don’t have exact tabs but we know everyone in town and we know where they live. I get to go where I was born and raised and spent 18 years of my life.” “We get to explore there and show everyone in the rest of Canada.” Keeping the secret close, Jon did not reveal the timing of the episode. But we can now. Before the shooting of the episode in Russell even ended, the planning was afoot. Jon - and the rest of the folks here who had worked so hard to make this happen, wanted the celebration to include everyone with a viewing party. Jon will be here for the family fun BBQ leading up to the live CTV episode at 8 pm. Stay tuned for our next issue for an update on the actual date of our The Amazing Race Canada block party.