Douglas Coupland's first original produced screenplay is laden with clichéd stereotypes about Vancouver, from grow ops in comfortable suburban homes to Asian-based mafia types running money-laundering scams.

Despite the typecasting, though, Everything's Gone Green is undeniably written as a love letter to the West Coast writer's hometown.

Framed by the beauty of Vancouver's lush forests, sprawling mountains, and vibrant ocean, the film uses the city not only as its backdrop but as its vehicle.

"I'm a Torontonian and to do a film that's so clearly a love letter to Vancouver, it was really nice," Everything's Gone Green director Paul Fox told CTV.ca.

"I think that everyone -- no matter where you're from -- always thinks your hometown is the best place to live in. But damn it, Vancouver is. Take that Melbourne, take that Zurich, Toronto," Coupland told eTalk.

"What's interesting in Doug's work is that he loves the city so much that there is this kind of real romanticized vision of the city that I had not seen in anything before. We are so used to seeing the cop shows of Vancouver and the gritty slices of life on the downtown Eastside," said Fox, who turned heads last year with his horror flick The Dark Hours.

Following the template of most of Coupland's novels, Everything's Gone Green is a dry coming-of-age comedy that follows the travails of a likable nearly-30 wastrel who loses his girlfriend and his job on the same day after his bosses find suicidal poetry on his hard drive.

Brampton, Ont.-born actor Paolo Costanzo (Michael on NBC's "Joey") stars as Ryan, a thoughtful slacker who is tempted into a money-laundering scheme that seems too easy to be true.

Though the scam provides him the cash to buy a canary-yellow Mustang and the affections of a buxom blonde who secretly broadcasts their coital romps online, he struggles with his ill-gotten gains.

Saskatoon's Steph Song plays Ryan's love interest Ming, the alluring set designer whose complicity in the shady business of her boyfriend, played by Vancouver's JR Bourne, shakes Ryan to the core.

But for Coupland, the film's real superstar is his hometown of Vancouver.

"A lot of the forces that are changing society right now around the world, like Asia, drug law enforcement, the creation of products like computer games or entertainment, it's all really exploding in Vancouver -- so it's almost like a crystallization of what's happening elsewhere," said Coupland, 44, whose first novel Generation X continues to serve as the slacker bible.

"Obviously, we make, like, a million things here that are set in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, whatever, but we never seem to actually make anything set here. (The screenplay) took a lot of the city's idiosyncrasies and sort of wove them into the plot,'' Coupland recently told The Canadian Press.

"The dominance of pot culture, Asian culture, real estate culture, obviously the weather and eco-tourism and film and TV," he said.

The biggest challenge was shooting a film that was so dependent on the beauty of the city's natural environment, Fox said.

"To get a sense of the tapestry of Vancouver, the film couldn't be shot in one or two locations -- we really needed a broad canvas and so we moved around a lot," he said.

It's not the first time Coupland opened his door to the film industry. Years ago, he and a friend co-wrote a script that was bought by Disney but never developed. His book Generation X was purchased by Sophia Coppola's company, but the one-year option has since expired. The adaptation of his novel All Families are Psychotic is to be produced by DreamWorks Pictures but another writer created the screenplay.

Coupland wrote the screenplay for Everything's Gone Green some eight years ago at the request of a filmmaker friend who lamented the dearth of local material.

But it stayed in his drawer until he received a call from Toronto-based Radke Film Group.

It's the first feature film for both the TV-advertising production company, and Chris Nanos, who joined the firm to lead its budding feature-film division.

Nanos and his partners decided to cold-call a list of people who had made their name in creative fields. Coupland was on that list, and the rest is history.

Once Radke Film Group decided to produce the film, they found their Vancouver partner in Saltspring Island's True West Films, the Canadian half of the international co-production team behind It's All Gone Peter Tong.

Fox says Nanos called him up one day to send him the script.

After presenting his point of view, the next thing he knew, "I was attached to it," he said.

"What I liked about it was that it was funny, but it wasn't like Dude, Where's my Car?" Fox said.

He was nervous, he says, that Coupland would saunter onto the set and declare "This is all wrong," he said.

That never happened.

"Doug steered clear once we got shooting. When he did visit the set, he would kind of look around a room, and say 'This is like stepping into my own brain.' It was quite gratifying for him to come and see we were doing him justice."

In fact, it wasn't a happy accident. Fox and his production designer co-opted some of Coupland's home and sculptural ideas into Ryan's condo.

"Once we knew that Ryan's backstory was probably that he was an art student or a graduate of (B.C.'s) Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, it made sense that he was a photographer but his home would also have things he is building and playing with and constructing," Fox said.

"So we definitely used a lot of Doug's own sculptural style in Ryan's apartment," he said.

For example, the sculptures of stacked plastic patio chairs wrapped in plastic in Ryan's apartment are almost an exact replica of Coupland's work, Fox said.

Indeed, though Coupland has made his name exploring a generation of slackers, he is anything but.

The author of Microserfs, Shampoo Planet, Eleanor Rigby, Souvenir of Canada and Terry, a moving pictorial history of Terry Fox, he has also written a play that was performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon, England. Coupland, also an acclaimed sculptor and visual artist, recently returned to Vancouver after launching a new show at Phyllis Lambert's Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Everything's Gone Green makes its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in the rest of the country in late October.