I Screen Studies

Three stories from different newspapers/magazines, all dated 5 June 2008, each illustrating an aspect of the spread of film and television production around the world. Massachusetts is booming on the back of a 25% tax credit, Belfast is also on the rise as a location and hoping recent activity will lead to more work in future, while Geoffrey Macnab documents the migration of British co-productions to other parts of Europe.

First, the New York Times reports on the boom in Massachusetts which is almost entirely due to the introduction of a new tax credit Lights, Camera, Tax Credit: Massachusetts Lures Filmmakers With Generous Rebates’.

Since last July, when Gov. Deval L. Patrick signed into law a 25 percent film tax credit, a wave of major film projects has landed in Massachusetts. The legislation was part of a fierce competition among a growing number of states to entice Hollywood to make films within their borders.

In April, both New York and Michigan raised the ante with generous rebate plans, with Michigan raising its tax credit to 42 percent. And in May, California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, urged legislators in his state to enhance its tax credit in hopes of keeping Hollywood in Hollywood. Nearly all 50 states have instituted film tax credits in recent years.

The article notes that a number of Massachusetts legislators have criticised the tax credit, but none are interviewed or quoted. This is hardly a balanced report; there is no consideration of the long-term consequences or costs of maintaining such a level of production over the long term, and no real discussion of the case put by those against the credit.

More space is given to the Massachusetts Film Office’s positive spin on the credit, with the claim that ‘direct new film-based revenue’ rose from $6m in the year before the tax credit was introduced, to $545m ’since 2006′.

Since January, multiple productions were shooting simultaneously in and around the Boston area. Besides “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” starring the comic actor Kevin James, Martin Scorsese was directing Leonardo DiCaprio in “Ashecliffe”; Ricky Gervais, the British comic actor, was directing and starring in his first feature film, “This Side of the Truth,” on the streets of Lowell. Sandra Bullock was filming “The Proposal” in Rockport and Gloucester; and Matthew McConaughey was filming “The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” in Boston. Because of the weak dollar, foreign filmmakers are also heading to Massachusetts to take advantage of what could amount to a 50 cent rebate on every dollar spent.

The film commissioner emphasises the benefits to small film-related businesses and ancillary service providers – casting agents, equipment providers, carpenters and builders, hairstylists, hotels, restaurants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was these small businesses and service providers that lobbied hardest for the tax credit having learned from the experience of other states, especially Louisiana.

In fact, it was a coalition of small business owners like Ms. Peri that persuaded the commonwealth to pass the aggressive tax credit. In late 2004, the group, lead by Joe Maiella, senior vice president of CrewStar, a small firm that offers payroll services and other crew-related services for film productions, made the case that Massachusetts was missing a lucrative opportunity.

With its pristine shoreline, diverse geographies, and historic cities and towns, the state had natural appeal. Tourism is a major economic driver, and a starring role in a feature film means millions of dollars worth of free advertising for the state.

“Massachusetts was not even on the radar map in attracting this level of film production,” Mr. Maiella said. “We recognized that we had to coalesce the industry here to achieve a number of initiatives. We used models from other states, particularly Louisiana, to draft a bill that we knew would work.”

The initial bill put a $7 million limit on the tax credit, which effectively kept big film projects away. Under the coalition’s prodding, Governor Patrick removed the cap last July, increased the credit to 25 percent from 20 percent and offered motion picture producers flexibility in how they took advantage of the credit.

The big questions are: how sustainable is the production boom, and can enough sufficiently qualified and skilled crew and service providers be sought locally to meet as much as possible of the films’ needs and avoid the need to fly in expertise or resources? The article mentions very briefly close to the end a number of education and training programs being organised by the state government, but there is no discussion of how this is being coordinated with industry, or what the long-term, local prospects for the products of these programs will be.

Sandra Peri, the Boston casting agent whose image and story provide the way in to this article about Massachusetts, has the last telling words:

“It’s about the money,” Ms. Peri acknowledges. “If they can get 42 percent rebate in Michigan, they’ll just pack up and find a way to make Michigan look like Paris.”

The second article is a non-bylined piece from The Economist which describes the recent boom in production in Belfast: ‘Belfast: The Film Set’. The report describes recent films made in the cavernous paint hall at the Harland and Wolf shipbuilding facility, including City of Ember with Bill Murray. Again, and unsurprisingly given the publication’s primary interest, the focus is on the economics of production and the ‘return’ on the local film commission’s ‘investment’:

The hall comfortably held the throng of extras backing Bill Murray last autumn in a children’s fantasy called “City of Ember”, due for release in October. The producers spent £9.3m ($18.2m) in 14 weeks in and around Belfast. Northern Ireland Screen, a government body which promotes the region to film-makers, thought that a good return on the £800,000 it provided. The film was shot entirely in the paint hall, which triumphed over bids from Prague and Berlin, among other places.

The article does though contain a fabulous closing remark which emphasises the positive ways in which film production can transform the image and stories of a place:

But many films now make Belfast a backdrop for stories other than its own—and are changing that story in the process.

This quality, of being able to host ’stories other than its own’, is essential for any place that is not a major metropolis with a longstanding history and tradition of production. If a place harbours desires to host film and television production over the long-term, it must welcome this ‘cloaking’. This reminded me of a piece I read a week or two ago in the Courier Mail by Phil Bartsch, about the filming of a new police drama called The Strip on the Gold Coast in which it is almost a relief for the Coast to be playing itself… as a hotbed of crime and corruption. “…at long last, the Glitter Strip can be itself”, Bartsch writes. Another Gold Coast-shot series that is also set there, The Wateries (about water police), similarly focuses on the Coast ‘as itself’, and as a hotbed of crime and corruption.

The third article, ‘The Big Exodus: Is the British Film Industry in Crisis?‘ is by Geoffrey Macnab and published in The Independent. This article tells the migrating media story from the perspective of a place/industry that is (or rather perceives itself to be) ‘losing’ production to other locations around the world. For once, this story is not about Los Angeles. Another great quote, as Macnab expresses surprise that the shooting of Stephen Daldry’s new film The Reader took place in Germany:

Even though the action is set in Germany, one would have expected the film to be shot in a British Studio.

Note the capitalisation of ‘British Studio’. This may have been a sub-editorial addition, but whether it was intentional or not it suggests a sense of British superiority which the author assumes his readers share, but which he has not himself expressed. ‘One’ here is a neat distancing from the authorial ‘I’. It suggests a collective, while providing an escape for the writer unwilling to stake a position. ‘I would have expected the film to be shot in a British studio’ is a much more arrogant and ignorant way of putting this. Why would anyone expect this to be shot in Britain? Such certainty is most un-film-like. And yet just a couple of years ago, production in Britain was at record levels.The point in Macnab’s piece is that despite a competitive, attractive tax credit – 16% for productions budgeted to spend over 20 million pounds in the UK (low budget blockbusters upwards), 20% for lower budgeted films – and a long and distinguished filmmaking tradition and reputation, Britain is not able to draw and retain the largest of films in the way it used to do precisely because the credit ties the fortunes of many in the British film industry to Hollywood. In times of economic difficulty, Hollywood studios traditionally retract to Los Angeles, and production tends to follow. The big questions not only for Britain but also for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, South Africa are: Is this a cycle or a permanent change? Have the transformations in the system of international film and television production which have spread more and more of that production around the world changed the system sufficiently to maintain so many new production centres? Will the flow of migrating projects be maintained by current levels of subvention and state assistance? And can local production fill any gap?

The British industry remains susceptible to whatever ailments infect the US studios. “When Hollywood sneezes, the global film industry catches cold,” is how British Film Commissioner Colin Brown characterises the relationship between the US majors and the rest of the world. In April, Britain’s flagship studios Pinewood-Shepperton announced a 26 per cent fall in pre-tax profits in 2007, to $10.58m (£5.3m). The irony is that the British Government has gone to great lengths to cater to the Hollywood studios.

“The UK tax credit is a very generous system …but it’s a pity that it favours principally the US studios,” comments one British producer who is now doing his film-making in Germany.

If Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt make a Hollywood movie in Pinewood or Shepperton, they are subsidised by the Treasury. If Ralph Fiennes stars in a British-financed film that shoots in Africa, the producer is unlikely to get anything. According to current rules, such movies as David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago wouldn’t qualify for the full UK tax credit.

“The failure of the legislation (for the UK film tax credit) is to make it useful for a broader, independent community that would provide a continuous and consistent throughput of work for people in all areas of the industry,” suggests Mike Downey of the perceived bias toward Hollywood.

And the article also answered a question I remember asking myself when I was young, ‘If my name was Zowie Bowie or Moon Unit Zappa, would I change it?’ Zowie Bowie is now Duncan Jones, film director, currently making Moon at Shepperton.