Shoot In California Blog RSS
The Film Works blog just broke news about the newest report on the California Film & Television Tax Credit program. The report, from UCLA and the Headway project, is available in the Report Library of this site under California. I strongly recommend everyone read the actual report in full. From the Film Works article:...
It’s time for California to wake up. California is under attack. In the late 1990′s, Canada devised generous film incentives in the form of tax credits as a weapon to wage economic war on the U.S. in an attempt to capture one of the planet’s most valuable and prized industries: the U.S. motion picture...
There is a fantastic post on the Film Works blog that has a fairly detailed breakdown of the major expenditures of a major film production that spent $20.2 million over 93 days shooting in Los Angeles in 2009. Here is a sample of the itemized expenditures: Hotel room days: 213 $66,061 Car rental days:...
Below is the first half of the Film Works campaign’s analysis of the brand new LAEDC study on the economic impact of the California film incentive. It is quite thorough and is a honest appraisal of the report, which some people are attempting to spin as showing a positive return on investment for the...
There is a general consensus that producers, studios and filmmakers who take advantage of generous film incentives are not to blame for runaway production, but rather the underlying incentive. Filmmaking is a highly competitive business and the stakes are huge. Most films lose money, and one big-budget flop can sink a studio. If a...
The brief interview below made me gasp at the end, when I heard how much money this one motion picture catering business in Los Angeles spends at just one of its many vendors, who are also in California. I think this highlights the very real danger to California from runaway production. The losses and...
A total of five annual reports about the New York state film incentive program from the NY Dept. of Taxation & Finance have been added to the Report Library. In addition to these reports, I also added the January 2011 “Progress Report” from the California Film Commission as well as a 2007 report on...
Three recently released articles published by the Film Works L.A. campaign in California are well worth reading…. The first article, Part One: “The Clear and Present Danger” of Runaway Production to California, is the first of a two-part story about the threat of runaway production to California (and therefore the nation in the long run)...
It’s about time. And the timing could not be better. As state film incentives across the nation begin to recede and California’s own incenitve shows more proof that filmmakers prefer to stay in California to take advantage of its overwhelming talent base and infrastructure if they have the chance comes this unveiling today….”Film Works...
Thanks to politically active Santa Barbara doctoral student Lauren Copeland for sending the following story about the “California Cows” commercial controversy, which I covered HERE and HERE. In what should have been a “no-duh”, California is about to pass a bill that requires state tourism and agriculture commercials to shoot in California. Why is...
I’ve never had much respect for USA Today, but their August 2 article about the film industry in Louisiana made me cringe. It’s rife with problems…. Let’s start with the article’s second & third sentences: In the 1990s, filmmakers often traveled to Canada. But that eventually became less fashionable, and these days the industry...
I’ve been posting quite a bit about California lately and new numbers coming out about the effectiveness of the states one-year-old film incentive, which is rather modest. And certainly, while I have called the modesty of the California film incentive a pretty smart move, I have also written about tweaks to the program that...
The Santa Monica-based Milken Institute, an “independent economic think tank”, released an excellent “must read” report on how runaway production is impacting California called “Film Flight: Lost Production and its Economic Impact on California”. The 46-page report has been added to the Report Library HERE. I thought the report was excellent and well worth...
There was a significant report released last week by FilmL.A. First, I want to say a few things about FilmL.A. As far as I am concerned, they are the gold standard for how industry-community relations should be handled. The film production reports produced by FilmL.A. are an exquisite source of information, the accuracy of...
Bob Poole’s June 29 article in the Los Angeles Times caught my attention. Framed as an nostalgic issue of the Hollywood “landmark” being demolished in favor of development company behind movie studios in New Mexico and elswhere and, therefore, partly responsible for runaway production, the owners of the stand seem to have an emotionallly...
Rather than making the previous entry on this issue even longer, I elected to put my most recent exchange with Mr. Hiltzik in a shorter post. If you have not read the earlier post and exchange, please do so as this is a continuation thereof. This has proven to be a wonderful exchange and...
UPDATE: Micheal Hiltzik sent me an email this morning in response to my post below. His email and my response are at the end of this post. Ed Gutentag’s “Shoot Movies in California Blog” had an interesting post about a recent column in the June 16th edition of the Los Angeles Times by Michael...
Below is an excellent commercial produced by Brian Bedell for the Shoot Movies in California organization. In addition to being very funny (especially the last sip of coffee), I think this commercial is brilliant for recognizing the ignorance or apathy of many Americans not working in the entertainment industry. It’s not that these people...
Below is the promotional video produced by the Illinois Film Office. Several states have done these now and I have yet to see a bad one. The short made by the California Film Commission about the devastating impacts of runaway production on the state is sobering and heartfelt, not to mention its also somewhat...
Roger Moore’s blog at The Orlando Sentinel had an interesting post on June 4th titled “Marmaduke, Killers and the case FOR ‘Runaway Production.’” Moore seems to suggest that “Marmaduke” sucked because it was “lazily” shot in Southern California and may have been less offensive to him had it been filmed in Kansas without sucking...
Variety.com – H'w'd and D.C.