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The entertainment community in Hollywood and the Big Apple is expressing relief today that New York state has renewed the 30% tax credit on film and television production for another 5 years through 2015. The NYS budget passed last night and newly signed allocates $2.1 billion to the program, with $420 million given out each annum. There’s also $7 million a year set aside for New York-based the post-production and editing industry. Passage of the program came down to the wire: about 18 months ago, Fox’s Fringe packed up and moved to Vancouver because the existing program of NY tax credits was too successful and ran out of funds. More money was sprung for it, but uncertainty lingered over whether the program would be funded long-term so reportedly TV producers sought out other locales with tax incentives. SAG’s National Director of Government Relations and Policy Nancy Fox said, “Lawmakers recognized that these tax credits have been a great boon for the local economy, providing incentives that created thousands of jobs for New York actors, crew members, and other workers affiliated with the entertainment industry. We are extremely grateful to Governor Paterson, Senate Leader Senator Sampson, Speaker Silver and the other legislators who have maintained their support for this program throughout the extended budget approval process.”
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California, take notice! Watch for a ton of production to leave once again and take NY by storm! Happy for NY’ers, they deserve it, but Hollywood workers will suffer.
Great news. This will generate a lot of jobs (and tourists love visiting NYC where all those scenes are shot). Gov Paterson has taken a lot of heat lately, but any politician making the tough decisions always takes heat. This is a win for NYC.
FINALLY!
Wait a minute! Aren’t film studios and producers the “rich people” we keep hearing about? They shouldn’t get any tax breaks. You mean if we give “rich people” tax breaks, they’ll create more jobs for non-rich people. I’ve never heard such craziness.
Now hold on there: Studios are a resource collective of overlapping crafts and talents required to make movies in controlled spaces for best lighting and sound capture of performances. Producers are the general contractors who schedule and rent studio space to make pictures on behalf of investors, talent, and distribution companies. Distribution companies own delivery contracts to theaters and all other channels of motion picture entertainment. The money paid by a consumer goes to the channel, which takes a cut and hands that to the distributor, who does the accounting and then maybe pays the producer. Net revenue positive for a production company is very rare after distribution and channel costs and profit margins are deducted. With over 6,000 US feature films produced every year, just under 600 actually see theatrical release, with a majority assigned to film vaults around the country to be tracked by attorneys for the creditors and investors in a film production. Most producers I know are more likely to be living out of their beat-up used cars than living it up in Brentwood, CA. Just ask Peter Jackson where his earnings are from the just the US release of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes, the greed of the few and the powerful overshadows the hard work of the real film makers around the world. Just ask Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp if he really makes movies.
While the more conservative economic pulpiteers, from the Forbesian Fox folks to the daily CNBC jockeys, hawk the notion of trickle-down when it comes to tax breaks for the wealthy, I have always had difficulty finding the benefits for those who are in the middle class (which I’ll arbitrarily cap at $250,000). .
Job creation effected by tax breaks? I certainly haven’t seen it on a large scale. Nor have the numbers from Bush II through Obama documented such job increases. So I agree with dtruth27
But I have seen (and realized) jobs—however temporary—come about because of the film production tax breaks in question. And that is d’truth.
With more film and television production taking place because of these “tax breaks,” more actors—union and non-union—are getting work, AND paying taxes on those meager wages. Local production and technical crew—make-up, hairdressing, wardrobe and casting; lighting, sound, carpentry, gaffers and others—find work in their desired fields because the studios bring jobs to New York. Most of the people on a set are not from Hollywood. Then there are the ancillary businesses that benefit from productions, like food merchants who serve those who are directed to take “walk-away lunches” when there are none on set and cabbies (and the MTA) who deliver the talent that might not be working or going anywhere on those days. And more.
While many of us are paid less than minimum wage for the same work done by those who have gotten into SAG and AFTRA—some of us who have similar or more professional training—that is a different, but related, issue. But most of us enjoy working in this business and want to work more. We just have to figure out how to make some of the changes that must be made—some inequalities just aren’t fair.