Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Filmmaking incentives losing glamour in cash-strapped states
latimes.com: "More than 40 states offer tax breaks for movie and TV production, drawing business away from Southern California. But in the face of budget crises, several states are having second thoughts."
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2 comments:
This seems to be a consistent topic for this blog, and a very important one. The decentralizing of hollywood is happening. This article takes a different view than many of the other however, and highlights one issue of these tax breaks. I find it irresponsible of the filmmakers to take somewhat questionable tactics and use them to save money. This can be beneficial to both filmmakers and the states, everyone just needs to participate.
While I understand that movies can sometimes be a major state or city economic booster, I've always wondered if the costs placed on the city were ever really offset by the money they gave out. Movies need everything from food to extra human bodies, so the idea that they'd pump more money into the local economy makes some sense, except that lots of these local economies never really see the full extent of the money they should. When I first heard of this tax break system, I thought it might have a variety of rules attached to it, like where and what it applies to exactly, and then that there was a high number of local people required to be working on the project. This article showed that really, the tax break system is relatively undefined, and either really need to be reformed or done away with since based on the existing system, I don't see how local economies actually gain any money.
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