PROVO, UT — When The Lone Ranger opened in theaters, viewers saw John Reid (Armie Hammer) and Tonto (Johnny Depp) acting against the iconic Western backdrops of Utah’s Monument Valley, Dead Horse Point, and Fossil Point (now nicknamed Thelma and Louise point).
But there was also something most viewers would have missed: scenes filmed in the New Mexico desert, with Utah vistas added by computer-generated imagery.
The reason filmmakers shot much of Lone Ranger in New Mexico and then dropped in some favorite Utah red rock backdrops, Salt Lake Tribune film critic Seans Means explained recently, is money—specifically, financial incentives, including tax rebates, offered by state governments. In short, New Mexico gave The Lone Ranger a better deal.
Here’s Means:
Marshall Moore, director of the Utah Film Commission, said Utah offered Disney a 20 percent tax credit to bring the production here. (It would have been 25 percent if 85 percent of the crew had been hired locally.) By giving up that tax revenue, the state draws more money into the economy — some $3.7 million spent in Utah by The Lone Ranger production, Moore said.
As Means puts it, there is an “escalating arms race” between states to one-up each other to lure Hollywood producers to their small towns, urban centers, and spectacular vistas. Just this year, the New Mexico legislature upped the ante for movie and television production even further, from a 25 percent credit to 30 percent. (Gov. Susana Martinez vetoed the original so-called Breaking Bad tax credit bill, but it was resurrected after lawmakers expanded tax credits to other industries.) That came after neighboring Colorado jumped back in to the film incentive game itself in 2012, hiring a former Hollywood producer to lead its film office and funding a $4 million incentive program that includes a 20 percent tax rebate, which has drawn a number of films and a Hallmark TV series to the state. In Arizona, by contrast, lawmakers this year did not renew that state’s film incentive program, which lasted four years and ended in 2010.
The incentives in Western states are not unusual. According to the Motion Picture Association of America and recent news reports, 37 states have some sort of film and TV incentive. In some of those states, such as Michigan, the incentives have become the subject of heated political controversy—and they’ve drawn coverage that reflects that.
Out here, though, coverage has been mixed, with some reporters more likely to capture the glamorous side of the tax-credit phenomenon while others do dig deeper. These two from Pittsburgh seem a bit soft on analysis. This story in the Wilmington (NC) Star News explained how state money was spent for filmmaking, but offered little analysis of the return on taxpayer investment for film incentives. But reporter Cassie Foss did more sourcing on this one.
And while the quality is not unexpected here, The New York Times told an in-depth story in December 2012 about Michigan film incentives, and how a plan for a production studio in Pontiac went south. It was part of a larger series on tax credits.
It can be hard to draw far-reaching conclusions about the effectiveness of state movie incentives, because there is variation from state to state. Michigan and Ohio for example, essentially offer cash reimbursements, while other states offer tax credits; some states have annual caps on incentives, others do not. There are some resources to help navigate this terrain: The Hollywood Reporter recently published this “Guide to the Latest Production Incentives,” and Entertainment Partners, a production management company with expertise in state incentives, maps incentives countrywide on its website. There’s also a database developed by The New York Times for a 2012 series on state tax incentives; the state-by-state breakdown of film incentives is here.
Prof. Campbell --
Surprised to read so little about if -- or how much -- marketing exposure matters to the 4Corners states in their fiscal support of film activities. Perhaps those fine-print acknowledgments to the states involved, always at the tail end of the film credits, deserve slightly larger fonts. And perhaps I'm the only exile from the 4Corners who hankers after views of the high desert in her DVD films. From "Bad Day at Black Rock" to "Silverado", the list of haunting vistas grows ever longer.
#1 Posted by Bel Campbell, CJR on Fri 19 Jul 2013 at 06:35 PM