On a muddy lot about a half hour north of town there’s a big recycling container that’s been repurposed as the production office for a horror movie called House Hunting. Inside are a couple of card tables covered with papers, folders and open laptops. The day’s call sheets hang in manila folders taped to the wall.
In a spot of tall, naked trees nearby, the film’s director, Eric Hurt, is wearing something that looks like a bulletproof vest. Into the vest he straps his Red One camera, and points it at an actor, a burly man with a face you just can’t place who has been flown in from Los Angeles. From Hurt down to the lowliest production assistant, sitting in the dirt and pushing a cameraman along a dolly, 18 people are working on set: The “blood guy” sits on a cooler drinking a Coke, looking a little beat up. A woman introduces herself as the makeup lady, recruited because she runs a haunted house in Luray. She apologizes for snacking so much. (She’s six months pregnant.) One production assistant won’t shake hands because he cut his finger in what he calls a production-related logging accident.
Those of the crew who are not from around here are staying with those who are. One producer says her home laundry facilities are doing double duty. And they’ve mostly been eating food donated by places like Boylan Heights and Rebecca’s Natural Foods. (Somebody had to buy the Spudnuts.)
Back in the real world, state politics were on lockdown this year after a $4.2 billion shortfall threatened to cut funding to basic services. It’s no small wonder, then, that funding for films—from labors of love like House Hunting, to blockbusters like Evan Almighty—made its way into the commonwealth’s budget this year. But make its way onto the budget, it did.
Now, depending on House Hunting’s production costs, the film could be eligible to receive two forms of support from Richmond. If its qualifying expenses exceed a quarter-million dollars, it could get get back 15 to 20 percent of the film’s costs in tax credits. (A film of, say, $20 million that has $10 million in qualifying expenses is eligible to receive $2 million.) If its expenses fall below a quarter-million dollars, the production is eligible for grants from the Motion Picture Opportunity Fund—increased last month to $2 million from $200,000—that is administered by Governor Bob McDonnell.
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Local filmmaker Eric Hurt, of Pillage and Plunder Pictures, is filming an independent feature film called House Hunting on a Red One camera—“beyond HD”—which he straps to a vest for stability. The film will be shot over 20 days, during which a skeleton crew and cast will be working long hours, six days a week. |
There is little argument that subsidizing a film industry in the commonwealth is good for the film industry. But consider that the state’s arts budget already has been cut by 30 percent between 2008 and 2010, and now faces further cuts. Virginia’s legislators are hardly patrons of the arts. And Bob McDonnell hardly seems like a movie buff. So why are are Virginia’s politicians bankrolling film?
The best of both worlds
Erica Arvold, a producer on House Hunting, runs the Virginia Production Alliance’s (VPA) new Charlottesville chapter. She grew up in Blacksburg, and fell in love with film while portraying a tennis player in the background of Dirty Dancing (made before the days of film incentives at Mountain Lake Resort, near Roanoke). Eventually, she was accepted to Chicago’s prestigious Goodman School of Drama, where she pursued a dream to work in film, figuring, “You can go to architecture school to learn how to be an architect, so why not this?”
While her classmates, including stars like Jillian Anderson, were learning to act, Arvold learned to navigate the film industry. She eventually earned an internship with casting director Jane Alderman, worked her way up, and west, until she was casting films in Los Angeles. (The first one was Backdraft, a Ron Howard-directed drama about firefighters that starred Robert DeNiro and Kurt Russell.)
After making it in Los Angeles, it was tantamount to career suicide when Arvold left the epicenter of the film world to come to Charlottesville. She had to turn down a “ridiculous job opportunity” with a major studio so that she could move with her husband to take over a family business. But “after 18 years in the business, for 18 hours a day,” there was no way to say goodbye to working in film.
Now, as chair of the Charlottesville VPA, Arvold is in the middle of a new kind of epicenter. (The VPA’s Richmond chapter was instrumental in successfully lobbying the state for incentives.) At a recent meeting at the alliance’s office her colleagues, Operations Director Will van der Linde and Vice Chair Lora Lee Jones, rattled off countless bona fide Charlottesville-based film companies that many Charlottesvillians have likely never heard of. There’s Piraeus Pictures, Pillage and Plunder (who are the folks behind House Hunting), Cavalier, Amoeba, ATO Films, Filament Productions, Paladin Pictures, Darkstone, Silverthorn, Plumcot—the list goes on. Most of these companies are either hyperlocal in scope and pay for their films out of pocket, or depend on out-of-state contracts to bankroll their work.
Van der Linde says that Charlottesville is a key area for the Virginia film industry. He echoed a popular sentiment that filmmaking in Central Virginia, with the all-you-can-shoot natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the low overhead of country living, is a “best of both worlds” scenario. A glut of talent operates with relative freedom here, producing lots of “artistic shorts.” Meanwhile, in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, most of the film work is contracted by the military and corporations. The distinction between film work that’s been contracted by corporations, and artistic shorts, is that only one type of film pays. (Guess which one.)
That means there’s not enough work for eager local filmmakers. Van der Linde, who graduated from UVA in 2009, notes that “people study film here, and learn about film and cinematography, and then they have to leave to make a living with the degree that they spent $40,000 on.”
“If nobody’s coming in to do these productions, they’re not getting hired to do these jobs, then there’s no reason to educate them,” says Van der Linde. “It’s sad.”
Brian Wimer, a Charlottesville-based filmmaker, says, “If you’re going to make a feature film, Virginia is not the place to do it unless you’re shooting something at Monticello. There’s no reason if it’s not historical.” He notes that it’s difficult for independent filmmakers to work outside of a major market’s infrastructure of equipment, producers…you name it. He had to pay for his most recent film, a Buddhist horror feature called Mantra, entirely out of pocket.
“When a production comes through, then we all get paid,” he says. “But when it doesn’t, we work on our artistic pursuits.” With a local cast and crew, Wimer recently finished a a corporate training video filmed in the style of “The Office.” He says he was able to employ 25 people on set. That’s a $40,000 budget, spent over five days that he found through his “own initiative of searching out jobs.”
“If I had more backing,” Wimer says, “I have eight more feature films that I can shoot this year.”
The filmmakers behind these companies feel they’re equipped to handle as much of a load as any major market. Meghan Eckman, who made The Parking Lot Movie and runs a small film editing business called Redhouse Productions, says, “I’m seeing a lot of exciting projects on a bigger scale come in, and I think our talent is equipped to handle these larger projects. And we give more care and attention than maybe someone in a metropolitan area would give a project.”
Adds Wimer, “We have a strong enough film community to meet the demand that’s out there.”
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Tom Trigo was the location scout for Tom Shadyac’s Evan Almighty. At more than $175 million, the film was one of the most expensive comedies ever made—and it was made locally. Trigo says that film money “trickles down to the local businesses.” |
Arvold has found herself in the middle of a nascent film industry, often “incestuous,” that’s producing works that are attracting increasing local notice. Two local documentaries, Eckman’s The Parking Lot Movie and Chris Farina’s World Peace…and Other Fourth Grade Achievements, were recently screened at South by Southwest in Austin, one of the country’s major film festivals. Just last year, Hurt won a national health care film contest with a locally shot film spot, “I Deserve Health Care,” and his recent short film Lullabye was picked up for distribution by FEARnet, an online subsidiary of Sony and Lionsgate Films.
But the work that Arvold does in Charlottesville—from casting major motion pictures, to producing plays at Live Arts—is “not my bread and butter.” “I went to do Charlotte’s Web,” for which she was casting director, she says, “so I went to L.A., left my family for four months, did the job and came back. And I don’t want to leave my family. I want to make a living here.”
So with all of the local talent and interest, Arvold and local film workers are encouraged that their industry was singled out as worthy of subsidy. “For the first time in a long time, our current and new governor is gung ho on the idea of bringing film here.” Absent an attractive statewide package, the well might run totally dry. What’s not to love?
The Almighty dollar
Advocates for a film industry in Virginia often quote an impressive statistic about the growth that films spur: Every dollar the state invests in film meets with $14 in economic activity. The logic is that if you entice big-budget productions to spend millions in your state, the people who are working on the movie while they’re on location will need to eat (our restaurants) and sleep (hotels, cha-ching). They will also need other services, including lumber, warehouse space, generators, trailers and even dry cleaning, all of which is potential money in the bank for Virginians. To say nothing of all the tourists that footage of beautiful Virginia will bring once the movie’s released.
Other films that have been lured by Virginia include Giant (1956, shot in the county), What about Bob? (1991, near Smith Mountain Lake), Toy Soldiers (1991, at The Miller School) Hannibal (2001, in Richmond), and Terrence Malick’s The New World, from 2005, which could’ve been sold as a tourism reel for Jamestown. But the golden moment in Charlottesville’s film history came when location scouts chose the greater Charlottesville area to film Evan Almighty, a comedy starring Morgan Freeman and Steve Carrell and directed by UVA alum Tom Shadyac. (Jim “Ace Ventura” Carrey was in Bruce Almighty, but he’s “not a big fan of doing the same character twice,” Shadyac said.)
Tom Trigo is the Crozet-based location scout who put together the package that attracted the film’s producers to the area. “On a creative level,” he says, the area “was a stronger package than anything that they looked at in the state.” Among the unlikely amenities that the region boasted was a “subdivision at the base of mountains,” which was one of Shadyac’s creative demands. But one of the main draws, oddly enough, was ample warehouse space. Films with larger budgets often stick with big cities because they need large indoor spaces where they can create interiors.
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Local filmmaker Brian Wimer says if he had the financial support, there are eight feature films that he could shoot this year. But he often finds himself playing the waiting game. “When a production comes through, then we all get paid,” he says. “But when it doesn’t, we work on our artistic pursuits.” |
At the time, Virginia offered nothing in the way of incentives, aside from the Governors Motion Picture Opportunity Fund ($200,000 at the time). Nonetheless, “Shadyac was one of those directors that had enough clout to say, ‘This does not take place in Wyoming. This takes place near Washington, D.C.’” Almighty went on to blow through at least $175 million to become one of the most expensive comedies ever made. Much of that money probably went to Freeman, Carrell and Shadyac, who might have spent it on real estate in Malibu.
But Trigo stresses that enormous sums of that cash were spent locally. “They had accounts set up everywhere,” he says, including a nice relationship with Crozet Hardware, which provided some of the materials to build an enormous arc, a la Noah, in Crozet. “It all trickles down to the local businesses,” Trigo says, adding that production companies “look hard at” whether the crew can be well provided for in a shooting area.
“We’ve beaten other states many times when it comes to just locations,” says Trigo.
Almighty isn’t the only triumph that advocates for film incentives point to. According to the Virginia Film Office, Evan Almighty and the 2008 HBO miniseries “John Adams” together spent $100 million in Virginia. The Virginia Film Office tallies that the film industry had an “economic impact” of $601 million in Virginia, in 2007 alone, when Evan Almighty was released. But in 2008 the impact fell to $378 million.
“It didn’t help that the economy crashed in 2008,” says Trigo. He says he’s lucky that his business is diversified into print and television, while film productions have consistently overlooked the little commonwealth with no incentives.
Out of Hollywood
Hugh Wilson moved to Charlottesville in 1992 in the middle of a career as a writer and director for film and TV. While living in Los Angeles, he created “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which went on earn 10 Emmy nominations, and the classic Police Academy series. When he left Hollywood, Wilson said that the “the Canada market was so burgeoning that it was killing the market in the U.S.” Runaway productions, as they’re called, would get packed up and shipped off to Canada, or “Hollywood North.” When places outside of Hollywood started offering plus-sized incentives, the whole filmmaking institution started to hemorrhage money into smaller markets.
“I made two movies in Canada because of the difference between our dollar and their dollar,” Wilson says, “and it made sense for American movie companies to go to Vancouver and Toronto. Both of those places became like little Hollywoods. You’d see 18-wheel trucks, equipment, generators—it was everywhere.” But it wasn’t just the difference in the dollar that had lured productions from Hollywood. It was the generous incentives from the Canadian film office.
It wasn’t long before states in the U.S. followed suit. “When the incentive war started, essentially in Canada,” says Terry Stroud, chairman of the Virginia Production Alliance who also runs a postproduction sound studio in Richmond, “the states went nuts with incentives…A lot of the creative decisions that were made in the past have now given way to financials,” he says.
Arvold agrees. “Frankly, as a producer, you are being negligent if you are not going to a state that offers you incentives, if you can pay 15 percent less out of state. That’s your job as a producer—that’s literally your job, is to make sure the money is well spent, and winds up on screen.”
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On the set of House Hunting, Hurt shoots Mark Singer of V and Beastmaster fame. Most of the film’s minor roles are played by local actors. |
Sensing this, Louisiana was the first state to adopt incentives for the industry when it enacted a tax credit for “investment losses in films with substantial Louisiana content” in 1992. When other states saw what looked like a massive success in attracting the film industry—and its jobs—to Louisiana, they sought to outbid the state. State incentives only grew fatter. Now, when most states offer a 10 to 40 percent tax rebate on production costs, according to the Screen Actors Guild. Only four states in the country don’t offer anything in the way of incentives, according to the Tax Foundation.
The incentive war officially began much later for Virginia filmmakers, when the producers behind Secretariat decided to shoot in Kentucky and Louisiana. For Governor McDonnell, the problem was not that Secretariat was his only chance to talk method with John Malkovich, who stars in the film. At the State of the Commonwealth speech in January, McDonnell said his problem was that it’s “a movie about a horse from Virginia. With a director from Virginia. Filmed in Kentucky and Louisiana. Not landing that production here meant an estimated loss of $30 million in economic impact.”
“That is a failure,” he said.
A modest proposal
By nearly all accounts, the steps that McDonnell has taken to court motion pictures are comparatively modest. On top of the $2 million Governor’s Motion Picture Opportunity Fund, the tax incentives are capped at $5 million per biennium. That’s almost literally nothing compared to Massachusetts, which last year offered as much as $100 million per year for filmmakers. “They’re modest, but we’re appreciative of every step we can achieve,” says Rita McClenny, a vice president at the Virginia Film Office.
Stroud, of the VPA, is happy to have the modest fix. “Is it as big and robust as the other states? Probably not,” he says. “Will it help us? Yes…Most importantly, we have locations here, some historic stuff, and a great track record. When we get the incentives going, we can start talking to producers again.”
He also muses that incentives far beyond what Virginia offers can overburden state budgets. “In some other states, given what the economy is doing oveall, I don’t know how these other states are going to keep up these tremendous incentive plans,” he says.
And as the first round of the nationwide tax battle comes to a close, some winners are looking into the pot only to find it empty. For example, the South Carolina Coordinating Council for Economic Development found that incentives there have returned only 19 cents in taxes for each dollar paid out in rebates. The chief economist at the Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office suggests that Louisiana—one of the first states to start aggressively courting the industry—is “losing around 83 cents of each dollar it shells out in incentives.”
Why would this be so? According to David Zin, an economic analyst for Michigan Senate Fiscal agency, the state of Michigan “paid $800,000 of Clint Eastwood’s salary for the film Gran Torino, only to see him take most of that money elsewhere.” Indeed, one of the most prominent arguments against incentives is that the money leaves the state with the big players.
“When the show goes away, certainly some people leave,” says Stroud. “But a lot of those people live here, and they reintegrate into the community and work on productions that are going on locally.”
One built-in failsafe, according to Stroud, is that Virginia’s package is structured so that “the more Virginians you use, the better it gets.” The new incentives are also more attractive if the work happens in an economically distressed area.
According to the Tax Foundation, any amount of incentive might not be enough, as “even California entered the fray in 2009 with a 20 percent credit for large productions and a 25 percent credit for small ones.” The savings there, along with California’s proximity to infrastructure, is “likely to overwhelm what other states can reasonably offer in the future.”
If the modest incentives aren’t enough to lure productions here, the Virginia Film Office says that the commonwealth stands to lose $385 million in 2010—all in the form of movies like Secretariat that are looking to film in the Virginia they’re set in, but can’t do so in clear conscience. Such films include The Wettest County in the World (a $25 million production about Prohibition-bootlegging capital Franklin County), “Undaunted Courage” (another “John Adams”-scale HBO miniseries about Lewis and Clark, valued at $80 million) and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (valued at $50 million).
It’s the jobs and the money that attracted McDonnell to the industry in the first place: “The industry has a yearly economic impact of more than $550 million, employs more than 6,000 Virginians and financially impacts an additional 2,500 workers in indirect jobs.”
And he’s particularly jazzed about big projects like Almighty and “John Adams.” “The total economic impact was more than $200 million, 1,000 crew members were hired and 10,000 extras were hired, $4.3 million was spent on hotel and apartment accommodations in Virginia, $5 million was spent on rental cars and equipment, and more than $1 million was spent on meals.”
In other words, that’s a lot of Spudnuts.
The thin red carpet
The 20-day shoot for House Hunting ends this week, and most of the skeleton crew will return to their day jobs. Pat Cassidy, one of the film’s producers, is in his mid-20s and works for a film production company in Austin. (If his boss wouldn’t give him the time off, he says, “It would be like telling someone who works at Home Depot that they can’t go to the Olympics.”) It’s not normal for a producer to be on set, but he won’t miss a day because the film is his “baby.” His shoes are muddy from a rainstorm the day before, but he looks pleased to be working on a film with his friends in the middle of the woods, even if he has to double as line producer. A production assistant tells the group to be quiet and still. Leaves still crack underfoot.
“Rolling!”
A flannel-clad star of the film pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and asks, “What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you’re doing here,” responds a body double.
Hurt snakes the camera around the scene. “O.K., now step in on the action and…” A buzzsaw noise erupts in the sky. It’s a plane flying overhead to nearby Charlottesville airport. Hurt stops for a moment, the camera looking heavy strapped to his chest. “Fuck this,” he says, searching the sky for the plane that just ruined his shot.
Modest incentives mean that filmmaking will remain a labor of love—replete with planes overhead, mud and production offices made of recycling containers—for Virginia’s filmmakers. But it remains to be seen whether incentives will make it a reasonable living too.
