March 04, 2005|By Jamie Smith Hopkins | Jamie Smith Hopkins,SUN STAFF
AND THEN — It is said that Maryland can double for practically anyplace, and the state parlayed that reputation into screen time last year. An Owen Wilson comedy was filmed on the Eastern Shore in the spring. Samuel L. Jackson and George Clooney were in town for separate movie shoots last summer. Two HBO productions wrapped up in Baltimore between January and November.
And then - suddenly - there was nothing at all.
Maryland's entertainment industry is in its longest dry period in years, and advocates say a new economic development war is to blame. Other states are wooing away major productions - and their infusions of on-location cash - with aggressive incentives.
Louisiana, dangling unlimited tax credits worth up to 20 percent of most wages paid by moviemakers and 15 percent of total production costs, has seen its film and television industry balloon from $25 million in 2002 to more than $330 million last year.
New Mexico, with similarly lucrative breaks, landed 25 movies in the past two years.
And when Pennsylvania's tax credit went into effect last summer, a Walt Disney Co. production poised to film in Annapolis immediately shut its local offices and moved to Philadelphia.
The movie? Annapolis.
"That was the last straw," said Henry Fawell, a spokesman for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.
Now Maryland is on the brink of its own Hollywood sweetener. Ehrlich has asked for $6 million in the fiscal year that begins in July to cover a wage rebate worth up to $2 million per film. Nearly 50 senators and delegates from both parties have sponsored bills to authorize it.
Owners of area businesses that would seem to have no connection to film have swamped the hearings, including Bunnie Gleiman. Her family-owned home-improvement center in Lutherville reaps about a quarter of its business selling lumber and other items to production companies - $750,000 to $1 million in a typical year. Ladder 49 alone was worth $250,000.
"I have never had to lay anybody off, never, but you know what? If they don't come back, I'm going to have to," said Gleiman, vice president of Bond Lumber and Home Center.
Hundreds of Marylanders work on technical crews - more than 450 in one union alone, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees' Local 487. Add to that the local actors, Teamsters, location scouts, security guards and caterers. And the hotels where the out-of-town production teams stay. And the restaurants where they eat. And the businesses from which they buy flowers, wood and a hundred other odds and ends.
The industry accounted for $75 million in direct and indirect impact in Maryland in the year that ended June 30, and $50 million this year before everything shut down, the state estimates.
"Hollywood ... is an army of money," said Rosemarie Levy, business agent for Local 487.
When that army retreated to other locales, people's livelihoods disappeared.
Amy Panzer's three trucks and two vans are idle at her home in Pasadena, unused since fall except for one day when a commercial production needed her food and beverage service.
Rehya D. Young, an assistant location manager from Charles Village, was late with her February rent and had her telephone turned off briefly.
William "B.J." Spencer, whose East Baltimore company guards all the productions that come to town, is down to three employees from a high of 110.
Brook Yeaton, a prop master and set decorator from Essex, just sold a rowhouse he had been renting out.
"What concerns me the most is ... it really doesn't seem like anything's on the horizon," said Yeaton, 37, a new father.
Crew technicians have begun to leave for Louisiana, and others are talking about it.
Boots Shelton, 46, a cameraman from Pikesville who's in New Orleans temporarily for a movie shoot, said he sees film crews everywhere: "It feels like you're in L.A."
Maryland's crew base has been built up since the days when Baltimore-born directors John Waters and Barry Levinson were the only ones making movies in the area, and any erosion would hurt Maryland's competitiveness, state officials say. If a company has to import a crew, expenses shoot upward.
Filming inducements aren't new: Many states, Maryland among them, give breaks on sales taxes. But this incarnation raises the stakes. Louisiana modeled its program on ones that have turned Canada into Hollywood North, and 11 states - even California - are looking to create or boost incentives.
The Maryland film industry will perish if the incentive package doesn't pass this spring, warned Dennis Castleman, the state's assistant secretary of tourism, film and the arts.
But even $6 million won't get the state back to full throttle if every company insists on incentives, film workers say. Louisiana, for example, passed out tax credits worth $50 million last year. Maryland's rebates would buy about three productions.
