Entertainment moguls don't need to con little old ladies to finance productions any more, as they did in Mel Brooks' The Producers and its spinoffs.
After all, there are state taxpayers to fleece.
Hollywood is getting struggling states to bid higher and higher for the glamour and supposed economic benefits of on-site film production. Maryland is joining the game. Del. Melony Ghee Griffith, a Prince George's County Democrat, says she'll introduce legislation that would have the state pay 28 percent of film-production costs incurred here.
"Maryland doesn't have anything close to being competitive" with other states, says director Barry Levinson, who was promoting the bill in Annapolis yesterday. "Unless state officials do something in terms of becoming more film-friendly, Maryland will continue to lose out."
You always wanted to help Barry produce films like Diner and Tin Men, right? Unfortunately, the taxpayer partners in these deals don't get to share in the box office, premiere parties or much of anything else. They just write checks.
The idea, as with all "economic development" welfare, is that luring employers with government cash generates jobs and enough added tax revenue to offset the cost. That's a dubious proposition even for auto factories and steel mills paying $30 an hour for permanent jobs.
Economic development pros know the money they can pry from a state is proportional to the glamour and mobility of their operation. Got a BMW plant? Not bad. An NFL football franchise? Better. A Brad Pitt movie? Back up the armored truck.
A Brad Pitt movie, as it happens, is presented as evidence that Maryland needs to give Hollywood money. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, set in Baltimore in F. Scott Fitzgerald's story, got moved to New Orleans in the movie version because of Louisiana's fabulous filmmaker incentives.
Good thing for Maryland, too. Louisiana taxpayers had to pay the Benjamin Button producers $27 million, according to state officials. The sales tax from Cate Blanchett's hotel bill and income tax paid by the key grip could not have come close to making up for that outlay.
"There's no way you can say these things make money" for the state budget, says Greg Albrecht, chief economist for the Louisiana Legislature. Extra tax revenue generated by films, he adds, "is not going to come close to the direct payment you're going to make. Basically, you're just flowing money out of the public treasury into the private sector."
