Wicked Little La Chimera, Weekly Reel #69
Cinema For Gaza and Disney/Fox/Warner Sports Venture; Reviews: La Chimera and Wicked Little Letters; and Hollywood Tax Incentives.
News
Cinema for Gaza, a UK aid group founded by female filmmakers and journalists, raised over $315,000 for medical aid (on-the-ground support from sterile water to cancer drugs) in only ten days. What started as a British online auction for signed posters and other film memorabilia quickly gained the attention of international film celebrities, most likely due to the fallback of the fallback of the Jonathan Glazer incident. Cinema for Gaza is the only NGO aid group operating in the north of Gaza, which has been almost entirely leveled by Israel’s special military operation against Palestinian civilians.
Congress is publicly questioning the proposed joint sports streaming venture by Disney, Fox, and Warner. This service caught everyone off guard, especially those not invited to the party (NBCUniversal and Paramount), and Fubo TV has already sued to block. The concerns are that this mega-sports bundling will create a monopolizing effect on the sports streaming world, which is at an all-time high in yearly-rights’ deals but would see an obvious decline in competition. Neither of the three companies who proposed the venture detailed how it would work because they’re probably still jockeying for their own internal positions within the triumvirate themselves.
Watch Now
La Chimera (2023, Alice Rohrwacher, France/Italy/Switzerland) is about a brooding Josh O’Connor as an Anglo-Archaeologist (Arthur) in nineteen-eighties Italy, who’s stuck in the Tuscan village of his missing wife’s family looting Etruscan grave sites for an international network of artifact dealers. We don’t know how he became involved in such activities with the tombaroli (grave-robbers), but we do know that he’s damn good at it through mysterious visions and the masterful use of a stick. His story is about the straddling of two worlds, represented geographically (as the one non-Italian living literally on the town wall’s edge) and romantically. His wife has been missing for a long time, which most people seem to understand the reason for except her mother, played by Isabella Rossellini. The wife is the loot he’s desperately on the hunt for while Italia (Carol Duarte) is the bubbly, and somewhat awkward, reminder of living that he needs more than wants.
Shot in three beautiful film formats (35mm, Super 16mm, and 16mm), the images match the dreamy nature of Arthur’s sleep-walking. At any point in the film he’s either fifteen minutes away from falling asleep, just woke up fifteen minutes prior, or is sleeping. The 16mm image with its intense grain and squarer frame represents his dreams and visions, akin to vintage family footage, while the 35mm establishes much of the area and nature establishing shots with the objective eye of cinema we’re all used to. The Super 16mm, slightly wider and shorter than 16mm, which preserves the feel (and rounded corners) of 16mm but projected in 35mm/widescreen photography format, is used for most of the film and captures the nuance of Arthur’s moodiness. For fans of the ‘foreigners-in-Italy’ sub-genre, this is a must-see, along with anyone that can catch it in theaters, which is worth it to see the photography alone.
Pass
Wicked Little Letters (2023, Thea Sharrock, UK) is another mediocre-to-bad example of both the British period-piece (too many of their films simply can’t escape the Victorian-Edwardian era) and the slightly twisted ‘based on real events’ story. (We need to put a stop to these films that have variants of ‘based on real events…..kinda’ credits at the beginning, just tell a damn story.) Like contemporary Star Wars properties mining what little remains of the original, this film scrapes bottom of the barrel British history to deliver an unsatisfying, screenwriting 101 story about a woman sent hate mail and another woman falsely accused of doing it. There’s conflict, then resolution, but the only bits to sustain the film are Olivia Colman and supposedly morally sophisticated others read aloud the dirty messages. While this could make a solid 30-second ad, watching it play out for one-hundred minutes is not fun.
The tale is well-known and continuously re-mythologized over time: film companies in the nineteen-tens and -twenties, almost all of which were based in New York and New Jersey, moved their production facilities to the farthest south-west corner of the country. This land offered more sun than not and within several hours drive in every direction, different climates (alpine, beach, desert, mediterranen, forest, etc.) could be used to set films in different countries/continents. Though Los Angeles was mostly citrus farms and desert, the film business and then other industries, most notably defense contractors, quickly turned the city into a major metropolitan area in a couple generations.
Hollywood is shorthand for how people talked about film LA, even though most production studios were in other parts of town. Today, Hollywood is little more than a tourist hub during the day and homeless encampment and drug den at night. Studios long ago abandoned ‘Hollywood’, and Los Angeles in general, when other states started offering tax incentives for film/tv production. The calculation was simple: offer money to productions to stimulate the local economy for several months. Plus, who wouldn’t want A-listers coming into town? The truth is that it’s more complicated than a simple ‘you have to spend money to make money’ mentality.
Former Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Stevens recently covered how states are using tax funds to lure film/tv productions in a series of articles for the New York Times. Stevens found that
states had given out more than $25 billion over the past two decades to subsidize the making of movies and television. The idea is to lure businesses to spend money, employ locals and stimulate the economy.
The problem is, the programs are actually huge money losers for states. Studies show that these efforts typically return a quarter or even a dime on every dollar given to studios.
Yet lawmakers are not slowing their spending. Quite the opposite. Hollywood is playing states off one another, and the competition has them sweetening their deals to lure productions, economists say. Under mounting pressure from New Jersey, New York recently expanded its film incentive program by 67 percent, to $700 million. Oklahoma went from $4 million to $30 million in just three years, in part to stay competitive with Texas. Then, Texas decided to spend nearly seven times that amount.
Apart from New York’s monster near-billion amount, the number for other states is going from small beans to inflated mega-prices, especially after these new post-2023 strike agreements go into effect.
States started supercharging their film incentive programs around the turn of the century. The idea is that when producers come to film in a state and spend money there, the government gives them back 20 to 30 percent of their costs as a thank-you for choosing that state.
Lawmakers say the film and TV shoots employ electricians, hair stylists and many other crew members. That means jobs. Money trickles through local economies to hotels, diners and dry cleaners. In Georgia, for example, the film industry says the state gets $6 or $7 in economic value for every dollar invested.
It should be noted that Georgia via Atlanta has the most robust film industry outside of Los Angeles and New York, so they don’t have as many costs associated with renting/buying new facilities and equipment as other cities without the infrastructure.
Of course, skeptical economic white papers can be no match for the allure of exclusive parties and the promise of a cameo in a blockbuster movie. Hollywood insiders lobby politicians with campaign donations and perks, which is another reason states keep expanding these programs. In Michigan, a big-name producer wined and dined lawmakers just as the state’s film incentives were set to expire. If you squint at the right scene from “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” you’ll spot a former Senate majority leader.
And states need to offer a good deal, or else productions will simply film elsewhere. Experts say this arms race helps explain why more and more public funds flow to these programs.
It’s amazing that even with this high level of tax-incentive competition, the cost of making films/shows is skyrocketing well above standard levels of inflation. How Michigan lost their tax incentives:
After a state economist determined that “the film incentives represent lost revenue” and that their economic benefits were “negligible,” Michigan, which cut funding for the police and schools while facing a severe budget deficit, eventually decided to end its incentives.
As the program gradually unwound, “The Avengers” moved to Cleveland and “Iron Man 3” went to Wilmington, N.C. Even “Detroit” was filmed in Boston.
Now, almost a decade after the state stopped paying Hollywood, lawmakers think they can no longer afford not to.
…
Supporters say a more carefully tailored program will function better than the previous one, creating jobs and invigorating spending. But economists have long been dubious about the value of subsidies for film and television, saying they have plunged state governments into a race to the bottom where the biggest winner, by far, is Hollywood.
A survey by The New York Times found that states have distributed more than $25 billion to film incentive programs.
…
“You could find almost an unlimited number of better uses for the same dollars,” said Michael Thom, a tax expert at the University of Southern California whose work has been critical of incentives. “Who on earth would say, ‘Keep giving the money to Hollywood; my kid’s school doesn’t need new books’?”
Even as officials have rethought public support of private industry, 38 states now allocate taxpayer dollars to film and TV production. Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia have all introduced programs within the past two years. Like Michigan, Wisconsin has drawn up legislation that would bring back its program.
Many of those states hope to become the next Georgia, which has emerged as a dynamic film hub while spending at least $5 billion on its program. New York has handed out more than $7 billion to lure productions from California, which has dedicated more than $3 billion to try to retain them. And Louisiana, an early catalyst for this arms race, has poured in $3 billion of its own.
And the shoe drops:
But independent fiscal monitors for the states have often found meager returns on investment. A recent report prepared for state auditors in Georgia estimated that the tax revenue returned on each dollar spent on incentives was 19 cents. A similar report from New York determined the return was between 15 cents and 31 cents.
“The film production credit is at best a break-even proposition and more likely a net cost” to the state, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance concluded.
The benefits?
Industry advocates say the investments are worth it. Tax dollars can successfully attract projects, and government funding spurs other economic activity. Productions pay catering businesses to feed workers, hoteliers to house their crews and dry cleaners to do the laundry — all of which creates a ripple effect.
Outside experts say that the effects of such spending are overstated and that the initiatives are incredibly costly for state governments. But their academic papers are competing against the promises of lobbyists and the allure of Hollywood stars and exclusive parties.
If nothing else, Hollywood was always great at marketing itself as a valuable commodity in and of itself, which was always just an idea rather than a place. Hollywood accounting is never transparent and always shady:
The film industry argues that evaluating incentives based on a simple analysis of tax dollars in versus tax dollars out fails to capture the extent of their reach. Economic development programs are not intended to raise government revenue and are seldom expected to pay for themselves.
The reports commissioned by the industry, state film offices and other economic development agencies consistently find wide-ranging benefits on the order of $6 or $7 of “economic value” for every $1 invested into a film incentive program. Even the skeptical auditors’ report on Georgia’s program, which found it to be a revenue loser for the state, acknowledged that the program also “induces substantial economic activity.”
I encourage you to read his entire article on this topic, as well as his other ones on Georgia and Oklahoma, for a better idea on how interdependent productions are on more than just boosting the local economy.
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