Shot in NC

Shot in NC How incentives can attract and keep film rolling in the Tarheel State

By Cherryl Aldave

For years, North Carolina has nipped at the heels of Hollywood's top-dog status in film like an angry pup. The Tarheel State, once second only to California in film revenue, has garnered more than $7 billion in income since 1980 from more than 800 movies and television series wholly or partially filmed here, including Nights in Rodanthe, The Secret Life of Bees, The Color Purple, Dawsons Creek, One Tree Hill, Forrest Gump and the George Clooney-directed Leatherheads.

The recent economic downturn, coupled with the fact that other countries lure American film production abroad with financial-incentive packages, has threatened to stile the US film business, North Carolina included. And with states like Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana also drawing film business away with incentives, the Old North State now fights just to stay in the game.

A new 25 percent film tax credit bill, SB 943, signed in the summer of 2009 by Gov. Beverly Perdue, raises the previous tax credit of 15 percent and has many in the local film industry hoping this will put North Carolina back in the race, while others caution that there may a dark cloud behind what looks like a silver lining for North Carolina film.

The Triad is abuzz with possibility.

THE CAST Its 2 p.m. on a brisk mid-December afternoon.

Burgess Jenkins coasts along a crowded Winston- Salem highway behind the wheel of his charcoal-gray Jaguar. With his assistant riding shotgun, the 36-yearold Jenkins weaves in and out of holiday traffic on his way to a meeting with a producer.

Jenkins is in a hurry and cannot be late. Actors who like to work never are.

I was one my way to have lunch with a producer from Stalemate, explains Jenkins in an e-mail exchange. Stalemate, a romantic comedy starring Jenkins that has also co-producing is slated to start filming in North Carolina in January.

A handsome blond born and raised in the Twin City, Jenkins portrayed Ray Budds in the 2000 film Remember The Titans opposite Denzel Washington and was cast as Bobby Irons for 12 episodes of the WB series One Tree Hill. After living in Los Angeles since 1999, Jenkins moved back to his hometown in 2006 to start a family with his wife, actor Ashlee Payne.

Its ironic, adds Jenkins. Half the reason I left LA is that I got sick of the Hollywood way of things. Producer meetings? Jaguars? Just add the grande, skinny, sugar-free caramel latte and I'm in full-blown actor mode.

Whether in or out of actor mode, Jenkins, who also teaches acting at Carolina Actors Group on Burke Street in downtown Winston-Salem, is absolutely thrilled about the new 25 percent incentives.

When the incentive was 15 percent, some of his friends moved to find work in other states with more film business through bigger incentives.

There's a number of very talented, highly trained cast and crew people here and were going to keep losing them without higher incentives, Jenkins says. I know people who have been fighting very hard for increased incentives for a long time and I'm ecstatic that its finally become reality.

Casting director Phil Newsome is one of those people. Throw a rock at the Triad and you'll likely hit someone Newsome once cast in a film.

Newsome's Winston-Salem-based Altair Casting and Production Services has provided casting and production support for several movies filmed here, including the critically acclaimed Goodbye Solo about a cab driver hired to chauffeur a suicidal old man to Blowing Rock so he can climb its highest peak, a scenic spot with winds so ferocious its said to be the only spot on earth where snow falls upward.

Altair also supplied 5,000 extras and some primary cast for the based-on-a-true-story tear-jerker The 5 the Quarter. The film stars Andie McDowell and Aidan Quinn as parents of Wake Forest football player Jon Abbate and his younger brother Luke, and centers on how Lukes tragic death in 2006 turned into a poignant triumph for Jon who in 2007 helped lead the Deacs to an ACC win and their first O range Bowl appearance.

It was a real grassroots effort, Newsome says of the push for the incentives. A lot of local filmmakers, actors, casting people and more were involved.

Tracy Kilpatrick [casting director with Wilmington's the Casting Office, whose credits include No Country For Old Men and Forrest Gump] was just one of many leaders in this across the state. We all went to the state capitol in Raleigh and lobbied several times and had big rallies on the capitol buildings common area. We had people calling en masse. We did an e-mail and letter-writing campaign. We did everything, you name it.

They also worked with legislators like state Sen. Linda Garrou from Forsyth County to push this through, says Altair Casting owner, attorney Ann Guill.

Garrou sponsored the bill, which requires companies to meet hiring requirements for North Carolinians and other criteria to qualify. According to the bill, production companies that make films in North Carolina will qualify for a 25 percent refundable tax credit (i.e.: cash) as long as they spend $250,000 or more to make the films.

There's no annual cap with the new incentive, which differs from the previous 15 percent credit signed into law in the fall of 2006 by Gov. Mike Easley.

Easley's credit also rewarded productions that cost more than $250,000, but the rebate was capped at $7.5 million per project. This meant films with $50 million or more invested in state received the same credit regardless of how much over $50 million dollars they spent.

This bill affects the economy here, says Guill.

Without it fewer people are working. There are naysayers but they are people who don't understand that this is not an incentive like the one we gave Dell. You have to spend money here first to get money back.

In 2004, Dell pressed a cash-strapped North Carolina to give it $280 million in incentives to set up its third US plant outside of Winston-Salem. Eager for tech jobs, the state acquiesced and Dell agreed to invest $100 million in the factory and create 1,500 jobs within five years in return.

The incentive drew ire from local economic researchers and, according to an Oct. 8, 2009 article in the UKs Register, effected a lawsuit that claimed using tax revenue to fund grants for private companies is forbidden by the state constitution because tax money can only be used to serve a public purpose.

Dell abruptly settled the dispute by closing the factory in its fourth year of business, leaving 905 North Carolinians out of work in the process and bitter feelings towards incentives statewide.

THE CREW
All this tax incentive can do is generate money, and it just might save the North Carolina film industry, says David Lyons, a local crew member whose worked on films shot in North Carolina like Talladega Nights, Patch Adams, Patriot and 1999s Ride With the Devil. Lyons was also part of the crew for Leatherheads South Carolina shoots.

Strangely vague about his exact job title, Lyons considers himself an artist who gets paid to make shit look pretty.

I once saw a movie set in the 1800s and one scene had visible modern car tracks in the dirt. It made the film look like it was made by amateurs, says Lyons. Everything in a scene has to it with the time period its supposed to be in. I make sure of that.

I also work on sets that are sometimes used for several shoots, sometimes filmed several days to months apart, Lyons explains. I make sure everything in the scene, even if the rest of that scene is shot weeks later, is in the same exact place and it takes precision and a lot of exact measurements to do that, Lyons says. Its called continuity, and its an art.

North Carolina employs more than 2,500 film-industry workers like Lyons, who recently took up part-time South Carolina residency to take advantage of increased work from incentives there. Has currently a regular crew member on Lifetimes Army Wives, which is filmed in Charleston.

The [film-industry] recruiting equation in the past 10 years has lipped 180 degrees, explained SC Film Commissioner Jeff Monks in the Charlotte Observer. The discussion now begins with: Tell us about your incentives, and then well talk to you about locations, your crew and your suppliers. That's been the story across the country.

These incentives are good because people in North Carolina need work, Lyons continued. Besides, how many other industries can come into your town and rent 500 hotel rooms at a time for six months? Guill echo's Lyons statement.

There's been so much talk about this that I wrote a letter to the editor that I never ended up sending, but it was about how nobody realized the impact

the 5 the Quarter filming here had just on Winston-Salem. Five or six local restaurants were featured in the film, as were two funeral homes, plus there was wardrobe people, prop masters, an art department an entire cast and crew. And they all frequented several bars and restaurants and it was huge business for those places. I think more local people should begin to realize how beneficial the film industry here is to everybody.

THE COMMISH

We do have some of the best crew in the world, and a lot of them graduate from schools here like the film school at Piedmont Community College and the School of the Arts, starts a cheerful Rebecca Clark. They intern on projects filming here when they're in school, and when they graduate some of them become producers so plenty of kids are getting jobs here because of the film industry.

Director of the non-profit Piedmont Triad Film Commission, located on Greensboro's Albert Pick Drive, Clarks enthusiasm leaps through the phone as she relates her duties, which are to market and promote the 12-county Piedmont Triad region for the production of films, commercials, webisodes and industrial videos and to companies who do still photography shoots, Clark says, as if repeating the information for the millionth time.

Clark, the first person called when a production company wants to film in the Triad, has been with the commission since 1994, and has seen the careers of many whose films she provided logistical support for take off.

Junebug writer Angus MacLachlan is a School of the Arts graduate, and Junebug was filmed in Winston-Salem, the effervescent Clark continues. That movie did extremely well and really helped Amy Adams make a name for herself. David Gordon Green, another School of the Arts graduate, is now a huge director thanks to Pineapple Express. It would be nice if more of them stayed here though.

Clark also helped Hostel director and Inglourious Basterds star Eli Roth with his first movie. Eli came from LA to shoot Cabin Fever here, and I helped to scout locations for it, says Clark. Cabin Fever, shot in Mocksville, Mt. Airy, Winston- Salem and High Point, grossed upwards of $33 million at the box office and was the highest grossing film Lions Gate Home Entertainment released in 2003.

In 2008, Clark helped recruit Leatherheads to shoot in the Triad, and met George Clooney when he came to the Piedmont as part of a location scouting contingent. I told my fianc about it and he was like, Great! My fianc is going scouting with the worlds sexiest man alive! George Clooney spent his birthday in Winston, and Scarlett Johansson flew in for it, but I'm not sure if they were dating at time, says Clark.

North Carolinas been a celebrity magnet since becoming known as Hollywood East in 1983, the year producer Dino DeLaurentis came to Wilmington and built his dream studio around an old brick warehouse.

Firestarter, starring a young Drew Barrymore, was the lots first production.

DeLaurentis christened his dream DEG Studios, which today is called Screen Gems EUE. Within ten years, North Carolina ranked second to California in film industry revenue, with our state earning $504 million in film-industry spending in 1993.

Revenues started to slip around 2000, when Canada emerged as one of the biggest competitors for US film business by using tax incentives, and the debate over what many in the American film industry saw as production exodus began to echo the fray over US companies moving overseas to boost profits, which critics say costs the American economy billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs annually.

In 2002 Louisiana passed the most generous tax incentive package for film production companies in North America at the time, which offered an investor tax credit of up to 15 percent and an employment tax credit of up to 20 percent.

North Carolina, already financially hammered by a string of plant closings across the state, slipped to the middle of the pack as new dogs like Michigan, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Connecticut, New Mexico and Massachusetts joined the incentive race.

In 2004, with other states offering higher and higher incentives, revenue from films shot in NC slipped to $235 million in direct spending contributions to the economy. In 2006 the state saw minimal feature-film production and in 2007 the number fell to $160 million. By 2008 the figure slumped to $92 million.

We've been watching people leave the state, but when you're a filmmaker faced with a 15 percent incentive versus 25 percent, why do it here if you can do the same thing somewhere else? asks actor and filmmaker John S. Rushton. Its just business.

Rushtons Crimson Wolf Production released the multimillion-dollar, sci-fi action thriller Eyeborgs in 2008. Eyeborgs tells the story of a near future where robotic surveillance cameras keep constant watch for possible criminal activity, and was shot entirely in Winston-Salem using local crew.

Crimson Wolf, based in Lewisville, was started in the Triad because we live here, says Rushton, the we referring to his partner in the company, Richard Clabaugh.And because there's lots of great cast and crew people and there's just no reason for Crimson Wolf to move anywhere else. Plus the new incentives have fired up filmmakers we know to finally get projects going they've been putting off, which is only going to grow the filmmaking community already here.

Eyeborgs stars Adrian Paul, known as The Highlander in the TV series and recent feature films, and Danny Trejo who played Machete in Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse. Its CGI, or computer generated graphics, were described in a review on the film website the Quiet Earth on April 30, 2009 as being more realistic and effective than mega-budget Hollywood spectaculars like Transformers.

Most of the CGI was done by Chris Watson, who's a graduate of the School of the Arts, says Rushton. Watson is the former student of Rushtons partner and Eyeborgs director Clabaugh, who once taught at the school.

While Eyeborgs utilizes several Winston-Salem landmarks like the Millennium Center in several scenes, most of it was shot in the Camel Citys downtown arts district.

One of the restaurant in the area, Downtown Thai, was a major favorite for Adrian Paul, Manny Trejo and the guys who were the Hollywood stars, says Rushton. Adrians eaten in Thai restaurants around the world and he said out of all the Thai restaurants where has eaten, Downtown Thai was the best.

THE FINAL CUT The bottom line is, there really aren't enough film productions in the United States for every state to play in this [incentive] game, said Peter Dekom, in the LA Times.

Eventually the states where it doesn't make economic sense aren't going to be players, says the entertainment industry attorney who helped craft New Mexico's successful film incentive program.

Louisiana recently stepped up their incentive to a whopping 30 percent.

Currently, 43 states are vying for film revenue through tax breaks and bonus packages in what's become a veritable incentive go-round, but Clark feels positive the incentive increase is a step in the right direction.

Production companies from LA are currently requesting information about filming here, everything from smaller studios to major studios, some that are looking to make big-budget feature films with budgets from $10 to $50 million on up so we are definitely on their radar again, says Clark of the spike in interest. But we also still feel very strongly about working with local filmmakers.

Some local filmmakers however, are not yet feeling the incentive love.

Rebecca's great and she's the happiest person I've ever met but while the incentive is gonna help us compete with almost every other place in America, as an independent filmmaker I think the incentives are really for Hollywood to send movies with big budgets out here to shoot, says Andy Coon.

Coons 2002 documentary, Greensboro's Child, is about the Nov. 3, 1979 murder of five activists from the Workers Viewpoint Organization by an armed band of Ku Klux Klan members and Nazis. In the year of its release, the documentary won the North Carolina Film and Video Festival award for best independent documentary, and the Chicago Digital Film Festival for best researched documentary.

Coon is currently collaborating with a like-minded group of local filmmakers on a project he hopes can qualify for the incentive through their joint fundraising efforts.

Clark remains optimistic. One of the things I'm very excited about is the History Channel series that shot here called Madhouse, she says.

Madhouse tells the stories of Bowman Gray Stadiums Saturday-night heroes who race on the longest-running NASCAR short track in the America, and features drivers like Tim The Rocket Brown, Chris Fleming and the Miller and Myers families, known by many race fans as the modern day Hatields and McCoy's.

They filmed here and hired all these locals and film production crew members for an entire five months. If the show does well they'll come back and most likely re-hire the people they hired before, who will then have jobs on the show, Clark continues. The History Channel is going to air these episodes with the first one premiering on Jan. 10, and it would be great for this area if a lot of people start watching the show and they come back to do Season 2 here.