April 18, 2007 News & Views » Cover

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Lights, camera, action ... take two 

North Carolina's film industry is booming again

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Unlike other industries, movie studio executives don't care about the quality of the public schools or the corporate tax structure. They don't need infrastructure to be built at taxpayer expense. And they don't care if the area community colleges have training programs to provide workers -- there's no time for that. Nights in Rodanthe begins shooting in Wilmington in May. "By the end of June, they'll be gone," Griffin says. "They'll have spent several million dollars here, hired a couple hundred people. It's all short-term, here and now."

That has been difficult to convey to state lawmakers, Griffin says, but Wilmington's own legislative delegation understands. Democratic state Sen. Julia Boseman and Republican Rep. Daniel McComas, both from Wilmington, sponsored the incentive legislation. Before she was elected in 2004, Boseman was a New Hanover county commissioner. She knew people who had left town for work, and she understood the impact of the film business downturn on local businesses. She helped put together the package that kept One Tree Hill in town, and even before being elected to state office, she urged the General Assembly to take action. "We knew at the local level that film was leaving and they would not come back unless we were competitive."

Boseman stresses that the film incentives are very different from other types of incentive packages the state has offered to large corporations -- these aren't tax credits, and there's no up-front cash payout from the state. "You don't get paid any money unless you're doing business here." (The loss of revenue to the state is so relatively small that film incentives aren't even on the radar of the N.C. Budget and Tax Center, a watchdog group that monitors state incentive packages.)

Even so, she says, "It wasn't easy to get passed. Some people are just adamantly opposed to any type of incentives, and some people didn't have a very good understanding of the industry." Having to come back the following year to fix the mistake in the fine print made it that much harder. "I had to come back and re-debate it all over." The final approval came from the House at the eleventh hour of the 2006 summer session. (Boseman thinks her outspoken call for Jim Black to resign as speaker was part of what made the vote a close one.) If the state heard from Hollywood that 15 percent isn't quite enough to make it worth their while, she says. "I don't think the climate would be good to increase the incentives right now. I don't know that I could get it through the House again."

So far, Boseman says the effect on her district has been easy to see. A man recently approached her at an event at Screen Gems and thanked her for making it possible for him to find work that lets him stay with his family. "It's been very rewarding to me to help bring jobs back home that we had lost," she says.

This story originally appeared in The Independent Weekly.

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