[Headline]
Panning Shot: Hollywood North?
It doesn't take the gift of Divination to foresee a grim future for big Hollywood productions in the Hub City. Boston's flurry of movie-making activity was spurred by a tax credit of 25% (equal to Rhode Island and under New York's 30%). While local media fawn over celebrities and promptly claim the new moniker “Hollywood North,” those in the know warn the red carpet will soon be rolled up and put back into mothballs.

Everyone knows about big films being shot in Boston. Everyone -- from appliance salesmen proudly describing their neighbor, actor Chris Cooper, in his recent role of lobbyist for the film tax-credit passing, to grade school teachers moonlighting as extras. Even in a city with deep union roots, some extras are ambivalent about joining SAG even with the incentive of significantly higher pay. These two indicators do not bode well for those who would claim we're ready for our close-up.

Zoom in: What a Closer Look Reveals
A recent lunch with an industry insider highlighted fissures in the basic business model upon which so much of studio financial and managerial decisions are based. For example, if a blockbuster (estimated at $30-70 million movie) is successful, then a sequel is a safe bet to be successful, too. How success is calculated can be as difficult to follow as any shell game. When costs rise or profits fall, the hunt begins for ways to tip the balance in the studio’s favor.

During the last strike in 1988 the industry is said to have lost $500 million. In Los Angeles the entertainment industry contributes about $80 million a day, much of it goes to those who work “below the line,” the caterers, dry cleaners, portable dressing rooms, food stylists.

When location shots were cheaper in Canada, studios found locations there. When the exchange rate shifted, it was overseas. When films that are intimately tied to locations still film elsewhere, following incentives and cheap labor costs, no one questions whether there is a better way to build a film's budget. They simply seek the next, newest, cheapest venue. Boston can be Paris. With the right incentives, you'll see it, too.

If 2,000 feet of trucks need to be parked on a city street for 2 days instead of the half day it was budgeted, where do those costs go? Who renegotiates the police detail when the shooting schedule changes? Where in the ledger are these costs buried? These issues are the daily business for directors, managers, vice presidents. Often, these are the costs that draw studio focus.

Wrap: The Longer View
Chasing profits by finding cheaper locations or cheaper extras, while clinging to an inefficient model is a short-term fix. The tax-credit movie making bonanza in Boston-as-Paris was fortuitous or far-sighted depending on whose press release you read. Scratch that. Everyone's press releases credit brilliant foresight and strategic business minds at work. But those are press releases. The real writers are on strike. Any sustained operating efficiencies will require a courageous leap no studio executive seems willing to make. Someone will actually have to lead, rather than follow. Someone will have to step forward, proclaim the emperor naked, and offer him some new threads.