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Tom Cruise vs. weekend service on commuter rail
By adamg on Thu, 02/16/2012 - 7:41am
The amount of a tax break Tom Cruise gets when he makes a movie here almost equals the cost of keeping commuter rail service running on weekends and after 10 p.m.
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Comments
purely political and factually bogus
The Massachusetts Film Tax Incentive Program explicitly states that payments to an employee when total payments are $1m or more (“High Salary Employee”) are NOT eligible for the payroll credit. So, the whole premise of the tract was baloney.
I'm as p-ed off as most Bostonians about the ongoing shenanigans re: MBTA budgeting. But there are better ways to raise awareness and educate people about the scope of the problem than stupid "eat the rich" propaganda.
Yeah, let's target the film
Yeah, let's target the film credit, get all that money Hollywood spends out of here.
Blue Mass Group should know better. Shame on them.
What money the film industry spends here?
You mean on vehicle rentals?
Nope, check the doors and license plates - the vehicles are all from California.
You mean from meals the crews eat?
Nope, check out the catering trucks, from out of state too. *Maybe* they bought their supplies from local wholesalers, but the staff aren't going out for dining on the town.
You mean the income from hotel rooms?
Nope - look at the huge motorhomes and trailers parked on our streets.
You mean from employing people who work the sets?
Nope - large percentages of the crews come from CA and are employed by CA companies. Lots of people there are getting paid virtually nothing, because they're just happy to be there, desperate to get their foot in the door or jump up the ladder out of the pool of a million other idiots who think they'll make it big in Hollywood.
Here's what they do cost us:
-Millions of dollars for star salary bonuses (25%, remember?), for stars who don't pay any taxes while they're in MA, save maybe the airport fees
-PUBLIC spaces being closed - roads, parks, even entire city blocks. What do you suppose the economic cost of 6 hours of "rolling" closures on an INTERSTATE FREEWAY was?
-Even more hassles, like neighborhoods that have to put up with generators, bright lights, not being able to get into or leave their homes, etc.
-The salaries of a slew of people the city and state governments to smooth all the wrinkles out for these Hollywood leeches.
Think of all the bullshit you've had to deal with from the city, and how nice it'd be if you had your very own liaison YOU could call.
It's a little of both
The treatment of the original article to the film credit versus the MBTA deficit is overly simplistic as all the commenters above have demonstrated.
However, the idea behind the film credit was to get the industry to love filming here SO much that they'd want to turn abandoned military bases and commercial warehouse depots into film studios and we'd become Hollywood East. It wasn't well thought out...but it was worth a shot, I guess, so long as we can afford the inconvenience. If we bring in ANY tax revenue at or above what we give out in credit, then it was a good deal financially. Without the credit, they wouldn't have filmed anything here and we'd be at a net of zero anyways...the MBTA still at a deficit. And since it's a credit to what we would only collect...if we gave the credit, then it's not like we really lost any money.
So, that's really the only question: Did we bring in more than we credited in revenues? If not, then we really didn't lose anything of much value and hopefully a few industries (tourism, hotel, food) picked up a bit of tangential benefit from it.
It might not be worth it, but movies do bring exposure
In general, I dislike it when government bets on industries by providing tax breaks to one over the other.
That said, there is another kind of value that movie making in and around Boston brings us: exposure. Whether it is worth the tax incentives or not is an open question, but most movies portray Boston in a cool type of way (whether it's brilliant computer geeks at the universities or tough blue collar folk who "talk funny"), and that has, in my experience, caused at least a few people to take another look at a city that they previously thought of as a dying Rust Belt-like place (even if their original notion was formed in ignorance).
It might sound ridiculous, but I actually know people who were not considering going to school in Boston before seeing Good Will Hunting. Some of those people are now quite successful, happily living here and contributing to the dynamic economy of Greater Boston. For some reason, that movie in particular really seemed to make our little outpost on the North Atlantic stand out in a way it had not before to a lot of people in the 25-35 age cohort.
Again, the tax breaks might not be worth it, but Boston and Massachusetts have undoubtedly gained in the cache department as a result of some of the movies set here (even if parts are filmed in Toronto or elsewhere).
Boston doesn't need movies for exposure
Every American kid when growing up does American History, and if they're not completely asleep, they're gonna hear a lot about Boston. The only other city with that kind of historical cachet here is Philly.
Also, there's the whole Harvard/MIT/BU/NU/etc/etc/etc thing, for school. Seems hard to believe that someone wouldn't think about school here unless they saw Good Will Hunting. Is Golden Boys going to make people more receptive to Pittsburgh? Bleh.
Speaking of GWH, I watched it again over the summer with my gf, and I discovered something I didn't realize before: it sucks. I guess I didn't notice when I watched it many years ago. That movie has all of the subtlety, well... of a Ben Affleck film. Sigh.
Plus, many of the city skyline shots from "Southie" were obviously filmed from Cambridge. That bastard.
but not every kid is a history buff.
I might have grown up dreaming about what it would have been like to be in Lexington in Concord on that April morning, but most other kids didn't.
My point was that in my experience, few people who are now in the 25-35 age cohort (or thereabout) and who did not grow up around here hadn't the slightest idea what a "Boston" accent was, or knew very much else about this place other than what saw might have seen in a history book. Good Will Hunting had a hand in changing that. Maybe it wasn't a big one, but it definitely opened at least few eyes (and ears) to the fact that this place had more than just history.
Remember things pre-1997? Boston was a place that was cold, had a shitty sports teams, and once upon a time had big tech companies. It was a place that was just discovering electronic toll transponders. It still had a mostly intact elevated highway running through downtown and lousy connections to the airport. And you couldn't call it "southie" unless you and 2 generations before you had grown up there without catching a beating (frankly, I think a lot of the people who throw "Southie" around should still catch said beating, but I digress).
It's difficult to avoid hindsight bias, but I can say with confidence that this place wasn't always revered as the cool place that it is now (and particularly by "foreigners").
can we give them 30% if they
can we give them 30% if they make a movie that isn't about people with irish last names killing people?