The District would have to front millions in taxpayer dollars — including help financing a soundstage — to outbid Maryland and Virginia and woo more Hollywood productions to the city, filmmakers and producers told a D.C. Council committee Wednesday. The city’s reputation for having a painstaking permitting process, expensive accommodations for film crews, a dearth of production facilities and zero financial rebates has cost D.C. hundreds of millions of dollars in lost economic impact and millions in lost tax revenue, experts said. Most recently D.C. lost out to Baltimore when the producers of the television show “Veep” opted for Maryland, which has $7.5 million in its incentives fund. The producers of an Abraham Lincoln biopic skipped D.C. for Virginia, which has at least $2 million in available incentives.
The District incentive fund currently has about $16,000 in it, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of Motion Picture and Television Development.
The hearing comes one week after Mayor Vincent Gray proposed a 5 percent additional sales tax on movie theater concessions to help beef up the incentive fund. But three-quarters of the tax revenue would go toward enticing a movie theater owner to build a multiplex across the Anacostia River.
But experts said other states, including California, feed their incentive fund through the state lottery, which is more reliable than a tax.
“You want to know that when you apply for a program, you won’t be left at the altar after spending all that money,” John Hadity, chairman of the Producers Guild of America East, told the council’s Committee on Small and Local Business Development.
But it’s not just about the money.
“At the end of the day, the financial incentive … matters, but also the cost of execution — the cost of permitting, the cost of getting the infrastructure up and running,” said Michael Pickrum, Chief Financial Officer of BET Networks. BET is based in the District but films most of its shows in Georgia, which offers a 20 percent rebate on production spending.
“You need to make it easier to produce shows,” he said.
His colleagues said a sound studio in the District would greatly cut down on production costs. They suggested New York Avenue’s industrial district as a potential location.
“When you come in, you want to be able to move quickly — get in and out … you want to do it in one location if you can,” said Charles Long, CEO of Metropolis Studios.
