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Sindicator on March 18, 2012 |
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Friday night über producer Jerry Bruckheimer tweeted a call for Albuquerque restaurant suggestions. He’s certainly not suffering any shortage of sweet eats as he’s also tweeted an abundance of cake on the Albuquerque Studios set of The Lone Ranger here in NM. Werd in to OHI also says that five star craft service is a set staple.
Sunday, whether trekking out to another filming location, sight seeing or restaurant hunting it looks like The Lone Ranger producer ventured North of Albuquerque…
The Taos News reports:
Film producer Jerry Bruckheimer may have been the subject of a routine traffic stop in Taos County today.
An individual named Jerome Leon Bruckheimer was pulled over by police on State Road 75 this afternoon in southern Taos County. Local police dispatch stated it was likely a routine traffic stop but offered no other details.
That also happens to be the full name of the renowned film producer who is heading up the Disney film, “The Lone Ranger,” starring Johnny Depp that is currently shooting in New Mexico.
Tags: Jerry Bruckheimer, Sighting, Taos, The Lone Ranger
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Sindicator on March 18, 2012 |
Comments OffUPDATE 3/26/12: North Carolina strikes gold with Hunger Games where New Mexico struck-out on film jobs, economy AND tourism…
The impact of the film could be far-reaching. The books, by Suzanne Collins, have sold millions of copies. Syrett said Lionsgate Films has an “incredible” marketing campaign behind the film.
“You can’t buy a billboard this large,” Syrett said Wednesday. “It will have a tremendous tourism impact for years to come.”
-MSNBC
Having a film shoot in your area is certainly a profitable venture. The North Carolina film commission has revealed that preliminary figures show that The Hunger Games brought nearly $62 million into the local economy.
The following Charlotte Observer story extracts that scenery among other accolades N.C. has to offer are what landed the state this and more upcoming major productions, including Iron Man 3, which also considered New Mexico during the particularly embattled period of time when our own state film futures were highly contested by the then incoming administration.
“…When “The Hunger Games” was scouting locations, Canada and New Mexico were also considered, Jacobson says. But, in addition to the tax-incentive program, “North Carolina really had it all visually for us.
…The Hunger Games” is the biggest film project to land in North Carolina, which has seen increased interest from filmmakers and TV producers thanks to one of the most robust tax-incentive programs in the country: Filmmakers can get a refund on 25 percent of salaries and money they spend on taxable items in North Carolina, worth up to $20 million per project.
…Currently, the state is hosting 10 productions (feature films including Marvel Studios’ “Iron Man 3” and TV series including Cinemax’s “Banshee”).
From a state whose Governor embraces and works to build film as a job creating priority, Theoden Janes of the Charlotte Observer reports from Los Angeles with the kind of journalistic prose that paints a romantic and beautiful picture of the film making, destined to cast a flattering spotlight on North Carolina for the rest of the world to see.
By Theoden Janes
Charlotte Observer
LOS ANGELES – The five-star Four Seasons Hotel seems to have everything a movie star could desire, but Lenny Kravitz is fantasizing about something that’s 2,400 miles away: Price’s Chicken Coop.
Charlotte’s renowned fried-chicken joint is one of the things the rocker-actor misses most about North Carolina, where “The Hunger Games” was shot over four months last year.
“That’s my joint,” says Kravitz, as he sinks into a sofa in a suite. “Normally, I eat very healthy and organic, so people are probably saying, ‘He eats that?’ But I gotta get country every now and again.”
Kravitz, several other “Hunger Games” cast members, and filmmakers jumped at the chance to talk about the Tar Heel State, toward the end of a recent weekend they spent fielding many of the same questions over and over again from journalists about the $90 million production, which was filmed between May and September 2011.
“It’ll be nice to talk about Charlotte, which I loved,” says director Gary Ross as he greets a visitor to another Four Seasons suite.
The release of the film is a huge deal to Ross and Kravitz and the fellow cast and crew. It’s an equally big deal for North Carolina.
‘N.C. really had it all visually’
“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” from 2006 is the highest-grossing film shot in the state; the NASCAR sendup topped out at $148 million. “The Hunger Games” – in theaters on Friday – could surpass that in two weekends.
Analysts believe it could become one of the biggest blockbusters ever, with good reason: It is based on a 2008 young-adult novel by Suzanne Collins that has sold 23.5 million copies; it stars a Hollywood It Girl-slash-Oscar-nominated actress (Jennifer Lawrence); and unlike “Twilight,” boys and men freely admit they like it.
The story is set in a bleak, dystopian future in which a postwar North America has been renamed Panem and divided into 12 districts, which surround a wealthy seat of government known as the Capitol. As punishment for a decades-ago rebellion, the Capitol annually selects one boy and one girl from each district to compete in a televised battle to the death.
Nina Jacobson, the film’s primary producer, says North Carolina provided ideal locations for each of the tale’s main settings – District 12 (home of Lawrence’s character, Katniss Everdeen), the Capitol, and the Arena (where the Games take place).
Remote portions of DuPont State Forest near Asheville were perfect for the artificial landscape the Capitol creates for the Arena; the insides of newer, clean-line uptown Charlotte buildings stood in nicely for the Capitol.
Multiple shooting locations were convenient because of economic struggles in North Carolina. An abandoned mill village outside of Hildebran (Henry River) and an old warehouse in Shelby (Royster P&M) were used to bring to life District 12, a poverty-stricken, rural Appalachia. The former Philip Morris cigarette manufacturing plant in Concord also got plenty of use.
“For District 12, when we found the areas around Shelby and in Henry River, we were blown away by how much that felt like we were reading the book and imagining it in our mind’s eye,” Jacobson says. “Having such great specificity to the Appalachian roots of Katniss’s character felt really right to us.
“Asheville and the woods had a sense of a wilderness so beautiful it could feel artificial. And Charlotte is an incredibly modern city. We were able to take advantage of some of your local architecture. Then we also had Philip Morris, which was this ominous concrete compound that worked great for the Capitol interiors.”
When “The Hunger Games” was scouting locations, Canada and New Mexico were also considered, Jacobson says. But, in addition to the tax-incentive program, “North Carolina really had it all visually for us.”
Where they lived, hung out
Because the shoot lasted all summer, the cast and crew became well-acquainted with the area.
Lawrence, the star, rented a house in the NoDa area of Charlotte. Ross, the director, rented one in Myers Park. The adult cast members took up residence at the Ritz-Carlton in uptown. Kravitz, who plays Katniss’s stylist in the film, rented out Bojangles’ Coliseum for a month to rehearse for his “Black and White America” world tour (currently making the rounds in Australia).
And they didn’t hide from view. Male lead Josh Hutcherson – who plays Katniss’s fellow District 12 tribute, Peeta Mellark – enjoyed a zipline tour in Asheville so much, he went back two more times. Ross was a repeat diner at the Customshop restaurant on Elizabeth Avenue. (“I ordered the pork belly a lot and I garnered that nickname.”)
Many cast members went to see Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow perform at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in late August, says actress Elizabeth Banks, who plays Effie Trinket, escort for the District 12 tributes.
“I thought Charlotte was beautiful. It’s so clean. Really walkable,” says Banks, who has another trilogy on her resume – “Spider-Man” 1, 2 and 3 – and has been featured as a frequent guest on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock.” “I had my son there, so it was nice to be able to go out every day and just kind of walk around, and I thought the downtown was really cool.”
Asheville was even more popular, though. The production was based there for almost two months, while the actors and filmmakers shot the Arena scenes in the DuPont forest, the Coleman Boundary in Barnardsville and the North Fork Reservoir in Black Mountain.
“Asheville’s one of the greatest places you can spend a summer, it really is,” says Ross, who has received Oscar nominations for writing “Seabiscuit,” “Dave” and “Big.” “It’s very transforming in a lot of ways. It’s this little jewel of a city off in the mountains.”
Among the favorite hangouts? The Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar. “The stacks go on and on and on and on,” Ross says, “and it just became a wonderful environment where you would wander by the Book Exchange and find a bunch of crew or people from the movie sitting there and reading and having a coffee during the day.”
Says Hutcherson, who is also currently starring in “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson: “Shooting in Asheville was incredible. It was cool to go somewhere and get away from it all and shoot this movie. Especially with all the hype surrounding it, it was nice to be where there weren’t cameras and there weren’t people getting in your head.”
‘It was just so hot’ on the set
The production didn’t go off without a hitch, though.
One of the first segments filmed was the Reaping Ceremony, when Banks’ character selects the names of the two teenagers who will represent District 12 in the Games. These scenes were shot outside an old warehouse in Shelby in May – as the area was going through a heat wave.
Throughout the film, Banks appears in a costume that took half an hour to put on and in makeup that took 21/2 hours to apply. With temperatures soaring into the triple digits, the get-up became unbearable.
“I got heat exhaustion for the first time in my life while I was there. It was crazy,” she says. “The only thing that was keeping me going was the adrenaline of shooting, because the minute they called wrap, I literally collapsed. I could barely form words.”
After that, producers gave her a personal air-conditioner. “It was blowing directly on me. It (showed) the temperature on it, and it never got below 87. So even with a full air-conditioning unit blowing on me, it still was almost 90 degrees the entire time we were there.”
The Reaping scenes involved scores of extras, many of whom were children; Banks and Lawrence both say they saw girls who had fainted due to the heat. They helped distribute water and tried to keep the extras’ spirits up.
“There was nothing we could really do, because we were outside – there was really nowhere people could go to cool down,” says Lawrence, an Academy Award nominee for 2010’s “Winter’s Bone.” “We tried to make as much shade as possible … making everybody drink a lot of water, but it was just so hot.”
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Tags: New Mexico Connections, New Mexico Film Incentives, North Carolina Film, The Hunger Games
Posted by
Sindicator on March 18, 2012 |
Comments Off“Currently, our tax credit is not on par with those of New York, Georgia, North Carolina and New Mexico, among others.”
-Gale Anne Hurd, co-founder of the Producers Guild of America
LOS ANGELES – Gale Anne Hurd is one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, having been a producer on such big hit action movies as “The Terminator” and “Aliens” and now AMC’s successful zombie drama series “The Walking Dead.” But Hurd hasn’t worked in California for nearly a decade, largely because of more favorable film tax credits and rebates offered in other locales.
A fourth-generation Los Angeles native, Hurd would like to see that change. She’s among many high-profile film and television producers who are hoping that California will extend and expand its tax credit to make it more competitive with the likes of Georgia, New York and Illinois. Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, D-Sylmar, recently introduced a bill that would extend the program, which launched in 2009 and is set to expire next year, through 2018.
Hurd, co-founder of the Producers Guild of America’s annual Produced By Conference, spoke about her views on the state credit and what Sacramento could do to strengthen it.
Q. You live in L.A. but rarely shoot here. Why not?
A. I film my TV series (“The Walking Dead”) out of state and have not filmed in California since I produced “The Hulk” in 2003. As much as I would like to sleep in my own bed at night and employ many of the incredibly talented California-based crew members, I have filmed instead in Georgia, Toronto and Detroit and many other (places) with much higher incentives. I have a project that’s about to shoot in New York that’s called “Very Good Girls” (a feature starring Elizabeth Olsen and Dakota Fanning).
Q. So is California’s film tax credit not effective?
A. It’s fantastic that we have a program, but it can’t be viewed in a vacuum because producers and financiers look at all of the available options and the pros and the cons and you want to limit the number of cons that you have.
Q. If you had a message to send to California lawmakers, what would it be?
A. The film and television industry is one of the most productive businesses in California, and employs thousands of residents as crew, cast and in executive positions. We pay taxes, we shop locally, send our children to school here and keep allied businesses (restaurants, dry cleaners, retail stores, car dealerships) in profit. The impact from lost production to other states and countries amounts to billions of dollars. With a competitive tax credit, California can reclaim its position as the entertainment capital of the world. Currently, our tax credit is not on par with those of New York, Georgia, North Carolina and New Mexico, among others.
Q. In what way?
A. There are so many restrictions. The tax credit is not a transferable credit (except for independent projects with budgets under $10 million). You can’t sell it like you can in other states like Georgia. You have to apply by June 1, and even if you are awarded the credit you have to start rolling your cameras 180 days after you’re notified (of an approval). But if your cast member isn’t available until January or February, then it doesn’t work.
As a producer, you have to go with a known commodity. That means shooting where you know you will be qualified so you can keep very precious finance, cast and budget schedules intact. To me, the tax credit should be a rolling situation like it is in most states, so that when you have your project together, you can submit it and be considered. That would be a first step.
Q. What else would you like to see changed?
A. Raising the limit (on the annual tax credit allocation) from $100 million to $200 million a year is a minimum when you consider New York has $420 million a year. When you think about the number of people working in the industry, there are far more people based in California than in New York, but New York right now has more than four times the incentive.
Q. Skeptics would say California can’t afford such an expansion. What do you say to that?
A. If you look at the impact that the industry has on the state in terms of taxes paid, in terms of the multiplier effect for each dollar that’s spent, I think it’s ridiculous. … Part of what they’re saying is that projects will shoot here anyway, but that’s simply not true. (“The Incredible Hulk,” the 2008 Marvel reboot of the big green guy’s franchise that Hurd also produced, was filmed mainly in Canada.)
Q. Why did you select Georgia as the location for shooting “The Walking Dead”?
A. The series is based on a comic book that is set in the South. Georgia (also) has a 30 percent tax credit. It was absolutely essential. For many independent financiers, their financing is incumbent upon tax credits or rebates. It’s part of their business plan. Those financing entities cannot shoot where they cannot be guaranteed a tax credit.
___
(c)2012 the Los Angeles Times
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Tags: Gale Anne Hurd, Los Angeles Times, New Mexico Film Incentives, Walking Dead
