Keep Filmmaking at Home, Petitions Urge

Petitions bearing more than 75,000 signatures urging Gov. Gray Davis to help stop the flow of film productions to Canada were presented to him Monday.

Members of the Film and Television Action Committee unveiled the petitions--mostly signed by production assistants, stunt performers and other film industry workers--at a news conference.

Speakers backed three measures pending in the Legislature, including a proposal by Assemblyman Scott Wildman offering a 10% tax rebate to companies that keep film production in California.

The tax break is meant to help close the cost gap between filming here and filming abroad, which can be 25% cheaper.

Wildman (D-Los Angeles) estimated that the bill would cost the state $27 million in tax revenue. He said keeping more than 100,000 workers--many of them Valley residents--employed would more than offset the loss in tax dollars.

According to a report by the independent consulting firm Monitor Co., $2.8 billion in production revenues and 23,500 entertainment jobs went north in 1998. The lost jobs set in motion an economic ripple that reaches the 131,400 people employed directly by the entertainment industry and as many as 248,300 indirectly tied to it.

“The nuts and bolts of the film industry are being pulled away from California,” said Jack DeGovia, president of the Film and Television Action Committee. “Workers like art directors can go to Canada with the productions. But we’re leaving behind all the prop makers and painters, the salt-of-the-earth people we’ve worked with for years. Their only answer is going to be to leave the industry. It has taken us 70 years to build this pool of talented craftsmen.”