Runaway films need incentive to stay

The Democratic presidential aspirants have been getting a lot of mileage lately out of accusing Wall Street’s corporate overlords of callously giving away American jobs. “People are making a fortune shipping the jobs of the other America somewhere else,” says Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.). After winning the New Hampshire primary, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told supporters: “We’re not giving one benefit or reward to any Benedict Arnold company or CEO who take the jobs and money overseas and stick you with the bill.”

Hey dudes, if you want to see jobs and money going overseas, come to Hollywood.

In the movie industry, runaway production is at epidemic levels. Over the last decade, billions of dollars in film production have gone outside the country, lured away by a variety of foreign tax breaks and economic incentives. Studios can save millions by shooting films and TV shows in Canada, which has been such a popular production getaway for Paramount that I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio replaced the fabled mountain peak on its logo with a shot of the Canadian Rockies. Over the past year, Paramount alone has filmed seven films outside the U.S., including “The Core,” “Paycheck” and “Timeline.”

Paramount is hardly alone. Miramax’s Oscar-winning “Chicago” was filmed in Toronto, and 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men” series was filmed in Vancouver.

After years of seeing home-grown jobs evaporate, quiet grumbling has turned to militancy among various show business unions and activist groups. As The Times’ John Horn reported recently, Miramax’s “Cold Mountain,” an American Civil War drama shot largely in Romania last year, has been the target of an Internet campaign urging people to avoid seeing the film. The campaign, led by two outspoken groups of below-the-line industry workers, including the Film and Television Action Committee, may have cost “Cold Mountain” box-office dollars as well as Oscar nominations, leaving Miramax without an Oscar best picture nominee for the first time in a decade.

Michael Everett, a veteran gaffer who’s a member of the FTAC steering committee, says the “Cold Mountain” attack is just the start of an offensive against high-profile films shooting outside the country. “We’re fighting fire with fire,” says Everett, now at work on the Warners film “Constantine,” shooting in Los Angeles. “Our attitude is, no Oscars for runaways.”

FTAC has also launched a letter-writing campaign against “Cinderella Man,” a Ron Howard film that stars Russell Crowe as 1930s-era American boxer Jim Braddock, which films later this spring in Toronto. Everett says his group plans a reverse publicity campaign against “Cinderella Man” and other American-themed movies shooting outside the U.S. “When a movie opens, they’re very vulnerable to bad publicity. And we plan to spread negative blurbs or reveal their endings as a way of shaming the people involved in the outsourcing of American jobs. They’re just spitting on our community.”

The showdown between the studios and various union activists raises two especially provocative questions. How important is it that an American-themed movie, be it “Cold Mountain” or “The Alamo” or “Miracle,” the new Kurt Russell film about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s dramatic victory in the 1980 Olympics, be made in the U.S.? And is it a legitimate tactic to lobby against giving a film a creative award, such as the Oscar, simply because it was shot on foreign soil?

As someone who would never dream of crossing a picket line -- I stopped shopping at Ralphs and Vons the day their workers went out on strike -- I’m sympathetic to the blue-collar Hollywood position. And I have no quarrel with the argument that the Oscars are a marketing tool as much as an award for creativity. But punishing a film for costing American workers’ jobs puts everyone on a dangerous slippery slope. Does that mean you can also punish a film for its filmmaker’s politics? Or its star’s bad behavior? Or its studio’s Oscar campaign excesses?

It would be nice if every movie were seen as sacrosanct, like “The Alamo.” “We never considered making ‘The Alamo’ outside of Texas, much less outside of America,” says Disney production chief Nina Jacobsen. But even though Disney promoted “Miracle” with an American-flag-drenched marketing blitz, Jacobsen says, “the experience of seeing the movie wasn’t any less complete by shooting the film on a stage in Vancouver. Shooting in Canada was simply a matter of economics.”

If you’re angry with Anthony Minghella for making “Cold Mountain” in Romania, then don’t you have to be critical of Martin Scorsese for making “Gangs of New York” in Rome? In that case, Miramax and Robert De Niro had attempted to build studios at the former Brooklyn Navy Yard. When the project fell through, Rome was the only available location with both studio space and large water tanks.

Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who produced both films, says he sympathizes with the union position. “As the son of working-class parents, I understand why they would be upset over the loss of jobs. I support John Kerry’s initiatives -- our government has to come up with the same tax incentives other countries have. But I also believe that when you’re working with artists like Martin Scorsese and Anthony Minghella, you have to let the filmmaker make the best artistic choices for their film.”

It also seems unfair to target a film like “Cinderella Man” and especially its director, Ron Howard, who, after all, has shot all 16 of his previous films in America. Although the film, financed by Universal and Miramax, is in Canada largely for budgetary reasons, creative decisions also played a major role.

Roughly one-third of the film takes place in or around an arena that doubles for the Depression-era Madison Square Garden. While most urban arenas are occupied with basketball or hockey games, Toronto has the Maple Leaf Garden, a vintage facility that stands unoccupied, allowing the production to lease it for as long as needed.

Of course, if I were an unemployed stagehand, it would be difficult for me to sympathize with studios that are raking in unprecedented DVD profits at a time when so many blue-collar workers are out of a job.

A big part of the problem is that Hollywood sits atop a fault line of class divisions. The union activists see executives as greedy profit-mongers; the studio loyalists view the unions as inflexible fanatics.

Everyone is guilty of some hypocrisy. The studios say they can’t afford to make movies in America, yet pay stars $20 million to perform in their films. The unions want the studios to make concessions, yet enforce restrictions that prohibit actors from flying coach, directors from driving themselves to work and cinematographers from operating a camera without having a camera operator paid to stand by.

Everyone agrees that if there were a level economic playing field, more movies would stay home. But neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton before him has shown much interest in the problem. As Paramount’s Sherry Lansing puts it: “If Canada is going to give all sorts of tax incentives, why couldn’t our government do the same thing?”

Industry leaders have been quick to criticize union activists for badmouthing movies that are shot overseas. But if the movie industry spent half the time and effort it’s put into shining a spotlight on the evils of piracy, it could have made runaway production into a front-burner issue.

One of the industry’s best salesmen is governor of the state that’s lost the most film production revenue. Yet if Gov. Schwarzenegger is planning to launch an all-out anti-runaway-production lobbying offensive in Washington, he’s done a pretty good job of keeping it under wraps.

This all sounds like a great opportunity for Kerry to make some political hay. If he’s serious about giving companies tax breaks for keeping jobs in America, he has a campaign platform that could bridge the gap between Hollywood’s warring parties.

Movies are not sneakers or slacks -- they are America’s great art form. It’s about time they all came with a stamp saying: Made in the USA.

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar.