Counterfeit Cities: Spacial Celebriphilia and Film's Whoring of Place
How Tax Payers Subsidize Hollywood's Production Costs

BY: DIzzIE [antikopyright 2007]


In case you can't be bothered to read two pages of text (I know it's
hard to, you know, read, so my apologies in advance that this isn't a
Youtube video), here's the short version: Why aren't movies often
filmed in the locations that the narrative takes place in? Because
movie studios can fuck over tax payers by giving them the 'privilege'
of footing the production cost bill by filming in other cities. Now
then...

I was watching Mr. Brooks (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780571/) the
other day, a fun little mash-up of American Psycho and The Thomas
Crown Affair that's indeed quite enjoyable so long as you fast
forward through any scene that has the decrepit Demi Moore monster in
it. But more to the point, Mr. Brooks is a film that establishes
itself as ostensibly being set in Portland, Oregon in the first
minute or so, and yet a curious odour of translocality begins to seep
in almost immediately. Whilst Mr. Brooks is driving on a highway in
the night, at about 8 minutes and 22 seconds one can see a topmost
corner of a building appear in the top right of the shot, darkened
save for the glowing Morgan Keegan sign. Doing a little bit of online
sleuthing, one can discover that Morgan Keegan is a "premier regional
investment firm offering full-service investment banking, securities
brokerage, trust and asset management." (Source
(http://www.morgankeegan.com/MK/Ourstory/default.htm))

So who gives half a fuck? Well, the thing is that there are no
Morgan Keegan branches in Portland. Looking at Morgan Keegan's
convenient online branch locator
(http://www.morgankeegan.com/MK/Ourstory/Locations/BranchLocator.htm),
one sees that not only are there no MK branches in Portland, but
there are no branches west of Texas, with corporate headquarters
being in Memphis, Tennessee. Hold that thought, and now fast forward
through the movie, past all of the end-credits with the trendy film
score, and just before the screen goes black, the following message
appears: "The Filmmakers wish to extend their personal thanks to The
Spirited Citizens of Shreveport and Bossier City, Louisiana." And lo
and behold, there is indeed a Morgan Keegan branch in none other than
Shreveport, LA
(http://www.morgankeegan.com/MK/Ourstory/Locations/default.htm?state=L
A&city=Shreveport).

In case you still don't give a fuck, the question that now arises is
why in the world would a movie that claims to be situated in Oregon
be (at least partially) filmed across the country in Louisiana? This
is where things get a little more interesting...

In order to entice wealthy movie execs to film their oft-recycled
Hollywood bowel movements in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, state
film commissions all too often offer the movie studios a variety of
dangling carrots (rubbed in Vaseline a la Palahniuk), namely tax
credits. The film's production company schlops together a list of
proposed expenses, adds it all up, and passes it over to the state's
film commission, which then grants the production company a tax
credit that's X% of the total expenses.

The fun thing about tax credits is that they are what are known as
liquid assets, which means that they can be sold for cash (for
instance to specialized credit brokers or even to individual
residents, which would mean that those who actually gave the
production companies the credits in the first place now have the
privilege of buying those credits back!). The other fun thing is that
the initial pre-application is presented to the commission before any
of the proposed expenditures are actually spent.

But the fun doesn't stop there :). As it so happens, Louisiana's
(former) film commissioner was charged last month with accepting
$50,000 in bribes (http://blog.nola.com/times-
picayune/2007/08/former_state_film_commissioner.html) in return for
increasing the tax credits given to film production companies, such
as the ones that produced Mr. Brooks and indeed only a few days ago
he has recently plead guilty to accepting close to $60,000
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/09/07/AR2007090701283_pf.html). In the
specific case of Mr. Brooks, Malcolm Petal, the chief executive of
the Louisiana Institute of Film and Technology (LIFT), which was the
production company behind the film, gave the money to a middleman,
the lawyer William Bradley, who in turn passed the cashito along to
Lousiana's film commissioner, Mark Smith. Smith then cast a lenient
eye on the amount of tax credits that LIFT received.

Remember that part where I said that production costs are submitted
not based on any sort of audit process but by using simple
expenditure forms that list how much the production company expects
to spend? The initial expenditure proposed for Mr. Brooks was a hefty
$34.1 million. The actual production cost? $18.5. And as you may have
guessed, the film commission issued the tax credits based on the
preliminary figure.

Of course, the key point here is that tax credits allocated to the
production companies have to come from somewhere. Sure, the state's
bribed film commissioner is the motherfucker that actually signs the
credits over, but where exactly do those credits come from in the
first place? From the local tax payers. This essentially means that
the denizens of Louisiana paid the production company behind Mr.
Brooks $5.1 million (http://blog.nola.com/times-
picayune/2007/08/former_state_film_commissioner.html). To further rub
some shit over the bludgeoned whore's face, Lousiana's old tax credit
policy actually forced its citizens to give tax credits for all
expenses incurred by the production company, even those outside of
Louisiana. This serves to explain why some of Mr. Brooks does indeed
appear to be shot in Portland (some of the locations like the Cup &
Saucer Cafe (http://portland.citysearch.com/profile/8470170/) and the
Wentworth Chevytown (http://www.wentworthchevrolet.com/) are clearly
local Portland businesses). Why not go ahead and shoot in the
location the film is actually meant to be in if you can get the
suckers in that other place to grant you some 'generous' kickbacks
irrespective of where you're actually incurring expenses?

Here's how shit goes down: the production companies bribe the sate
film commissioners, who in turn overlook certain inflations in
proposed expenditures so as to allow the production companies to
garner higher tax credits. In other words, the production companies
and state officials reap the financial benefits, while the tax payers
get skullfucked. Thus not only may you end up paying the film
industry to do its movie in your town, but you get the added benefit
of having restricted movement in your city as whole streets are
cordoned off for the purposes of film production, all while your town
not only isn't even mentioned in the film, but is actually dressed up
to look like a wholly different city altogether.

The alleged thinking behind these cutbacks being offered to the
movie studios is that the revenue generated by new expenses resulting
from having everyone associated with the film present in the town
will outweigh the costs of granting the production companies the tax
credits in the first place. As others have already pointed out
(http://jeffsadow.blogspot.com/2005/03/lights-camera-corporate-
welfare-for.html), these alleged benefits are pretty fucking far from
guarantees. What's more, is that the cunts behind these programs also
claim that whoring out your city provides 'intangible' benefits along
the lines of exposure of the locale, that can then apparently
generate tourism or some such jazz.

That's all well and good, but it brings us back to the fact that the
Mr.Brooks' diegesis is explicitly meant to be situated in Portland.
How then, pray tell, may a city reap any sort of 'intangible'
benefits if the city portrayed in the film is labeled as another
locale altogether? It is as if the city's film commissioner turned
pimp not only whored out the city to be (ab)used any which way, but
the whore was then ordered to dress up like a favourite celebrity as
it gets dicked in the ear. Nothing about Portland is pivotal (or for
that matter of any significance whatsoever) to the plotline of Mr.
Brooks, and yet the producers felt the urge to transform Shreveport
into a counterfeit city, an apparently cheaper version of Portland.

Imitation creates the impression of the necessity of veneration,
that some cities are thus worthy of being imitated, whilst others can
only aspire to be imitators (and must indeed compete for the
perceived privilege by offering competitive kickbacks), thus granting
that which is imitated an undeserved worth at the expense (and this
is to be taken quite literally, recall whose taxes are paying for the
film's production) of the locale in which actual filming takes place.

Thus, next time you notice that the film's location may not be the
one claimed in the narrative, keep in mind that this is likely due to
the fact that the film's producers have found a convenient smaller
city in which they can bribe their way into making that town's
residents subsidize the movie's production, while at the same time
thus perpetuating a filmically constructed inequality of locality
that indeed spills over outside of the screen.

The officials get bribed, the production companies get kickbacks and
tax credits, and the citizens foot the bill as they're getting fucked
over. To then finally return to the question posed at the outset of
this textifle, this is why a movie that claims to be situated in
Portland, Oregon was actually (partially) filmed in Shreveport,
Louisiana. It's fun to learn things, isn't it? :)

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