Michael Kinsley considers how state film subsidies just encourage a dive to the bottom race with other states. Little new wealth is created; what is is not large and is quickly dissipated. And the next state over is always ready to up the ante. Or Vancouver, BC, which has doubled for nearly every significant city on the planet.
And then there's the international market. Peter Jackson made New Zealand a major film center with The Lord of the Rings. The producers of Cold Mountain thought Romania looked more like western North Carolina than western North Carolina.
Most of the time, in any event, movies and TV shows use locations for second unit, exterior shots. Movies, by their nature, end production. TV shows tend to stay in LA. Grey's Anatomy, which pretends a Seattle setting, presents an office building put up for the high tech boom and then turned into a big server farm HQ, as a hospital. Frasier just used a backdrop photo of downtown Seattle to set the location (although it did generate a decent joke: when Harborview Hospital- which exists for real- embarked on a major expansion, the two huge cranes looming over the site were quickly dubbed Niles and Frasier).
Army Wives, a TV series, is based down around Charleston. It's an outlier in a state that can't seem to support even enough infrastructure to produce regular documentary features for the state-owned public TV network.
But back to Kinsley, who concludes:
And then there's the international market. Peter Jackson made New Zealand a major film center with The Lord of the Rings. The producers of Cold Mountain thought Romania looked more like western North Carolina than western North Carolina.
Most of the time, in any event, movies and TV shows use locations for second unit, exterior shots. Movies, by their nature, end production. TV shows tend to stay in LA. Grey's Anatomy, which pretends a Seattle setting, presents an office building put up for the high tech boom and then turned into a big server farm HQ, as a hospital. Frasier just used a backdrop photo of downtown Seattle to set the location (although it did generate a decent joke: when Harborview Hospital- which exists for real- embarked on a major expansion, the two huge cranes looming over the site were quickly dubbed Niles and Frasier).
Army Wives, a TV series, is based down around Charleston. It's an outlier in a state that can't seem to support even enough infrastructure to produce regular documentary features for the state-owned public TV network.
But back to Kinsley, who concludes:
Government, in order to work, must be a monopoly. The appeal of the movie industry to beleaguered state treasurers, in addition to its glamour, is its mobility. There are no huge factories. A movie set somewhere can be shot almost anywhere. And it will employ locals and spend money. But mobility giveth and mobility taketh away. Pit the states against one another, and the subsidies will inevitably become more generous and less effective at the same time.Just like for attracting factories under SC's 1950s textile mill model.
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