Los Angeles is no longer the hotspot for filming an action blockbuster, with film-makers relocating to places such as Vancouver. So what can it do to win back the �migr�s?
One thing that reinforced the feeling Hollywood was the centre of the universe was the fact that it used to appear on screen so much. Or at least Los Angeles did. I was reminded of this last week when one of the characters in the sci-fi film In Time tumbled from the Sixth Street bridge and into the shallow slop of the LA river. The arches of the bridge, the epic concrete flood-channel, the endless sight lines, the bleary light: all of it was familiar. Point Break, Terminator 2, Chinatown, Them! all sprang to mind. Andrew Niccol's thriller was saying the same thing about its casually iconic backdrops as its unageing parade of cheekboned 25-year-olds were saying about their lives: we shouldn't die.
But, in the real world, things move on. These days, the Hollywood action blockbuster is as likely to come in Rain-lashed Business-District flavour as Sun-baked Urban Western: that's because lots of them, like Watchmen, I, Robot, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, now film in Vancouver. Runaway production ? films deciding to shoot abroad ? has been a hot issue for the US film industry for more than a decade. In 2003, 66% of studio films were still shot in California; six years later, it was only 38%. Another measure of this decline is the PPD (Permitted Production Day) figure ? one PPD being permission granted for a single film crew to film for a single project at a single defined location in a 24-hour period. Between 1996 and 2009, Los Angeles PPDs dropped from almost 14,000 a year to under 5,000.
Part of the unease about runaway production is due to its effects on the thousands of people employed in entertainment in California; part of it is plain national pride. But productions have been running away since cinema began, part of the allure being, of course, the occasional brush with the exotic. If you're making a film about, say, an international playboy spy, it's inevitable that you'll want to drop him at some point into a smoky Cantonese speakeasy, or a remote Alpine hotel (and the old studio-backlot substitutes don't really cut it any more). If there's a justifiable reason in the script for location-shooting abroad, this is known as a "creative runaway".
What's really hurting California's feelings is the "economic runaway" ? films that relocate for financial reasons, like tax incentives, reduced labour costs and upfront budget contributions. Vancouver was quick to establish itself as "Hollywood North" in the late 90s by offering a tax rebate on film production ? currently set at 33%. Other countries, like Australia ? where The Matrix and Moulin Rouge! were filmed - have followed suit. Such come-hither pouting was often seen in smaller countries keen to lure big-budget activity as a way of saying, as they launched their own fledging industries, "Cinema happens here". Romania (Cold Mountain, Ghost Rider) was one; Dubai ? as the sight of Tom Cruise clinging to the Burj Khalifa like the world's most expensive window-cleaner in the new Mission: Impossible reminds us ? is another.
With the emirate offering no special help to film-makers, this looks on the surface like a creative runaway. Actually, Dubai is desperate to be seen as a credible cinema centre, and one Mission: Impossible ? Ghost Protocol insider tells me that, confidentially, incentives were on the table for Paramount on a one-off basis. So Ghost Protocol is really an economic case; this blurring between the two must surely be common, with scripts getting hastily re-written as countries jostle for position and offer competing terms. That's globalisation, and it seems na�ve for the California industry to carp too much about the process. Perhaps the trade guilds would be better off focusing their energies on campaigning against states like New Mexico and Louisiana promoting competition within the US with tax credits: there is a more reasonable argument, with some short-term profiteering going on, that this is balkanising and weakening the American film industry from within.
California can't win on economic terms: as the first to build a global cinema, it was always going to be underbid on production costs further down the line. Perhaps, to win back some of the �migr�s, it needs to think local again ? start more projects that have a firm connection with America, and so have a reason to actually be set there (Collateral is a good example). And it needs to remember something: it was itself once the competition ? a group of rebellious film-makers who escaped west from the protectionist cartel of the Motion Picture Patents Company in New York, set up in 1908. There wasn't much there then, long before the downtown LA skyline became the stand-in for the anywhere city. A few farms, dusty roads, the new telegraph poles, and the sweet aroma of the acacias, Hollywood was nothing but a place.
? This article was corrected on 15 December 2010. The Dark Knight did not film in Vancouver.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/dec/14/runaway-california-location-los-angeles
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