Utah

This post is a perfect compliment to the one below. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

With 30,000 people in town for the Sundance Film Festival, Utah film commissioner Aaron Syrett is giddy at the prospect of persuading a few filmmakers to shoot their next production here.

He's got good reason to be. The state is coming off its best year ever for film productions, has a new film incentive program that could see its funding increase fivefold and Syrett's on home turf as a sponsor of the festival.

In the cutthroat world of Hollywood productions, which often spend hundreds of millions of dollars, he'll need every advantage he can get.

The competition is fierce and willing to travel.

North Carolina, Maryland, Washington and New York, among numerous other states and cities, also have recruiters here touting millions of dollars in incentives that are often more generous than Utah's.

Which is worse, the fact that many and probably most states are going to put more money into their programs than they get out of it, or that the bureaucrats don't realize that they are perpetuating the lack of quality films over the past decade or so? More tax incentives mean more bad movies [side note: I'm willing to bet that production of The Departed was not a result of tax incentives]. Here's more:

Veteran Chicago entertainment lawyer Corkey Cederal, in town giving a speech on federal film incentives, says states either need to get serious about giving large incentives or not bother. In his estimation, Utah isn't making the cut. The serious states offer at least a 20 percent rebate or tax credit, he said.

"For any state to offer a very little incentive ... is like someone being a little bit pregnant. They should decide they don't want to offer any incentives or they should really come with a reasonable incentive," he said.

If there's one thing that Hollywood knows how to do, it's fool everyone into thinking that they are in financial straits and are in dire need of tax breaks.