When I attended the screening of Carrie Preston’s (Arlene Fowler) film That’s What She Said, someone at the closing reception told me that they thought True Blood was filmed in Louisiana. I happily told him however that the series was filmed in Southern California most of the time. As it turns out, the HBO series wasn’t the only production shot here in California. According to a report published by the Hollywood Reporter this week the upcoming film Hemmingway and Gellhorn was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area with the help of San Francisco as well as the state of California.
During a panel at the California Film Commission Locations Breakfast, Hemmingway and Gellhorn producer Trish Hoffman stated that the production couldn’t have been completed without over $3 million in incentives from the city of San Francisco and the state of California. The fact that director Phillip Kaufman and most of the crew lived in the Bay Area also helped in addition to state of the art technology.
Incentives like those provided by the California Film Commission have helped provide jobs to over 30,000 crew members, 8,000 cast members and 100,000 extras since 2009 totalling $2.9 billion. The incentives are tax rebates given to each production that films in the state therefore making it cheaper to shoot here. Granted, the state already has a home court advantage so to speak given that it has the infrastructure, work force weather and industry headquarters already in it.
But the incentives are why people like famed filmmaker and Woody Allen is planning to shoot his first US film in years in San Francisco thanks to its program which started in 2006. It requires productions under $3 million to shoot 55% of the production in the city and those over $3 million to shoot 65%. This makes it the only city in California to have a program like that in place. It is planning to pass another $2 million funding bill for the program to be spent over 2 years.
The California Film Commission’s deadline for its next round of incentives is June 1 with $100 million up for grabs.
Sometimes it really does pay to stay local!
Source: Hollywood Reporter.com- “California Film Commission Explains How HBO Swapped Spain for San Francisco”
Image Credit: HBO, Inc.