12-5-08
Legislature Gives Gift to Illinois Filmmakers
The Chicago film contingent is all smiles just moments after teh Senate incentives vote: Jeff Crabtree, Teamsters; Lars Ullberg, IPA, Eileen Willenbord, AFTRA/SAG, Betsy Steinberg, DCEO, Mark Hogan and Aaron Holder, Local 476; Justin Conway, Local 600.
It came virtually out of the blue for Illinois’ film industry. But when the state legislature suddenly, and nearly unanimously, passed a film tax credit renewal last week, it was the culmination of five years of hard work. Simply put, Illinois’ film industry got, almost, everything they wanted. The credit, itself, was raised to 30 percent, which will hopefully raise our production dollars from 21st in the nation. The biggest piece, though, was that the new legislation has no sunset clause. That means it doesn’t expire. Ever. Or until the legislature actively repeals it. And with no sunset clause, now Illinois can attract longer-term production—like television series.
“To me that’s the mother lode,” said Eileen Willenborg, vice-president of the Illinois Production Alliance and SAG/AFTRA Chicago’s executive director. “Getting rid of that yearly expiration date allows a producer who’s developing a TV series to say, ‘I can do this for four years. I can produce here’.”
Passage of Senate bill #1981 was so overwhelmingly fast that the IPA legislative committee and other filmmakers who went to Springfield are still pinching themselves to make sure it really happened.
But that it did. In the space of just a few hours, the House voted 108-2 and the Senate, 52-0 to approve the bill, making it veto proof.
The bill wended its way swiftly through the legislature. The House read it into the record at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, shot it over to the Senate committee where it was passed without opposition, and onto the Senate floor, where the vote took place at 2:45 p.m.
The tax incentives were increased from the 20 percent of the past three years.
With the help of John Coli, president of the Teamsters Joint Council 25, “We were able to convince the legislature that the incentives were not only good for the film industry, but for the entire state by creating new good-paying jobs,” said IATSE Local 476’s Mark Hogan.
Last year, the incentive created 26,500 jobs and pumped around $155 million directly into the Illinois economy. “We are looking forward to tripling that number in the next several years,” Hogan added.
Now the bill awaits the signature of Gov. Blagojevich, a consistent supporter of the tax credit and the state film industry, before the end of the year.
“This is certainly the start of a new golden era for Illinois film production,” said IPA president Lars Ullberg, who was in Springfield with members of the IPA legislative committee: Willenborg, DGA’s Dan Moore, the Teamsters’ Jeff Crabtree and Hogan.
“The bigger incentives put us up there with the best in the business. They return the state to a level where we can compete fairly. In a fair race no one can beat us,” Ullberg said.
“Getting away from the annual albatross, we can now focus creatively on other incentives,” said Willenborg.
Those other incentives include an investor tax credit and an infrastructure tax credit. The latter would not only allow new studios to be built in Illinois, but it would allow new support businesses to spring up.
Willenborg is looking for a studio to do for Chicago what Miramax did for New York.
“We want an indigenous film industry,” she said. “We want to churn out 8-10 movies a year.”
The Illinois Production Alliance is the only state organization that supports and funds lobbying efforts to provide incentives that enables Illinois to compete in what Ullberg calls “the incentives arm race” among 37 other states fighting for the economic benefits of film production.
For many years, IPA has paid for the services of IGCG, a Chicago-based lobbying firm.
Ullberg also thanked “a lot of deserving people who worked so diligently for a long time to make this happen. It’s a sign that the industry can accomplish great things by working together.”