Posted 22 March, 2008 in RI News
Movie Money
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, March 23, 2008
Greg Gormley and Marcus Thomas returned to Rhode Island after building movie sets in Hollywood. They have converted an East Providence warehouse into a small studio suitable for special effects moviemaking. They also recently turned a 60,000-square-foot former Ocean State Job Lot warehouse, in North Kingstown, into a studio.
In 1990, Anne Mulhall left Rhode Island for what she hoped would be a career in show business. She first found work in New York as a TV actor, then she moved to Los Angeles, where she got experience behind the camera.
In 1998, she returned to Rhode Island for family reasons and hatched a plan to start a show business of her own. She formed LDI Casting in the hope of making her living casting actors for films and TV shows shot in New Eng- land.
Professional work was scarce. There was “maybe a movie a year and a Cardi’s commercial,” she recalled.
By 2004, rather than being a casting agent, Mulhall was really earning her living as a recreational therapist for people with Alzheimer’s.
Then, in 2005, Mulhall’s fortunes, and those of many others in the fledgling Rhode Island film industry, abruptly changed.
Steven Feinberg, the executive director of the Rhode Island Film & Television Office, prodded state lawmakers, especially House Speaker William J. Murphy, into creating a tax-incentive program for filmmakers patterned after successful programs in New Mexico and Louisiana. The Rhode Island law offers 25-percent state tax credits to filmmakers who spend more than $300,000 in the state. So if a movie production spends $20 million here, it gets $5 million worth of tax credits. The credits are negotiable. They can legally be sold, and at a discount, to others, who use them to offset their own state income or corporate tax obligation. Thus, a $1,000 piece of the movie company’s tax credit can be sold to a local taxpayer for $900. That person can then present it to the state tax office for its full $1,000 face value, saving that person $100 in the bargain.
The tax-credit bill had an immediate effect. In the three years since the bill was passed, nine feature films and two television series set up shop in Rhode Island, in addition to a number of commercials. Most prominent among the locally filmed ventures were the TV series Brotherhood and the feature movies Underdog, Dan in Real Life, Evening, Hachiko: A Dog’s Story and 27 Dresses.
Suddenly there was so much work that Mulhall says, “I can count on one hand how many weeks off I’ve had since 2005.”
Mulhall isn’t alone. She is one of hundreds of Rhode Islanders who have found work in the state’s nascent movie and TV industry in the last three years.
Moviemakers say they have been attracted to Rhode Island because of its welcoming attitude and the diversity of its architecture and landscape. But the tax credits are what sealed the deal. Thus, although 27 Dresses is set mostly in New York City, it filmed in Rhode Island for 40 days and in Manhattan for only 10.
Yet the fledgling Rhode Island TV and movie-production industry is now threatened as lawmakers struggle to close a massive state budget deficit and thousands face ejection from state-financed assistance programs. Many question whether the state can continue to award tax credits to Hollywood — so far totaling $30.8 million — when it is cutting essential human services to make ends meet.
Governor Carcieri has asked the state’s new office of tax-policy analysis to examine the costs and benefits of the program “to make sure the film tax credit isn’t more costly than it’s worth,” according to Jeff Neal, a spokesman for the governor.
But the film business also has key State House supporters. Speaker Murphy views the film industry as a way to expand Rhode Island’s economy, with several local colleges now offering film study programs. He asserted recently that “for every dollar spent in Rhode Island by the movie and television industry, the state is gaining 75 cents that it never had if not for this program.”
THE LOOMING budget debate on film tax credits especially worries those who have a personal financial stake in the state’s growing film industry.
Besides the local actors who appear on camera, generally as extras, they include the many “invisible people” behind the camera, such as carpenters, electricians and makeup artists.
One of the “invisible people” is Steph Accetta, who, like Mulhall, returned to Rhode Island when the film business took off after passage of the tax-credit bill.
A Cranston native, Accetta has served as production manager on Brotherhood, Evening, 27 Dresses and currently Hachiko: A Dog’s Story. She does cost analyses for filmmakers, making deals with venders, hotels and equipment companies to service the film projects.
Accetta worked at the Rhode Island Film Office from 1990 until, she says, the Bruce Sundlun administration came in and eventually decided that the state couldn’t afford such frills. So she moved to Miami to work in the film business there. She lived in Florida for nearly a decade — and still owns a house there — until the tax credit attracted film business here and brought her back home.
Another behind-the-scenes film worker is Scott Levine, of Providence. Levine worked for more than two decades in the publicity departments of Universal and 20th Century Fox in several cities, including New York, before coming to Rhode Island “before the film boom was under way.”
In 2006, he went to work on Underdog as a unit publicist, overseeing all local and national media relations while the film was in production. Since then, Levine has gone from one movie to the next. Underdog was followed by Dan in Real Life and 27 Dresses in Rhode Island, then Steve Martin’s Pink Panther 2 in Boston and Cameron Diaz’s The Box. Currently he’s back in Rhode Island for The Clique, at the newly opened Kay Studios in North Kingstown.
Levine credits the tax-credit programs here and in Massachusetts for keeping him employed. He points out that although Pink Panther 2 “is set in Thailand, Paris and Rome, except for two weeks in Paris, the rest was shot in Boston. Most of The Box is set in Virginia, but most of it will be filmed in Boston. It’s the lure of the tax incentive.”
But most of the jobs provided by the fledgling film industry have been part-time work for movie extras.
Warwick retirees Angela and Bill Ryding, for example, have found a post-retirement career working as extras, starting with The Last Shot, a movie starring Matthew Broderick and Alec Baldwin that was filmed in Rhode Island four years ago, before the tax credits were enacted.
Since then, they have appeared in four episodes of the Showtime TV series Brotherhood, including a wedding scene that took eight days to shoot. They’ve also appeared in a panic scene in Underdog, the never-screened Waterfront TV pilot and wedding scenes in 27 Dresses and Pink Panther 2, in Boston. “We are professional wedding guests,” Angela Ryding says with a laugh.
As a result of 27 Dresses, her husband has logged enough time in front of the camera to join her in the Screen Actors Guild. The base pay for a member of the Guild is $130 for eight hours. They are paid time-and-a-half for the next two hours, double time for the next six.
Even people who never considered playing a part in the film industry have found themselves caught up in it.
Semia George, of Flowers by Semia, in North Providence, was hired to provide most of the flowers for the many wedding scenes in 27 Dresses after being recommended to the film staff by people in the local bridal industry. Joe Broady, of the Goth-inspired Club Hell, in Providence, rented out his nightclub to the 27 Dresses crew for five days last June, during which “at least 30 carpenters and electricians came in and changed things. They moved our dance podiums, put in a new VIP area, put up new lights. They brought in a truck to pump in air conditioning because our A/C was too noisy.” They even transformed the Richmond Street club’s “pretty disgusting looking alley into a country club scene.”
IN RHODE ISLAND many movie interiors are shot in real places. A seaside house in Newport was used for the filming of Evening; the State House Rotunda served as a principal set for Underdog; a summer house in Jamestown was a primary location for the filming of Dan in Real Life; and the Woonsocket railway station was used this winter for Hachiko, starring Richard Gere.
Finding these venues is where location scouts, such as Colin Walsh of Providence, come in.
From the set of Hachiko, Walsh explained that he’s responsible for not only finding film sites, but also working with local police to organize details for traffic control and finding space along local streets for the army of crew trucks. Walsh’s film credits include Underdog, Brotherhood, Evening, 27 Dresses, Hachiko and Fever Pitch, in Boston. Because the film business here has been “pretty consistent,” he says, he has been able to work steadily on movies. Marisa Bellis, of Bristol, works for the nonprofit American Humane Association on films in which animals are involved. She’s on the set for every scene in which an animal is used, to make sure it is treated well.
Bellis was living in Los Angeles when she came to Rhode Island to oversee the animal handling on Underdog. She quickly fell in love with the state. After Massachusetts and Connecticut passed tax-incentive laws, “I threw all my cards up in the air and said, ‘LA’s not for me. I’m going to carve out a new niche, let me be the New England rep.’ ”
She moved here in October 2006 and bought a house in Bristol.
She says the first six months here were “very scary.”
“It was very slow. I was very nervous. But then it started picking up, and now it’s fantastic. The big joke in my office in Los Angeles is that now that I’ve moved here, Richard Gere is shooting Hachiko in Bristol three blocks from my house.”
Dave Cambria moved his family and his business, Red Herring, from the Boston area to Barrington six years ago to be closer to the action. Red Herring rents lighting equipment and generators to film companies. Cambria, who is also a lighting technician, has four union film electricians on his staff and adds up to 10 more workers during a busy shoot.
“We’re in charge of all the lighting on a set and anything electrical, from hooking up the trailers the stars use to heating the set when it’s cold or air conditioning it when its hot,” he says.
“I’m a textbook example of the power of tax credits.”
Others who have made it behind the scenes in the film business in Rhode Island include John Ryder, of Rumford, who supplies specialty cars and also dresses the sets. For Hachiko, he installed new decor at the location house on High Street in Bristol. “I’ve never worked so much as last year,” says Ryder, who bounced from Brotherhood to Bachelor Number 2 to The Women to The Box to Hachiko. There have been so many films that, he says, “I don’t know where one ends and the next one begins.”
Costume designer Deb Newhall, of Providence, splits her time between New York and Boston on movie sets, although she was the wardrobe supervisor responsible for the “day-to-day continuity and prepping costumes” on 27 Dresses and currently supervises a crew of a half-dozen costume people at a Woonsocket studio for Hachiko.
David Rotondo, of East Greenwich, was caught during an off moment from work on The Box, in Boston, where he is the construction coordinator. His days often run from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. But Rotondo says, “I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been steadily employed for almost three years. And it looks like I’ll be employed through this year now that Brotherhood has come back” for another season.
Joe Rossi, of Cumberland, is also looking forward to the return of Brotherhood’s third season. He’s a makeup artist who specializes in creating injuries for the camera. With Brotherhood, Rossi can always count on a lot of gunshot wounds.
Rossi and the other local people who are finding a niche in Rhode Island’s version of Hollywood East are banking on the hope that moviemakers continue to find the state attractive for their films — both physically and, especially, financially.
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