As we spring forward into days with more hours of light, it seems appropriate to check in with the Sunshine State and its film commissioner Paul Sirmons. As this Q&A session reveals, pending legislation could make Florida, which is full of hot locations, even more attractive to spotmakers.
SHOOT: Tell us about the state of commercialmaking in Florida right now.
Sirmons: Commercials are a huge part of our business in Florida; anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the production we do in the state is commercials. Of course a large part of it is done in South Florida, but it is the one type of production that impacts pretty much our whole state. Much of the production in the panhandle of Florida is commercial activity so it’s very important to us on a statewide basis.
SHOOT: What is the state of commercial production in the rest of Florida?
Sirmons: It’s very good. Production activity affects Orlando, Tampa/St. Pete, Jacksonville and Miami, or what we call South Florida, which are our four production centers. I say that because we have the most crew living in those four areas. But of course, commercials are done down in Naples and Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. You can pretty much find it all over the state. And we want to encourage that and that’s why we are looking at making our incentives work for commercials starting July.
SHOOT: What are the proposed changes?
Sirmons: We’ve had an incentive for two years and on paper it includes commercials. But in reality, not one commercial has been able to qualify for it because it requires commercials to spend at least $850,000 on each production in order to get the incentive. We currently offer a 15 percent cash back incentive.
So one of the things we have proposed to make it work for the commercial industry is allowing commercial productions to be cumulative and to qualify by reaching a lower threshold of $500,000 [annually]….Each commercial has to have no less than $75,000 in qualified expenditures to reach the [$500,000] threshold. Qualified expenditures are payments to Florida vendors, businesses, cast and crew.
[The proposed alterations are for the existing] Florida Entertainment Incentive Program. It was funded last year with $10 million in a cash rebate situation so if you did a production that reached $850,000 in qualified expenditures, then you would get back 15 percent afterwards.
The proposal that is in both the House and the Senate right now will actually lower the threshold to six hundred and twenty five thousand dollars on all productions and it will switch our incentive to a tax credit as opposed to a cash rebate. But in the proposal it does guarantee a producer that the tax credit cannot be sold for less than eight-five cents on the dollar, or eighty-five percent of face value. So it’s more protective than other programs and the tax credit can be monetized against both corporate income tax and sales tax, for companies with sales tax obligations to the state. That creates a very broad-based monetized credit.
Some states have tax credit programs that make it hard, if you don’t own a company in the state, to turn that into money; we’re trying to make it as easy as possible and that’s why the legislature proposed switching to the tax credit this year.
Because it’s in appropriations, we don’t know until June when the governor signs the bill, how much money we have in the incentive program and we start qualifying productions on July1.
The shows that can have the highest impact on the state’s economy, they plan farther in advance than that. Our $10 million was promised out in 11 days this year so it’s very hard to attract those other productions. What we are trying to do is a tax credit program that stretches for a number of years.
What is proposed in the House and Senate bill right now is $25 million a year for eight years in the form of tax credits. And by being a tax credit you will know it’s there for the next eight years basically. Furthermore, if you want to shoot within a year and you are afraid that the tax credits might run out, you can actually, if those tax credits are promised out, you can take the tax credit for the following year; you can go ahead and shoot when you want and take the tax credit from a subsequent year. It helps ensure that if you want to have a production in Florida, you can be much more assured, not promised, but much more assured that the incentive will be available.
SHOOT: Is the sales tax exemption included in your Entertainment Incentive Plan?
Sirmons: It’s a completely separate incentive. The sales tax exemption is huge and is taken advantage of by a tremendous amount of productions; I think in the thousands now.
SHOOT: What other things are you working on?
Sirmons: We’re also going to break out a statewide Reel Scout system probably in late April or May, which will unite all of the 54 film offices in the state and allow them to put their photos and representations all within one basic Web site, one super Web site so producers will have a much easier job of looking over the location photos that are available.
SHOOT: Tell me about the locations in Florida, South Florida seems like an especially beautiful place to film.
Sirmons: It is beautiful, [as it is] all around [the state]. You get into Cedar Key and Fort DeSoto up the west coast, and on the east coast you’ve got the Kennedy Space Center. There are not only unique natural looks but also so many unique structures, anything from old forts to the space program.
And in Pensacola, they just announced that, I believe, in May they are going to sink an aircraft carrier off the coast of Pensacola and that is available for filming. So there are a lot of very unique opportunities.
Across the coast in Naples you’ve got some of the greatest golf courses and hotels in the world. When you get up to St. Pete you’ve got Fort DeSoto and the aquarium in Tampa, large ports in Tampa and of course up in Jacksonville on the other coast.
In Daytona Beach you’ve got the speedway, terrific beaches and the LPGA golf course. When you get down into the Cape Canaveral and the Cocoa Beach area you’ve got again outstanding beaches–we don’t run short of outstanding beaches here. And we’ve got the space center and all of the companies that support the space center; it’s a very technical area.
Orlando is so much more than theme parks. You’ve got every look in the world right there in Central Florida and if you want beaches, you’re a 45-minute drive from Cocoa Beach, so Orlando is a great place to set up. And they have state-of-the-art sound stages that are the best available in the state and probably on the East Coast there are no finer than they have in both Universal and Disney and also Chapman/Leonard.
Jacksonville is in the running to land the Dallas feature, so that’s how diverse that place is. Not only does it have the great ports and the great downtown and an NFL football team, but it’s got a chance to land the movie Dallas because John Travolta is going to play J.R. and Mr. Travolta happens to live over in Ocala.
And even in Tallahassee here, a large company like Wal-Mart comes in to shoot their commercials. And in the panhandle there are really picturesque beaches and the sands in Panama City and Fort Walton Beach all the way to Pensacola are legendary.
SHOOT: What about the Everglades?
Sirmons: The Everglades are fascinating and the water source for the Everglades actually starts in Orlando and flows all the way down. Then you get up in North Florida and right up near the Georgia border and you’re pretty much in the southern part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It has the rolling hills and the valleys, old growth trees– it’s beautiful.
SHOOT: What is the state of your infrastructure?
Sirmons: It’s very good. By all accounts, we are the third largest state [behind New York and California] for crew base in the country — we have equipment houses in Central Florida to South Florida for camera gear, grip gear, electric gear; post production houses in both Central and South Florida, everything right through to HD.
