Last month Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue signed the Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act. This legislation offers several tax credits for film, television, commercial, music video and interactive projects. In light of this news, SHOOT spoke with Greg Torre, director of The Georgia Film, Video & Music Office, about the finer points of the act as well as the state’s popular locations and infrastructure.
SHOOT: What is the state of filming in Georgia, particularly spot filming?
Torre: It’s actually a good time for us. The last couple of years have been somewhat challenging. Five or ten years ago, when I heard from a producer, especially a TV or feature film producer, their first question was really about location and to some degree infrastructure and lastly about incentives and that has sort of reversed itself.
In a nutshell the business is getting better for us — the real bread and butter for us has been the commercial industry. Last year, 2004, we had 182 commercials, I believe, that shot here. It’s a business that we value and that we work pretty hard to keep and we’re doing pretty well with it.
SHOOT: Can you tell me about the infrastructure that you have in place?
Torre: We consider ourselves a production center. If you’re a producer and you’re coming here, whether it’s for a commercial, music video, feature film or TV movie, you have access to a deep crew base, which can supply every position that you need–there’s on-camera talent, equipment, production support services and stages. We also have an international airport that gets people to and from where they want to go pretty quickly. We’ve got an abundance of good hotels and restaurants that makes for a fairly high quality of life when producers are visiting us.
SHOOT: Tell me about the different locations that you have in Georgia.
Torre: It’s fairly diverse if you look at the big picture. There’s Atlanta, just an hour north of that we have mountains, two-and-a-half to three hours south of Atlanta we have beaches, and in between, a lot of great farmland and small towns.
SHOOT: What are the favorite locations for spotmakers?
Torre: It’s a mix. [We get] a lot of car commercials [that shoot on] mountain and country roads. Beautiful fields and agricultural elements can be used for product commercials. Obviously the city works very well; we’ve got a modern sleek, city look [in Atlanta] that is very different from the small towns. Savannah is a great location, it’s mostly 18th and 19th century architecture, beautiful cobblestone streets, Spanish moss. If you go on down the coast there is Sea Island, St. Simons Island and Jekyll Island.
SHOOT: Tell me about your new incentives package.
Torre: Well we have two incentives, the first one passed in 2002 and it is a sales and use tax exemption–both of these incentives [from ’02 and ’05] very much include the commercial industry and music videos as well as feature films and TV movies. When we were crafting these, our goal was to make sure that anything we did would apply to commercials because we are really interested in growing that part of our business here.
The sales and use tax exemption is a sales tax exemption. When a company comes in, they apply for a tax exemption and it is point of purchase, so as you make purchases you save the money then as opposed to applying for a rebate.
This year, on May 9, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed House Bill 539, the Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act – it is retroactive to January 1 of this year so it’s in effect now. It’s a series of tax credits basically and the cornerstone of it is a nine percent base tax credit. It includes both in-state and out-of-state labor, materials and services. You basically will receive a nine percent tax credit on those expenditures.
To encourage you to hire more Georgians, we offer an additional three percent bonus on Georgia salaries and wages. If you are in a tier one or tier two county–those are designated counties in Georgia that are economically distressed–doing business or shooting, you get an additional three percent. The goal of that is we want to make sure we encourage productions to go outside of metro Atlanta, we want to be able to help projects go where they need to go and still be able to save them money.
The other element of the incentive is a two percent bonus for multiple TV projects. If you’re a television producer and you do over 20 million dollars a year in television programming, you get an additional two percent on the nine. That could include multiple high-budget commercials, but ultimately the goal is to attract series.
The tax credit is a situation where you are allocated tax credits based on your expenditures and once you file your tax returns, you receive the credits. The nice thing about these credits is they are transferable. If for some reason the company does not have Georgia tax liability, they can sell those credits to a company that does have tax liability.
[Editor’s note: Commercials and music videos are eligible for the tax credit once the production company has spent a minimum of $500,000 during a single year; this may be through a single project or multiple projects.]
SHOOT: Film commissions have faced difficulties during the past several years. Has Georgia faced any kinds of challenges relative to runaway production, threats of being closed or facing cuts?
Torre: No, I’ve read that about other film commissions. We’ve had a very supportive state government that really understands the value of this industry and we haven’t been faced with any serious cuts. States across the nation have been cutting back to some degree and we have had some across the board cuts that we have absorbed but nothing that was crippling. So no, I think we feel very supported at this point.
