There was a time, not so long ago, when commercial production companies weren’t exactly flocking in droves to shoot spots in New York City. Instead, they were taking their jobs to Los Angeles and other cities more conducive to location work. Back in the ’80s, you’d ask a producer why they weren’t shooting in the Big Apple, and they’d complain about everything from the permitting process to parking.
Nowadays, producers are seeing New York City in a new light, evidenced by the fact that the amount of production being done in New York City has skyrocketed over the past five years.
SHOOT recently spoke with the woman who was on watch during the upswing, Patricia Reed Scott, Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, about everything from the Big Apple’s increase in production to the Brooklyn Navy Yard studio project to how she is handling the city’s hot spots.
SHOOT: You are in the interesting position of having been commissioner twice [Reed held the post from ’83-’90 and accepted the position again in ’94]. What’s it like the second time around?
Patricia Reed Scott: It’s very interesting because you know the job and the players and the issues and the challenges, which raises the level of the game. That’s what you want to do.
SHOOT: What exactly do you do on a daily basis?
PRS: This job is a delicate balancing act. As an agency of the government, we’re charged with economic development for entertainment industry production across three different fields-film, television and theater. That’s a pretty broad territory. As for production, you’re balancing the production activities that take place in practical locations around the city with neighborhoods, businesses, individuals and various communities. On a daily basis, that’s between 60 to 90 projects. We’re clearing 40,000 locations in the course of the year and permitting them, while we are also developing policy analysis and undertaking some of the development of facilities and tax policies and so forth.
And since show business is of such great interest to the public and the press, we do it with a great deal of monitoring, questions and looking over. We also have to address ourselves as to how it affects other agencies of government on all levels-local, state and federal. So, we have a number of participants, not always with the same agenda, and we are sort of the tennis ball, bouncing amongst them, attempting to coordinate everybody into being on the same page and of the same mind to advance this industry. And this industry has made astonishing advances in terms of the numbers of jobs that are based here, the direct expenditures in the city and the taxes the industry drives, and in making all of this known to the community.
And then the question is also in the field of addressing the counterbalancing of competing uses in a manner that is acceptable and continues to be acceptable to both people who live and work in the areas we visit with productions and the productions themselves. So, it’s not a simple matrix of interests that you’re working on. It’s also extremely compressed as to the arrival of key information in terms of what somebody wants to shoot on a given day and to all of the attendant details. In other words, it’s highly logistical. It is changing and moving at a very fast rate on rather short notice. That makes it all uniquely challenging.
SHOOT: You’re working in a pressure-cooker environment. Why would you want to tackle this job a second time around?
PRS: To tell you the truth, I was invited in to brief this administration [when Mayor Rudolph Guliani was first elected mayor in ’94] about the job early on, and I did, and they said, ‘Would you be interested in coming back?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think so. I think seven years was long enough. But thank you for asking.’ But then they invited me back again, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, I have to have a reason for doing this. Could I raise the level of my game and raise the level of the industry’s game in the city? Would that be an interesting challenge to try to meet?’ And the answer was yes.
SHOOT: When you accepted the job for the second time around, what was on your agenda?
PRS: What I really wanted to do was get some tax breaks for the industry, which the Giuliani administration seized upon. The mayor did it instantly, and we got that done. Both film and television and theater do not pay city sales taxes on production consumables, and that’s a great savings to production budgets. And then the development of facilities was the other piece.
SHOOT: Currently, there are several studio projects in the works-The Brooklyn Navy Yard, the expansion of Silvercup Studios, Long Island City, and the Hudson River Studio Project. How important are these projects to the city?
PRS: Well, they answer a question that was raised by my seven-year tenure in the ’80s and raised much more strongly in the last five years in this great production boom. There had been times when I was asked for professional, state-of-the-art sound stages that we didn’t have. The first time around, we didn’t have much of them at all. Thanks to the development of Kaufman-Astoria [in Astoria, New York] and Silvercup Studios, we got them. They’re fully used, and we’re at a different level now, one where we need a critical mass of new stages, and you will get them at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which will truly be an all-in-one complex.
It will be something that would enable us to answer ‘yes’ to the people who decide where things get done, who would like to site their projects in New York. [It will attract people] who have come and gone away from us because they ended up having to take the television pilots somewhere else because we didn’t have a stage that could deal with it. We’ve lost things that had big builds, and the only place we have to put them, currently, since Kaufman-Astoria’s big stage is fully booked, would be in an armory, and the armories have limitations as to power, parking, heat and air conditioning. So they’re swing space on occasion, but they’re not really a reliable asset.
SHOOT: How viable is the Brooklyn Navy Yard project? Is it really going to happen?
PRS: It has been under discussion for a long time and it has the people with the means of production attached to it. It is also on land that can be built on as of right now, so it can go very quickly. It also has a sufficient amount of private investment to really do a critical mass of stages.
SHOOT: New York State topped the $5 billion mark in production last year. How much of that was contributed by New York City?
PRS: About 99 percent of that.
SHOOT: As for that $5 billion production figure from last year, how much did commercials contribute to that?
PRS: That’s a figure with a 2.3 multiple or higher. That’s not pure, straight expenditures. The straight, direct expenditure last year was $2.6 billion dollars in principal photography shooting days.
SHOOT: So, how much did commercials contribute to that figure?
PRS: We did see a rise in principal photography shooting days in commercials. They were at 3,333 principal photography days in ’97, and they rose to 3,698 days in ’98. And that’s an increase of 365 days-an 11 percent rise. And of the pie, the leading dollar amounts are television at roughly $1.2 billion; feature films have grown very substantially, it’s just under $1 billion. And commercials are somewhere around $350 million. I do want to add a caveat. We gather our material off production shooting days here. I do not pick up a lot of studio work for commercials that happens. I don’t pick up any of the non-live action stuff, so this is a partial window on commercials.
SHOOT: So that $350 million figure for commercial production could actually be significantly higher.
PRS: It could well be with the growth of shooting non-live action and using all of the effects that have constantly proliferated in the last few years. I think that business, the houses that do a lot of that business, seem to be reporting very good years.
