Hurricane Batters New Hollywood, Old Hollywood Sighs Guilty Relief
We know what you're thinking in those dark moments between the CNN anchor's question and the rain-battered New Orleans correspondent's shouted answer: Sure, this hurricane business has been truly tragic, but how does it affect the entertainment industry's bottom line? After all, the Big Easy is the New Hollywood, and these destructive, inconvenient tropical storms and the ensuing declarations of martial law are a bitch on tight shooting schedules. The LAT looks at the storm's potential impact on the movie biz and runaway production:
Even with its generous tax incentives — Louisiana paid out $67 million in tax credits to movie and TV productions in 2004 — the fallout from Katrina could make the state a much tougher sell, at least in the short term, industry watchers say.
"This is probably going to put them out of competition for a while," said Jack Kyser, chief economist with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. [...]
Steve Dayan, a business manager for the Los Angeles-based union that represents location managers and other production workers, said, "This is obviously not going to have a positive impact on filming in Louisiana."
And to think that just six months ago, the unions and local politicians scoffed at Governor Schwarzenegger's ambitious plans to divert a chunk of the education budget to build an incredible tropical-storm-generating machine on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. No one will be laughing at him when the production of Big Momma's House 2 shifts back to Southern California, where it belongs.
