Billionaire pledges more money to foster film production in Arizona

PHOENIX — When it comes to attracting film production to Arizona, the Grand Canyon State uses a completely different kind of bait.

Louisiana, Georgia, New York, Vancouver, British Columbia and others all use tax breaks and credits as their incentives to lure movie productions out of Hollywood. The process has worked mostly for almost a generation. This was until California got smart and cut its own taxes to stem the flow of runaway production. The result has almost killed the film industry in Louisiana and Georgia.

But Arizona prefers to bring production to the state by offering incentives.

Matthew Earl Jones, head of the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Office of Film and Digital Media, says saving production costs through incentives is key.

“Our goal is to aggregate a total of 25- to 30-percent (savings on production costs) so we are extremely competitive to our neighbors,” he said.

On Thursday, billionaire philanthropist Bob Parsons, who owns Sneaky Big Studios in Scottsdale among other media related operations like marketing firm BIG YAM, The Parsons Agency, announced he is pledging $300,000 dollars as part of a joint donation with the Arizona Commerce Authority to see the continued operation of the Office of Film and Digital Media.

“Here we’re making the investment and the investment is being made by business — not government,” the gruff-voiced former Marine said “Now government is helping, but mostly it’s spearheaded by private business and I think any time that happens and the ball starts rolling, much more so than it is happening in California, you’re going to find this is where it starts to boom.”

An example of this is Parsons’ own Sneaky Big Studios. The full-service production facility started one year ago and has seen business beyond expectations.

“We have had a successful year here, with over 50 productions,” Sneaky Big CEO Marianne Curran said.

The public-private combination of incentives is a two-prong approach. The first is called the Reel Deals Discount Program and actively seeks out vendors who are willing to work with the film office to provide special discounts to out-of-state productions.

“Phoenix is closer to Los Angeles than San Francisco,” Matthew Earl Jones said, “and if you’re taking equipment out to New Mexico, it’s an extra day for a driver, for hotels, for rentals, and at a teamster’s rate (for personnel). When you add that up, you’re saving thousands of dollars on those big line items when you come into another state.”

The other one is the film resource coordinator, who works on the ground lining up local professionals to work the shoots providing services and obtaining permits and coordinating resources for location shooting.

The overall goal here is bringing productions to Arizona and potentially getting them to stay and set up shop. By offering grassroots, ground-level help with productions, the idea is to get a big production unit to headquarter here.

And according to Earl Jones, Arizona is teeming with former film industry veterans.

“Someone who loves and understands the business have come to us,” he said. “People who have come to us (to offer their services) are people much like myself who’ve lived and worked in Los Angeles, know the business but came here for the enhanced quality of life and just fell in love with Arizona. So we’ve got people up in Show Low or St. Johns who actually had industry experience in New York or L.A. but don’t want that life style any more, but understand the business and they still have contacts in the business.”

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