Michigan film workers will rally Sunday, April 17, for a non-stop, 15 hour webathon to raise money to fund a TV spot campaign, in an effort to influence the legislature to maintain Michigan’s film tax incentives.
The “Film Credits Work Webathon” was triggered by Republicans on a House subcommittee’s approval of a bill Wednesday to eliminate Gov. Rick Snyder ’s proposed $25 million incentives cap and thus bury any possibility of a continuing Michigan film industry.
Leading the effort to raise $46,000 to fund the two-week campaign is activist Nancy Skinner, president/CEO of full-service HDTV NextWave Media Studio of Troy. A Michigan native, she spent 12 years in Chicago as a broadcaster and was a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat won by Barack Obama.
Skinner also heads Filmcreditswork.com, the organization buying time to air awareness-raising spots on cable outlets in Lansing, Metro Detroit, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.
“We’re also targeting two stations we know legislators watch, ESPN and Fox in Lansing,” Skinner notes.
The spots will start airing when total airtime costs have been raised. So far, two websites, filmscreditswork.com and rickswrong.com, have generated contributions of $12,000, leaving $36,000 yet to be collected to launch the campaign.
Webathon co-hosts are Skinner and actor Tirem Jhames, while business owners, workers and celebrities will share their stories throughout Sunday’s 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. appeals.
Call-ins are invited to participate. Chicago filmmakers are encouraged to call and tell about how their phone and fax campaign to state senators helped defeat the five-year sunset clause amendment in SB4.
“We will ask viewers to contribute a minimum of $10 each. Our fund-raising campaign is an all-or-nothing-at-all situation” to get broadcast the spots, Skinner says.
Spots are real people testimonials
The NextWave team set aside two days in early March to tape people who had “positive stories of how they benefited from the tax incentives and what they will be losing without them,” she states. Of these, seven spots were produced for airing.
One of the video stories is told by Jeff Daniels’ brother John, owner of a Chelsea lumber yard and how his company benefitted from sales of $300,000 for set construction.
She also relates how the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit renovated all its rooms to accommodate the steady flow of film bookings “and lost $250,000 in room rentals when ‘The Avengers’ recently pulled out of Detroit to film in Cleveland.”
“When the phones start ringing, the legislators will respond positively,” says an optimist Skinner, who realizes the film industry has a hard fight to win the lawmakers over to a compromise that will allow Michigan’s film industry to flourish.
“When the tax credits were introduced in 2008, the vote was virtually unanimous except for one vote,” she says.
During the three years of Michigan’s active 35-42% tax incentives, the state gained nearly $400 million in film revenues of which 2.5% trickled down in to the local economy, according to a study by Ernst & Young, and employed 11,000.
Debate on the film credit will continue as the budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts in October advances in the Legislature.
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