Suburban businesses cash in when Hollywood comes to town
PHOTO BY WENDY MAEDA/GLOBE STAFF /FILE: Cast and crew from “Tumbledown” took over a street in downtown Concord
while filming an outdoor scene in April.
GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 30, 2014
Losing the lease to the
family bakery’s landmark location of 61 years in a central part of Quincy and
moving to a less traveled part of town four years ago has been difficult on
Brian Jackle .
Foot traffic once attracted
to O’Brien’s
Bakery by Jackle’s concoctions, like the doughy fusion of peanut
butter, banana, and chocolate he dubbed Elvis Bread, is much harder to come by
at its new location on Vernon Street.
But like a Hollywood fairy
tale, Jackle got a break a few months ago when a baker friend of his in
Somerville recommended O’Brien’s to the craft service team in charge of feeding
the crew on the set of “The Finest Hours,” a multimillion-dollar
Disney production filming in Quincy and Duxbury.
“They were looking for
six-foot subs,” Jackle said. “The guys from the movie called me and asked me,
and I said I can make them.”
Four hours of giant
sandwich-making helped establish a relationship between Jackle’s family-run
business and the film’s food and beverage contractors, who have continued to
place orders with the bakery, including a recent request for 100 bread bowls to
go with 4 gallons of steak chili and 2 gallons of broccoli-cheddar soup made by
Jackle’s mother, Muriel.
While the latest report
from the state Department of Revenue indicated that most of the spending
attributed to the Massachusetts film tax credit in 2012 went out of state, proponents of the
initiative say that an increasing number of locally filmed productions have
spread out beyond Boston, helping small businesses and tourism in the suburbs
from Lincoln to Quincy to Saugus.
The number of major
productions — those with budgets over $250,000 — filmed in the state annually
has more than tripled since 2011, going from nine to 30 this year, according to
the Massachusetts Film Office. And from 2011 to 2013, film production took
place in 108 Massachusetts communities, boosting local businesses from
restaurants to hardware stores, said Lisa Strout, director of the film agency.
“Non-film-specific
businesses are so surprised when [film crews] are in a town for a week and
they’re buying 300 bagels every single day, or pizzas,” Strout said. “It goes
across all economic sectors. Car rental folks are very cognizant of the movie
industry, [as are] our lumber yards.”
One indicator that
Massachusetts is coming into its own as a filming destination is the
construction of the $41 million New England Studios, led by Chris Byers and a group of investors.
The complex, which opened
last year and now is on its second movie, features four sound stages totaling
72,000 square feet in the former Fort Devens Army base, which straddles Ayer,
Harvard, and Shirley.
“We were losing parts of
movies to California or to other states to do their sound-stage work because we
didn’t have anything that high caliber,” Strout said. “We’re really excited to
see how this affects the movie industry here.”
For Jackle, getting the call
from craft service for “The Finest Hours,” which is scheduled to continue
filming locally until January, has turned into an unexpected lifeline. Any time
an order comes in from the set, it’s in the hundreds of dollars, he said.
“It’s helping a lot,” he said.
“It’s been tough.’’
If film productions “do
more business from people like me and small businesses, it’s great.”
The mobile, unpredictable
nature of the movie-making industry makes it difficult for the state film
office, local chambers of commerce, and visitors bureaus to measure a
production’s full economic reach in the communities where they film, Strout
said. But one indicator, she said, is the growth in membership in local film
and television unions, among them the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees
Local 481 , headquartered in Woburn.
In 2006, when the state’s
film tax credit went into effect, the union, representing behind-the-scenes
workers such as set builders and electricians, had 325 members. It now boasts
about 900, said business manager Chris O’Donnell.
O’Donnell contends it
wouldn’t have happened if not for the tax incentive, which critics have said
doesn’t benefit the economy enough. Under the incentive, filmmakers who spend
more than $50,000 locally qualify for a 25 percent payroll tax credit; spending
more than 50 percent of a project’s total budget or filming at least 50 percent
of principal photography in Massachusetts qualifies projects for a 25 percent
production tax credit and a sales tax exemption.
In 2012, the most recent
year with data from the Department of Revenue, the film tax credit cost the
state $78.9 million in revenue, while only a third of the $304.4 million in
spending driven by the credit occurred in Massachusetts. But O’Donnell said
agency’s report “is a very small slice of what impact the film industry has had
in Massachusetts.”
One example, he said, is “The Equalizer,” a thriller starring Denzel
Washington that opened in theaters in September. It was filmed last year, with
locations including a former Lowe’s store in Haverhill. Members of Local 481
were in charge of the vendor lists for everything from set construction
materials to props and food, he said.
“For ‘The Equalizer’ alone,
there were vendors and businesses in 45 different communities that came off
that list,” O’Donnell said.
Since 2008, members of
Local 481 have made production-related purchases in more than 3,000 local
businesses, many outside of Boston, O’Donnell said. Among those members is the
duo behind Team Crafty , a Lincoln-based craft service
business started by David Steinwachs in response to the growing local film
industry, said co-owner Cam Goodrich.
Over the past four years,
the men have been working nonstop on approximately 16 movie and TV productions
filmed throughout Massachusetts, including the Whitey Bulger biopic “Black Mass,” “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey Jr., and “Grown Ups 2.”
A lot of the food and drink
on set is purchased at warehouse clubs and local supermarkets, but Steinwachs
and Goodrich try to get as much as possible from small businesses and
restaurants, Goodrich said. On average, their food budget is $950 to $1,900 a
day to feed 100 to 200 people on a set, he said.
“It’s a fat wad of cash
usually. . . We’ve been given the golden ticket to help people out,”
Goodrich said. “On a movie like ‘Grown Ups 2,’ we would have to get a second
meal every day of the week, and that was a different vendor every
night. . . We really try to spread the wealth because they give us
the wealth to spread.”
Paul Delios, president of
the 60-year-old family-run Kane’s Donuts in Saugus, said he has delivered
orders for 300 doughnuts on a weekly basis for the past three years to many of
the sets where Team Crafty has worked, including current productions. Each
dozen costs $16.
“It’s not a huge part of
our business, but it’s a nice extra,” Delios said.
Even long after productions
have wrapped, the local economy still benefits, said Taunya Wolfe Finn, owner
of Wolfe
Adventures and Tours in Newburyport. Since a movie-themed component
was added about two years ago, Wolfe said, it now makes up 10 percent of her
group tour business.
Wolfe Finn said she makes
it a point to bring visitors to places where they can spend money, such as Woodman’s of Essex
, a seafood restaurant where parts of the movie “Grown Ups” were filmed in 2009. If a 45-person
tour group, for instance, has lunch there or at any local restaurant, it can
easily add up to more than $1,000 for the business, Wolfe said.
“It’s amazing how far of a
reach the filming industry has going into the local economy,” she said. “People
want to see where things happened, where history happened, and where the movies
were filmed.”
Once the state’s film tax
incentive was enacted, Farshad Sayan, owner of Clevergreen
Cleaners in Medford, and his wife tapped an industry-connected
friend in Los Angeles to recommend their eco-friendly dry-cleaning business to
anyone planning to film in Massachusetts. They got their first contract in 2007
with the movie “The Women.”
“We knew Hollywood was
coming to Boston,” said Sayan, now working on his 45th or 46th production,
including the recently filmed “Ted 2 .” “Ever since then, it’s just been one
after another,’’ he said, noting that costume supervisors “have me on their
contact list or I have them on my phone.”
Though movie contracts are
only 3 to 5 percent of Sayan’s business, it can be a big help.
“This past summer having a
movie like ‘Black Mass’ really made a huge difference for us during our slow
time of the year — $35,000 to $40,000 for the total dry-cleaning bill,” he said.
“Sometimes the movie industry is like an umbrella that you sometimes have to
hold on to when it’s shiny, and you kind of wonder why you even carried it
along, but when it rains you’re glad you carried your umbrella with you.
Katheleen Conti can be reached
at kconti@globe.com.
Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKConti.
How local businesses have profited from the filming
industry
PHOTO BY JOHN TLUMACKI/ GLOBE STAFF
A pizza restaurant was
made over into a Cuban cafe on Revere Beach Blvd. across the street from Revere
Beach to transform the look of the beach into Miami Beach where a scene from
the movie Black Mass will be filmed there for the next several days.
GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 30, 2014
A sampling of how some
local businesses and organizations have profited from the local filmmaking
industry:
■ Growth in membership of the International Alliance
of Theatrical and Stage Employees Local 481:
From 325 in 2006 to about 900 currently.
■ Number of local vendors used for filming of “The
Equalizer” by Local 481 members: More
than 3,000 in 45 communities.
■ Of the 40 film and television productions that
Local 481 members worked on since 2011, 70 percent of shooting days were
outside of Boston.
SOURCE: IATSE Local 481
Major productions (with
budgets of over $250,000) filmed in Massachusetts:
2011: 9
2012: 15
2013: 23
2014: 30
From 2011 to 2013, 108
local communities hosted film productions.
SOURCE: Massachusetts Film
Office
Financial benefits for
Massachusetts:
■ New state revenue generated by the film tax
incentive program in 2012: $10.6 million
■ Of $304.4 million in spending generated by the tax
credit in 2012, $100.6 million was spent in Massachusetts.
■ 98 productions filming in Massachusetts in 2012
received $78.9 million in tax credits.
SOURCE: Massachusetts
Department of Revenue
