Lawmakers Urge Governor to Support Film Tax Credit

State Senators Loretta Weinberg (D-37) and Paul Sarlo (D-36) joined Fort Lee Assemblywoman and Freeholder candidate Joan Voss (D-38), film advocates and industry professionals at Fort Lee High School Wednesday to urge Gov. Chris Christie and Republicans in the state Legislature to support “a healthy and robust film tax credit to preserve New Jersey’s motion picture legacy.”

The news conference had been scheduled to take place on the sidewalk in front of the at 2160 Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee—the location of an historic marker indicating where the Solax Company, one of the largest pre-Hollywood film studios established by pioneering French filmmaker Alice Guy Blache and her husband, once stood. But weather forced the event indoors to the auditorium just next door.

Sarlo, a leading sponsor of legislation to reinstate the Digital Media and Film Tax Credit, said he’s been an advocate of the program for the 10 years he’s been in the Legislature “because it creates jobs.”

“These are good paying jobs,” Sarlo said. “These are very highly technical jobs—union jobs. When you’re talking about making films, and when you’re talking about a long-sustaining show such as Law and Order [SVU], which we recently lost to New York City, these are jobs that are created over a period of time … Reality TV doesn’t create long-term jobs. But when you’re making a film, and you are putting up a show like Law and Order, which took up a warehouse in North Bergen for the last five years, you’re talking about millions of dollars in revenue for the state of New Jersey.”

Sarlo added that Christie allowed the tax credit to expire recently, and that the governor “refuses to give this another chance.”

“All we’re asking for is an opportunity to have this program in place so when another show like Law and Order, or another large-scale film wants to come into New Jersey and set up shop, we are going to be competitive with our neighboring states,” Sarlo said.

Voss, a Fort Lee native, said that when her father was a little boy, children were paid a quarter to be extras in movies shot in Fort Lee and noted that the likes of John Barrymore have lived in the borough. She also said she remembers when parts of the film, Goodfellas (1990) was filmed “right down the block from my house, and it was just so much fun for all the kids to go and see the production.”

“The film industry will bring jobs, and with a 9.4 percent unemployment, this is something we desperately need,” Voss said. “And it’s not for actors and actresses or directors, it’s for the carpenters and the people who are in the trades who desperately need jobs at this point.”

Weinberg spoke in great detail about the history of film in Fort Lee and New Jersey, noting Blache’s many accomplishments as a pioneering director—the first female director in cinema history. She pointed out that Blache made more than 1,000 films from 1896 until 1920, is widely credited as being one of the first filmmakers to use film as a narrative device and also pioneered the use of synchronized sound in film “decades before the era of sound in film was made commercially viable with the release of Al Jolson’s, The Jazz Singer.”

Noting that Blache is buried in Mahwah, Weinberg said the Directors Guild of America will honor her Thursday with a Special Lifetime Achievement award 43 years after her death.

“But while the Directors Guild is finally paying respect to this forgotten visionary of the film industry, New Jersey is turning its back on our greatest tool to help directors continue that legacy and continue making movies in the Garden State,” Weinberg said. “The New Jersey Digital Media and Film Tax Credit program has been a lifeline for filmmakers looking to show a different side of our home state than is often depicted in the stereotypes so prevalent in today’s pop culture.”

Calling Christie “short-sighted” and “stubborn,” Weinberg added that during his first year in office, the governor eliminated the tax credit, citing “financial concerns.” She also said that beyond the economic impact of restoring the film tax credit, there’s also a cultural one.

“We want to impress upon all of you, as well as the governor’s office, that [New Jersey has] a proud history of the arts and certainly of filmmaking beginning right here in Fort Lee,” Weinberg said. “And we stand for a lot more than Snooki and [The Real Housewives of New Jersey] and all of those TV shows. I cannot believe that a program like HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, chronicling a slice of our state’s history, is actually being filmed in Long Island rather than Atlantic City. The reality is that Boardwalk Empire chose to go to New York with higher production costs because they could recoup those losses through [New York’s] generous tax credit.”

Weinberg also said that the high cost of making movies today virtually guarantees that any state that doesn’t offer some form of tax incentive is certain “to lose out on the lion’s share of the business.”