from: Richard Verrier, LA Times –

On the second floor of a hospital, a criminal profiler is strolling down a hallway with a colleague when an alarm goes off. Several doctors and nurses sprint past him to an intensive care unit where a child and potential witness to a crime is being treated.

The scene, for an upcoming episode of the CBS crime drama “Criminal Minds,” actually unfolded last week on the former Sherman Way campus of Northridge Hospital Medical Center, which solely serves as a location backdrop for shows that have included such dramas such as TNT’s “Rizzoli & Isles” and “Hawthorne.”

The Northridge facility is among a dozen current and onetime medical centers and hospitals represented by Real to Reel Inc., a 30-year-old Van Nuys location agency that has built a successful niche supplying location managers with something they frequently seek: film-ready hospital settings.

“Hospitals are a staple of crime dramas. Someone’s always getting shot, so we’re always going to the hospitals,” said Jeffrey Spellman, location manager for “Criminal Minds,” which plans to shoot its next episode at another closed hospital, St. Luke Medical Center in Pasadena. “To have a facility like this makes our job much easier.”

Though Real to Reel books productions for a variety of commercial properties, including the popular Hollywood & Highland Center, at least 40% of its business comes from steering movies and TV shows to hospitals.

Some productions film in hospital buildings for a few days, while others such as the now canceled “Scrubs” sign long-term leases. Film companies pay $5,000 to $12,000 a day to rent hospital space.

Real to Reel handles about 100 hospital productions a year, receiving a percentage of rental income. Film bookings for its hospital properties totaled $2.2 million in 2011, up 11% from $1.97 million in 2010, the company says. Most of the business was at the former Northridge medical center, which hosted the Comedy Central medical drama “Children’s Hospital” and the now-canceled TNT series “Hawthorne,” starring Jada Pinkett Smith.

Despite the loss of such a big customer, Gary Onyshko, Real to Reel’s president and chief executive, is optimistic that other shows will fill the void.

“We see a lot of pilots on the horizon for new medical shows,’’ Onyshko said. “We’ve seen a serious uptick.”

Reel to Reel’s clients include St. Luke Medical Center in Pasadena, used in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning boxing drama “Million Dollar Baby” and HBO’s vampire series “True Blood,” and St. Vincent Medical Center, the working hospital in downtown Los Angeles often used by crime dramas such as “CSI,” “The Closer” and “Southland.”

“Over the years we’ve become experts in hospital representations,’’ Onyshko said. “By making these properties available to filming that would have otherwise been boarded-up, we’re able to keep productions in Los Angeles.”

Hospitals permitted by the city and Los Angeles County generated 385 production days in 2011, double the level over the prior year, according to data from FilmL.A. Inc., the nonprofit group that handles permits for the area.

“These facilities play a significant role in the infrastructure that’s available to filmmakers in the L.A. region,’’ said FilmL.A. spokesman Todd Lindgren. “With the popularity of these crime and medical TV shows, we’re glad that we have so many facilities that cater to that need.”

The busiest hospitals last year were Linda Vista Community Hospital in Boyle Heights, routinely one of L.A.’s most popular film locations and which recently hosted Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures” and Rob Zombie’s film “The Lords of Salem,” as well as Northridge and St. Vincent Medical Center.

St. Vincent, which rents out unoccupied wings of the historic hospital to film crews, takes in more than $100,000 a year from film rentals. “It generates extra revenue for us,’’ said Jody Spector, director of guest relations at St. Vincent. “They use extra space and apart from the trucks outside often our patients don’t even know they’re here.”

Apart from the setting, hospitals are also attractive to Hollywood because they typically have lots of parking to accommodate crews. And, Real to Reel works with property owners to make the facilities film friendly. The former Northridge medical center, for example, has gimbal windows that can swing open to make it easier to shoot inside rooms. The nurse’s station table was lowered to improve camera angles.

“These properties are affordable, they’re turn-key and they’re ready to go and directors love them because they offer a variety of looks,” Onyshko said.

from: FilmWorksLA Blog –

Louisiana Film Officials Confuse Fact With Fiction, Integrity of Industry Data Suffers

Despite the size and importance of the film and television industry — and not only for California, but for the entire nation — there’s a woeful lack of consistent and/or accurate data available about it.  Frustration over this lack of information about a vital US industry was summed up years ago by Professor Martha Jones, of the California Research Bureau:

from: Richard Verrier, LA Times –

At the Grammy Awards Sunday night, performers including alternative-country duo Civil Wars, jazz artist Diana Krall and British singer Adele will take to the stage, along with the reunited Beach Boys and more than a dozen other musical acts.

Working behind the scenes to make sure that nothing goes wrong is Paul Holehouse, entertainment risk consultant for Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company.

Holehouse, a former safety executive at Universal Studios, visits sets of movie and TV shows as well as big events like the Grammys to identify potential risks and avoid accidents that can cause injury, losses and delays.

“My job is to coordinate with them [the producers] and make them comfortable that any liability issues are addressed ahead of time so they can do their show without any concerns,” said Holehouse, 63.

This week he was busy meeting with representatives of John Cossette Productions Inc., which is producing the Grammys, and with rigging crews and fire department officials, to review plans for the two-hour show to be held at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles and telecast on CBS.

“There’s a whole spectrum of things we look for, from slip and fall hazards, to stunt effects, evacuation plans and the rigging on stages,” Holehouse said.

At the 2010 Grammys, Holehouse was responsible for ensuring that Pink’s high wire act, in which she twirled in the air wrapped in silk scarves while fastened to a harness, went off without a hitch.

In addition to the Grammys, Holehouse also worked on the halftime show at the Super Bowl, the popular music festival Lollapalooza and scores of TV shows and movies. In fact, Fireman’s says it insures 80% of all films in the U.S., and 60% of all reality shows, providing coverage for everything from props and sets to actors who don’t show up on set because of a death or illness. The company also issues so-called film completion bonds, which are guarantees that a film will be completed on schedule and on budget.

from: Richard Verrier, LA Times –

Martin Cuff, who has run film commissions from Colorado to Cape Town, South Africa, and built up film programs in Bosnia, Turkey and Serbia, was recently tapped to be executive director of the Association of Film Commissioners International, which hosts the popular annual Locations Show. A native of England who lives in South Africa, Cuff talked to the Los Angeles Times about his new job and the upcoming expo, to be held June 15 and 16 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

What role do film commissioners play in today’s global market?

Film commissions are set up by governments to be the custodian of economic activity. That involves attracting international production to the destination, because it obviously creates jobs and stimulates small business growth.

But the job of film commissioners also is to support film festivals to make sure that money circulates in the local economy, develop film audiences, support local filmmakers and connect with film schools — in short solidifying all aspects of the industry and creating platforms on which the global film industry can continue to grow and be sustainable.

So how will this year’s trade show differ from last year’s?

For the first time this year, the Locations show will also run concurrently with the opening weekend of the Los Angeles Film Festival, a 10-day event produced by Film Independent. It’s a natural tie-in for us because we will get a whole base of independent filmmakers who need this kind of information.

We will offer networking events, workshops, seminars, discussions and presentations — all geared to sharing the most current, dynamic and effective body of knowledge about working on location throughout the world.

Last year you partnered with the Producers Guild of America. Did you have a falling out?

We didn’t get to manage the program and we needed to generate a certain amount of income. It was purely a financial decision. It was all very amicable.

Some critics in the past have dubbed the AFCI show a poacher’s festival, saying it encourages runaway production. What do you say to that?

Film commissions are not just blood-sucking vampires out to steal business away from California, but a dynamic gateway to the world. I’d like to think that the presence of film commissions will connect Californian producers and filmmakers with new markets, new finance and funding, new business relationships and new audiences.

China is just producing its first $100-million movie. Brazil’s economy is bigger than California’s. The TV audience in India is 600 million people. Africa’s economy as a whole is growing faster than China’s. There is business to be done in the international marketplace, and film commissions can provide an additional, impartial and completely free platform with which to begin that business outreach.

Serbia isn’t an obvious film market. How did you end up working in that country?

I was a consultant with the AFCI and they reached out to me to help develop their film program. Serbia was cheap but it was perceived to be risky, not so much because of war, but lack of information. So we had some challenges. We established a film commission and film incentive program, formally introducing to 14  municipalities nationwide the kinds of processes, protocols and responsiveness required by production.

My proudest success was probably a Serbian film function we held at the Sarajevo Film Festival in Bosnia, where hundreds of filmmakers from across the former Yugoslavia came together to celebrate the future.

You’ve spent years in South Africa. What brought you there?

I was living in London with some South Africans who persuaded me to go with them to South Africa when (Nelson) Mandela was released. I started working for a casting director’s office and later went to work for the Southern Africa International Film & Television Market. In South Africa, we had a young black film industry looking to try to create sustainable ways to tell their own stories.

We managed to create a small film fund to support a number of filmmakers to create their own movies and provided work space where they could use computers and read film textbooks. The experience taught that as a film commissioner your job is to create economic development and opportunity.

from: Richard Verrier, LA Times –

Horses have long played lead roles in cinema, from the classic movie “National Velvet” to 2010’s “Secretariat,” a drama based on the Triple Crown-winning thoroughbred. But rarely have they taken center stage as much they do in “War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated epic about an English farm boy’s lasting relationship with a horse that is sold to the cavalry during World War I.

For chief horse trainer Bobby Lovgren, it was one of the veteran’s toughest jobs to date.  Lovgren has trained horses for movies that have included “Seabiscuit,” “Cowboys and Aliens” and “The Legend of Zorro.”

The locally based 46-year-old trainer, however, says nothing has compared to the scale of work on “War Horse,” the DreamWorks Pictures movie that has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture. The film, which cost about $70 million to make, was adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel that inspired successful stage productions in London and on Broadway.

While the acclaimed play utilized life-sized puppets for horses, Lovgren’s task was to oversee the training of more than 150 live horses used in the film. He recruited a team of seven trainers from Australia, Spain and the U.S. as well as groomers, handlers, transporters — even an equine hair and makeup unit.

“What made ‘War Horse’ so special was that it was a combination of everything I’d done before with horses all put into one movie,” said Lovgren in an interview from New Mexico, where he is working on the Disney film “The Lone Ranger,” starring Johnny Depp. “It’s the biggest horse movie I’ve ever done.”

Lovgren is among a select group of animal handlers, trainers and wranglers in the industry, many of whom live in the northern L.A. County community of Acton, where he owns a small horse ranch.  Teamsters Local 399 has 130 union members who are animal trainers, handlers and wranglers, down from as many as 500 members in the 1970s, reflecting the decline in the western movie and television genre and widespread use of computer effects that has lessened the demand for live animals in films, said Steve Dayan, a business agent for Local 399.

Nonetheless, animal trainers like Lovgren remain essential and often unheralded behind-the-scene players in Hollywood.  “There are only a handful of guys left like Bobby,” Dayan said. “What they do is a very special art and skill that is a huge part of our history.”

Lovgren came to Hollywood via South Africa, where his parents owned one of the largest riding and jumping stables in the country.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1989, learning the ropes of the business from renowned horse trainers Corky Randall and his father, Glenn Randall Sr., who worked on such movies as “Ben Hur” and “Black Stallion.”

He went on to work as a trainer in dozens of movies, including “The Mask of Zorro,” “Running Free” and the 2005 comedy “Racing Stripes,” in which he trained zebras as well as horses.

On “War Horse,”  which has grossed $77 million domestically since its Christmas Day release, Lovgren spent two and a half months training actors to ride and feel comfortable with the horses before filming began in various English locales, including South Devon.

Lovgren and his team also had to discern how each of the horses responded differently to smoke, gunfire and other distractions. Trainers used body language, hand signals and repetitive exercises to train the horses to perform certain tasks and assess their individuals skills, such as jumping, chasing or pulling.

Fourteen different horses to play the title character of “Joey,” each depicting different stages of his life. One of them was Lovgren’s own horse Finder, whom he purchased after training him in “Seabiscuit.” Lovgren said Finder has a special ability to convey his feelings and connect with audiences. “He’s quite a ham in front of the camera,” he said.

Lovgren closely collaborated with Barbara Carr, a representative of the American Humane Assn., which monitors the welfare of animals used in films. “I found him to be a wonderful horse trainer,” said Carr, adding that no horses were injured during filming.  “He seemed to have a real feeling for the horses.”

While most of the scenes involved living horses, Spielberg used an animatronic horse for parts of a graphic battle scene in which Joey gets trapped in barbed wire. In the film’s production notes, Spielberg said of Lovgren: “Bobby and his team literally performed miracles with the horses in this film.”

from: FilmWorksLA.com –

Noticing the popularity of a story we ran about California’s top competitors last June, Film Works staffers decided to take a second look at California top five competitors (including U.S. states and other nations) for film and television production.

Of course, as anyone who follows the Film Works blog knows, most other jurisdictions’ Hollywood dreams are sustained by incentive programs and all kinds of unreasonable assumptions.   We’re basing our (admittedly non-scientific) list on a few data points gleaned from competing jurisdictions own reports: amount of total film production spending, total number of projects and total cost of operation.

Based on this analysis, California’s top five North American competitors are — wait for it — New York, Louisiana, British Columbia, Georgia and Ontario.  Again.

While the top five competitors are the same as last year, their individual rank in the top five and share of the total production spending has changed.  There is also some question about who really deserves the #2 and #3 spot, since it’s unclear from available data how much of Louisiana’s $1.4 billion take was spent in-state.  In the past, research has shown that a good chunk of the Pelican State’s reported totals have actually benefited other places, including California.  Regardless, assuming $1.4 billion was wholly spent in Louisiana last year, the total cost of its no-cap tax credit program (which covers 30-35% of production costs) will balloon from just under $200 million in 2010 to over $420 million in one year.

New York’s hold on the #1 slot is secure, because in addition to incentivized productions the state has a tremendous amount of non-incentivized film and television production.  It’s certain that total production spending in New York, incentivized and non-incentivized, would place it very far ahead of its closest rival, which appears to be Louisiana for now.

Another interesting observation is that total production spending in these top five competitors amounted to $4.3 billion two years ago and $5.3 billion in 2011.  Why the increase?  There’s not enough detail to know.  It’s possible there are simply more projects in production and more money being spent on them.  Another possibility is that these lucky jurisdictions saw  increases after film incentive programs in places like Michigan and New Mexico were curtailed or cut back.

By way of comparison, the amount of production spending just on wages alone in California exceeded $16 billion in 2009.  So there’s good news for the Golden State in that even our top five competitors do not receive as much film activity as we do here in California.  The downside is that California has not five, but literally dozens of competitors competing globally with us for film and television projects.  Despite the robust level of production that remains in California, and the natural advantages to shooting here, the outflow of incentive-fueled runaway production is damaging our state’s skilled workforce our economy.

Here’s to hoping the turn-around starts sometime in 2012.

New L.A. County Ordinance Adjusts Filming Rules at County Beaches

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted a new set of regulations affecting filming on County controlled beaches. The new regulations, which take effect on March 1, 2012, break with existing policy in the following ways:

• Sand Digging. Duly permitted film productions may be exempted from a regulation prohibiting the digging of holes more than 18” deep in beach sand or digging into vertical sand embankments. The L.A. County Department of Beaches and Harbors (B&H) will make this determination in consultation with the County Fire Chief. (Section 17.12.205)

• Fireworks. Duly permitted film productions may be exempted from a regulation prohibiting the transport, possession and discharge of fireworks and like devices on beach property. B&H will make this determination in consultation with the County Fire Chief. (Section 17.12.400)

• Boating. Film and television production companies are allowed to launch and land personal watercraft in any designated area approved by B&H and the County Fire Chief, provided the activity is conducted according to the stipulations of these authorities. (Section 17.12.470)

Beaches and Harbors also issued a clarification:

• Driving on Beaches. According to B&H, Section 17.12.230 of the Los Angeles County Code allows for driving activity on beaches, subject to departmental approval and the stipulation that use of vehicle(s) not interfere with the operation of the beach.

Filmmakers should take care to declare their specific beach activities on their permit applications, so that language specific to each activity can be included on the permit. Engaging in beach activities outside those specified on the permit could result in permit revocation. Those with an interest in viewing the new beach ordinance can do so at the following link: http://file.lacounty.gov/bos/supdocs/65848.pdf. For specific questions about filming at area beaches, please contact FilmL.A.’s Production Planning Department at 213.977.8600.

from: Dima Alzayat, LA Times –

After sparking a debate among pundits over its real or imagined political message, one of the most buzzed-about Super Bowl commercials — Chrysler’s “It’s Halftime in America” ad — is making another set of waves not for what it says but for where it was shot.

It turns out that the two-minute spot, which has gravelly voiced Clint Eastwood touting Detroit and its automobile industry rebound as inspirational symbols for the rest of the country, was not actually filmed in the Motor City — a fact now being used as yet another talking point by media experts arguing the ad’s intentions.

According to Wieden + Kennedy Portland, the advertising agency that produced the commercial, the spot was shot in New Orleans and various California cities including San Francisco, Oakland and right here in Los Angeles — where the tunnel scenes were filmed at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

For the commercial’s Detroit-only scenes, Chrysler used footage from its 2011 Super Bowl ad featuring Detroit-raised rapper Eminem driving through the country’s auto capital.

Chrysler, which maintains that the ad is apolitical, says the various filming locations were never meant to act as stand-ins for Detroit.

“The filming of the piece throughout the country was intentional,” said Chrysler spokeswoman Dianna Gutierrez. “This message was about the country as a whole and it was important to showcase that breadth.”

A similar ad controversy flared up in 2009 when the California Milk Advisory Board, which oversees the state’s dairy farmers, decided to shoot part of its “Happy Cows” commercial series in Auckland in order to take advantage of New Zealand’s low production costs. The argument from those opposed to the ads then was as it is now: if a commercial is promoting a specific place, well, it should probably film there.

from: Richard Verrier, LA Times –

While California’s film tax credit is providing an economic benefit to the state, it may not be providing as much of a return to taxpayers as an earlier study claimed.

That’s one of the main conclusions from a new study conducted by UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment about a program the state adopted in 2009 to help curb runaway production. The state sets aside $100 million annually for the program, under which filmmakers can receive a credit of 20% to 25% of qualified production expenses (salaries of actors are excluded). They can apply the credit to offset any sales or business tax liability they have with the state.

The UCLA study concludes that the California tax credit “is creating jobs and is likely providing an immediate economic benefit to the state,” but finds that some claims about the program’s value have been exaggerated.

In particular, the study takes issue with some aspects of a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. and financed by the Motion Picture Assn. of America that found that for every $1 the state allocated in a tax subsidy, the state recouped as much as $1.13 in spending.

That LAEDC estimate assumes that all productions applying for a subsidy will leave the state if they don’t receive one. However, the UCLA researchers found that some of the productions that didn’t get a credit, which is awarded on a lottery basis, still opted to shoot their films in California. Taking those projects out of the mix reduces the fiscal impact to as much as $1.04 per $1 of tax allocated, not $1.13, according to the UCLA report.

Nonetheless, the study, which included a survey of filmmakers, highlights the important role that state tax credits play in determining where they choose to shoot.

“Even though there is likely a small benefit to the state, I think the California film and television tax credit is a worthy program because, without it, in the long run, California is likely to lose dominance in an industry that is very important to the state’s economy,” said Lauren Appelbaum, research director for the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

The UCLA study was commissoned by Headway Project, a new think tank headed by former magazine publishing executive Michael Kong. In a separate report he authored, Kong makes several recommendations to improve the state tax credit program, including removing restrictions that forbid the sale or transfer of tax credits to third parties (except for low-budget independent movies) and doubling the funding of the current credit to $200 million a year.

[UPDATE: Christine Cooper, author of the LAEDC report,  said she and her colleagues had made a “reasonable assumption” that the productions that received the tax credit wouldn’t have  occurred without the incentive. “We are happy to see that the UCLA study confirms our finding of a net positive fiscal impact,’’  Cooper added. “While we can quibble over pennies -- $1.04 versus $1.13 in net positive fiscal impacts -- states like Louisiana are setting production records at our expense.”]

from: FilmLA.com –

Following several months of extended negotiation with L.A. City officials, FilmL.A. is pleased to announce the reopening of Lincoln Heights Jail to filming. The jail, which is available for filming as of today, has been closed to filmmakers since May 2010. The list of filmable areas of the jail is as follows:

1st Floor - Front Entrance, Kitchen, Squad Room, Offices

2nd Floor -  Jail Cells

3rd Floor – 5th Floor - NOT AVAILABLE

Roof -   Case-by-Case Basis, Cast/Crew Size of 10 or Fewer

As one of the many public properties covered by the City of Los Angeles’ use fee waiver, it costs nothing to lease the LHJ site for filming. Production companies using the jail will be required to cover the cost of oversight personnel during prep, filming and strike. Production companies seeking to film at the jail should be prepared to cover, at minimum:

(1) Uniformed Fire Safety Officer 4 hour min., $64 / hr

(2) FilmL.A. Monitor 4 hour min., $30 / hr + OT after 8 hrs.

(3) Cost of one 2500 gallon water truck, with hoses.

To see the looks available to you at the LHJ facility, we encourage you to view the jail on LocoScout (www.locoscout.com). For availability and other information about filming at LHJ, please contact FilmL.A.’s Production Planning Department at 213.977.8600.