From The Wrap

Come Back, Woody -- Lots of U.S. States Are Still Good to Hollyw'd!

Woody Allen may have abandoned New York for Europe, griping that the city has become too expensive for filmmaking, but it's not like the state isn't trying.

Just weeks ago, New York passed a new budget with some $450 million in tax credits for film and television production.

And New York isn't alone. Despite the current recession and some political backlash -- not to mention a headline-grabbing scandal involving Iowa's film office -- there's an enormous appetite in this country for the film industry.

In what has been likened to an arms race, more than 40 states currently offer some form of tax incentives for movies and television shows shot within their borders. These range from the 12 percent rebate Maine gives filmmakers who employ state residents to the whopping 40 percent across the board credit Michigan offers movie productions that shoot there.

More? Virginia signed production credits into law in June, North Carolina hiked up its refund from 15 to 20 percent in January, and Oregon has ramped up its courtship of Hollywood in recent years attracting more than $62 million in film production in 2009 alone.

“These programs can be fantastic for local economies,” William French, a lawyer who specializes in film tax credits, told TheWrap. “Productions can come in and drop hundreds of millions of dollars in a given jurisdiction. It’s a non-polluting, clean industry that is a good fix in a bad economy.”

"Given that the majority of states have enacted credits and have overwhelmingly continued to sustain them, it is clear that these incentives are stimulus packages that have created thousands of jobs," Vans Stevenson, senior vice president of government affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, told TheWrap.

Indeed, other states are finding it easier to compete with the film industry's hometown, Hollywood.

"California no longer has the infrastructural advantage that it once did," Kevin Klowden, director of the Milken Institute's California Center and the author of a report on the effect of runaway production on California, told TheWrap. "Other states and countries have built facilities and shown that it's perfectly reasonable to consider doing a movie in Georgia, Canada or even New Zealand."

In fact, Klowden says California has lost more than 25,000 related jobs, $2.4 billion in wages and $4.2 billion in total economic output since 1997 due to runaway film and TV production to other states and countries. The culprit -- incentives.

Not that film-incentive programs haven't been the subject of some controversy -- and some bad publicity.

Susan Christopherson, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell. Christopherson argues that film production rarely has the positive economic impact that states hope.

“All the studies indicate that even with those multiplier effects, such as a star needing a special hotel room, states are paying out more tax money than they are actually taking in,” Christopherson told TheWrap. “Now states are saying, ‘We’ll build an industry here.’