Leaving Los Angeles: Expo highlights new horizons

A Kenya representative touts the nation's warm climate

City film commissioners unhappy with 'runaway production'

February 29, 2000
Web posted at: 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT)

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- It's simple: If you want Hollywood filmmakers to come to your town to film a movie, TV or commercial production -- thereby injecting dollars into your local economy -- you head to Hollywood and make that pitch real estate agents know so well: location, location, location.

That's what happened this past weekend as film commissioners representing more than 300 destinations around the world descended on Los Angeles to attend the three-day Locations 2000 Global Expo.

The 15th annual convention is a giant sales pitch designed to lure Hollywood productions away from Hollywood. It attracted an estimated 333 booths representing companies from 33 nations, including Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, Chili, St. Lucia and Kenya, as well as the United States.

"It's big business," says Ward Emling, president of the Association of Film Commissioners International, which organizes the event. "This is where a lot of the people who make decisions about filming on location -- about filming anywhere -- this is where they are."

This is where the potential profits are for the folks back home, says Dino Lalli, director of the Oklahoma Film Commission.

"There's a ton of money" to made from on-site productions, says Lalli. "Last year alone Oklahoma took in approximately $25 (million) to $28 million (in revenue from productions). A lot of that was commercials. I think we had $9 million in commercials."

Emling says the expo is where filming location deals are made

Every place has a pitch:

- Canada boasts a tax structure that's more cost-effective for production companies coming from the States.

- Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, bills itself as "the largest studio outside L.A. in the United States."

- Kansas offers a 4.9 percent state sales tax rebate for filmmakers.

- Kenya and Silicon Valley promote their year-round mild climates.

One notable absentee from the expo: the city of Los Angeles, whose hillside Hollywood sign reminds visitors they're in Tinseltown. Representatives of the city are tired of "runaway production" -- their term for film and video companies that head for new horizons -- and are reluctant to participate in an event that would take business away from L.A.

"The show is really an effort to steal away business from Los Angeles," Cody Cluff of Entertainment Industry Development Corp. told Variety. "It's not in L.A.'s best interest to subsidize it."

Government and the networks are hastening the exodus, says Marty Eli Schwartz, a producer for CAP Pictures in Los Angeles.

"It's a matter of economics," he says, "and when the TV networks want to give us more money to do productions here, and the government frees up some money to subsidize filmmaking so things don't go out of the country, it'll make it a lot more easy to shoot here."

Expo attendees like Mark Flett from British Columbia Regional Film Commissions understands why L.A. film commissioners might not like the expo, but he's not backing down from a potential business opportunity.

"We're sympathetic with them, but we're in business up here (in Canada)," Flett says. "Business is going well. We'll just wait and see what happens with them."

Correspondent Dennis Michael and CNN Interactive Senior Writer Jamie Allen contributed to this report.

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