SENATE PANEL FINALLY REVIEWS WASTEFUL FILM INCENTIVES

The battle over South Carolina $15 million boondoggle known as “film incentives” came to head Friday when a State Senate panel heard from top film industry executives and bureaucratic officials. At issue was determining the economic impact of the costly program and deciding whether or not to renew it.

Sen. Yancey McGill, who chairs the Senate Film Subcommittee, said, “North Carolina was working while we were asleep. What we’re doing is status quo.”

And he’s absolutely right. North Carolina has 34 sound stages while have only six tiny, largely inadequate production facilities.

But leave it the State Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism’s Chad Prosser to defend a program that wastes tax dollars. CNN reported that Prosser “told the panel that even today, 14 years after the film came out, visitors came to Hunting Island State Park asking about locations where scenes for the movie ‘Forrest Gump’ were filmed.”

Gee, Mr. Prosser, I guess you’re right. So what if big-time Hollywood movies can’t shoot here because we can’t even come close to meeting their needs. As long as a handful of people stop by every now and then to see a few tree that were in a movie made nearly 15 years ago, it’s worth blowing a few million bucks.

My friend Oneal Compton pointed out, “If we are going to subsidize 15 Million dollars worth of something to grow a film industry we’d better have something to show for it when we get through spending that money.”

After years of frittering away millions of taxpayer dollars on Hollywood hustler producers, Mr. Jeff Monks, the longtime director of the South Carolina Film Office (I refuse to call it a Commission until it has Commissioners) who lobbied for and got his agency transferred to the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department (presumably hoping for a blind eye after being called on the carpet by his very astute former boss, the Secretary of Commerce, Joe Taylor)… [had] the chance to put on a dog and pony show for four very skeptical Senators who have probably already decided that the Incentives are a fools game (a race to the bottom, as Secretary Taylor called it) and that this state will never be competitive in the real film world unless we build some infrastructure. [ONEAL COMPTON]

So far all we really have to show for it is Disney’s ABC Studios’ Charleston production of the Lifetime Channel show “Army Wives.”

Sure, it’s a start. But, then again, it’s Lifetime.

If we really want to lure film companies and turn South Carolina into the “Hollywood” of the Southeast, then we need to stop trying to put the cart before the horse.