The hallway that leads to Sharon Pinkenson’s perch on the
11th floor of One Parkway Building is wallpapered in old movie posters from the
city’s brushes with Hollywood, from the first Rocky to Philadelphia to M. Night
Shyamalan’s assorted experiments with surprise endings. Nicolas Cage and Mark
Wahlberg stare back at you silently, stuck in classic cinematic hero poses, like
faded snapshots of Bobby Clarke and Mike Schmidt pinned up in a neighborhood
bar.
Pinkenson’s been running the Greater Philadelphia Film
Office for 24 years now, long enough to become a local icon in her own right.
Her spectacularly coiled halo of blond curls is as closely associated with the
film office as Clarke’s gap-toothed grin and Schmidt’s Magnum, P.I. mustache
are with the Flyers and Phillies of yesteryear. On her watch, Philadelphia
evolved into a go-to destination for directors drawn to the city’s many faces —
hulking City Hall, graceful Boathouse Row, posh Rittenhouse and destitute
Kensington.
National Treasure, The Italian Job, In Her Shoes,
Invincible, Rocky Balboa, Marley & Me, to name just a few: By the
mid-2000s, you couldn’t go more than a few weeks without hearing that yet
another big-name star was shooting a movie here. Catching a glimpse of Robert
De Niro started to seem nearly normal. And why not? Philadelphia was touting
itself as a world-class city, full of great museums, trendy restaurants and
affordable, walkable neighborhoods. It only followed that a creative economy
could thrive here, too.
And Pinkenson was at the center, gritty Philly’s
glamorous conduit to Hollywood. She still lights up when she talks about her
collaborations with Tinseltown’s elite — the phone calls from Marty’s office
(that’s Mr. Scorsese to you), the meetings with Bradley (Cooper), the strolls
downtown with Jonathan (Demme).
But Pinkenson’s smile vanishes when you bring up the
current state of Philly’s film industry, which is about as quiet as a clapboard
town in the Old West just before a gunfight breaks out. (Cue lonely tumbleweed
hopping across Broad Street.) Marty’s not calling anymore. People who want to
make a career in television and film are ditching Philly because they can’t
find work. Developer Jeffrey Rotwitt’s $50 million studio in Chester Township —
built amid the buzz Pinkenson fueled — is now looking like a colossally
expensive mistake. Moviemaking has always been a fickle, cyclical industry, but
this dry spell doesn’t look like it’s going to end soon. It’s not that
filmmakers are suddenly disinterested in Philly. The two big problems, industry
insiders say, is that making movies here has gotten too expensive and too
difficult, thanks to gridlock in Harrisburg and — surprise! — cantankerous
union bosses.
And Sharon Pinkenson — despite her charm, despite her
Rolodex, despite her status as the fountain-of-youth-guzzling, Hollywood-kissed
grande dame of Philadelphia’s society circuit — appears powerless to bring the
cameras back.
NATURALLY, IT WAS Ed Rendell who hired Sharon Pinkenson,
back in 1992, after she pitched him over lunch at the Palm. Before then, City
Hall ran the Philadelphia film office, and big directors largely stayed away.
Pinkenson, a
dental-hygienist-turned-boutique-owner-turned-commercial-costume-designer, told
Rendell that the movie office could do so much more. She told him that movies
meant business, and high-paying jobs. Rendell was intrigued, so much so that he
wanted Pinkenson to be the office’s executive director.
After taking the gig, she promptly headed to Los Angeles,
where she spread the word that Philly was open for business. Demme was among
the filmmakers who were intrigued. He needed a setting for a film he was
planning on the AIDS epidemic, and Philadelphia was an option. Pinkenson
personally took him to City Hall, where part of Philadelphia was eventually
shot. “We changed the world with that movie,” she says, gleefully showing off
an oversize poster of the film that’s autographed by Tom Hanks.
Rendell helped plenty. As governor, he signed a movie
tax-credit program into law in 2004. After some fits and starts, the cap was
set at $75 million in 2007. The program awards a 25 percent tax credit to TV
shows and movies that spend at least 60 percent of their budget in the
Commonwealth.
Movie tax credits are commonplace now, but for a time,
Pennsylvania was in the vanguard, and the program proved to be a siren song to
Hollywood.
For filmmakers, the appeal is obvious. For cities and
states, the calculation is considerably more complicated. One Commonwealth
agency reported in 2013 that the tax credits had injected $1.5 billion into
Pennsylvania’s economy in the space of a few years, and supported 19,000 jobs.
But that same year, a different state office reported that Pennsylvania only
got 14 cents for every dollar it doled out in film tax credits. It all depends
on how you count the money — how much of an economic multiplier moviemaking is
— and there’s no consensus on that score.
Except in Hollywood, where generous, dependable
tax-credit programs have become a huge factor for directors and producers
choosing where to shoot their films.
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And ever since Rendell left office, Pennsylvania’s
tax-credit program hasn’t been dependable or generous — at least, not compared
to the wholesale giveaways now being offered by many states. The film tax
credit tumbled from $75 million to $42 million in 2009 amid the Tom Corbett
budget cuts. The cap was bumped up to $60 million the following year, where
it’s remained ever since. But the credit seems perpetually in question thanks
to the state legislature’s inability to get through budget negotiations without
things going all Chernobyl.
In the meantime, New York has expanded its tax-credit cap
to $420 million, and California’s is set at $330 million. Other states, like
Georgia and Massachusetts, have no caps at all.
This would seem to be an open-and-shut case, then:
Pennsylvania’s tax-credit program just isn’t robust enough to attract
big-budget filmmakers.
But there’s a hitch: The most recent acclaimed director
to bail on Philly and take his much-anticipated project elsewhere didn’t pick
Vancouver or Boston. Instead, he’ll be filming in a booming entertainment mecca
just five hours away, a happening place called … Pittsburgh.
SHARON PINKENSON was so, so close to adding David (as in
David Fincher, director of films like Fight Club, Zodiac and The Social
Network) to her personal list of first-name-basis Hollywood directors.
Fincher is making a new Netflix series called Mindhunter,
and he was interested in setting the series in Philadelphia. So interested, in
fact, that Philly casting director Diane Heery, who is also the chair of the
Pennsylvania Film Industry Association, thought the project was a lock. “We got
a call to check our availability,” Heery says. “We know not to count our
chickens too early, but we felt very encouraged.”
It seemed like exactly the shot in the arm Philly’s scene
needed. Fincher’s people scouted the city for filming locations. And then? He
bailed. “Our decision to shoot in Pittsburgh and not Philadelphia was a
combination of practical (locations) and financial,” Bill Doyle, an associate
producer on Mindhunter, writes in an email. Fincher isn’t the only big name to
choose Pittsburgh recently.
Denzel Washington is there filming Fences, the first of
10 planned adaptations of August Wilson plays for HBO. Downward Dog, an ABC
comedy, is joining a handful of other shows already filming in Pittsburgh.
When I mention the town out west to Pinkenson, she
stiffens. “They have the same tax credit in Pittsburgh,” she allows, “but the
difference is the labor unions.”
So that’s twice we’ve tiptoed past a mention of the
unions. Here’s the deal: Philadelphia’s film union workers aligned themselves in
the 1990s with New York’s powerful Local 52, whose jurisdiction includes
Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and all of Pennsylvania — except for
Pittsburgh, which has its own separate local. Philly’s Teamsters Local 107 —
the guys who drive the trucks on movie and TV sets — were separately taken over
by their New York brethren in 2010.
Pinkenson and others in the industry, like casting
director Heery, say New York’s takeover of local film unions has been terrible
for business and Philadelphia’s standing in Hollywood.
I spoke to numerous Philly film and TV industry veterans
who recalled getting squeezed by the unions but were unwilling to be named for
this story. Some complained about union wages. But I also heard tales — many of
them dated — about unions behaving badly. One TV pro said she got a vaguely
threatening phone call from the union when she came here to scout for locations
for a big network show in the mid-2000s, and ultimately had to carry union
members on her payroll even when the guys weren’t needed. Another said that in
the fall of 2008 he got caught up in a union dispute that devolved into a
fistfight, and that he regularly encountered union members who gloated about
milking overtime from directors like Shyamalan. The same guy also recalled Teamsters
pressuring young locations department members to unionize — or else get pushed
out of their jobs — around 2009, the same year he said Sony Pictures bosses
complained to other studios about their experiences with unions here while
filming the Paul Rudd movie How Do You Know.
In other words, the city’s film unions have long used the
same sort of cut-your-nose-to-spite-your-face tactics that the Carpenters and
Teamsters employed to tremendous business-killing effect at the Pennsylvania
Convention Center for so long.
Years back, when Pennsylvania had a generous tax credit,
some producers and directors were willing to deal with the hassle. But city
unions haven’t grown more accommodating as the state’s tax credit has withered,
so Hollywood increasingly looks at Philly and figures: Why bother?
“They’re very, um, forceful,” Pinkenson says of the
city’s film and TV unions. “They have a reputation for being very difficult,
and I cannot tell you how many producers have come to me and said that they
wouldn’t work here because [of them].” She doesn’t blame local union members,
but rather the “interlopers” from “elsewhere.”
“That’s my gal, Sharon Pinkenson,” mutters John Ford, the
president of New York’s Local 52. “I’m doing what I can to get my members work.
I don’t have a big working relationship with film commissioners, even here in
New York. I don’t get involved in their affairs, nor should they get involved
with mine.” Which is a peculiar point of view, given that they’re all
theoretically involved in the job of moviemaking. “Sharon’s just upset because
I wouldn’t make any donations to her office,” Ford says.
Ford argues that the union’s rates are fair. Union
members working on TV shows and films in New York can make $40 to $48 an hour,
while their peers in Philly can earn $28 to $39 an hour. In Pittsburgh,
meanwhile, union members top out at less than $30 an hour. And, Ford says, that
wage scale is working out just fine for his members, including those in Philly,
who can commute to film shoots in New York and earn big-city wages when
business is bad back home.
Ford isn’t surprised that people are bashing the unions.
Organized labor always seems to get the blame when business isn’t good, no
matter the industry.
“I know it seems like we’re laying this at the union’s
feet, but they are a huge factor,” Heery says. An upcoming Nicolas Cage
thriller originally titled Philly Fury is now shooting in Mississippi under a
new name: Southern Fury. Pinkenson says a producer brushed her off when she
tried to find out if one project had been driven away by union costs or
tax-credit concerns. “Most of the shows that don’t come here because of the
costs aren’t even known to us. They just don’t even bother to call.”
Pinkenson and others suggest Philly’s film union members
should secede from New York’s Local 52 and join another union in an attempt to
lure more productions to the area. Michael Barnes, the president of Local 8,
Philadelphia’s stagehands union, and a regional representative for Local 52,
declined to comment for this story. And Ford? “I told Michael, have Sharon call
me if she’s got anything to say.”
FAME IS FICKLE, even for Philebrities. And as the city’s
movie business has dried up, Pinkenson’s star has dimmed.
Her enormous salary is a common source of resentment. The
most recent available tax records show that she made $227,000 in 2013,
significantly more than her peers in entertainment hubs like New York and
California, not to mention Mayor Jim Kenney. Big money like that rankles when
you’re collecting unemployment, or upset about having to move to find work, as
some of the people I interviewed were.
Philly’s film problems are only harder to swallow given
Pittsburgh’s thriving scene. Dawn Keezer, the head of Pittsburgh’s film office,
has been in her position almost as long as Pinkenson has been in hers. She’s
endured dry spells and rocky relations with Pittsburgh’s Teamsters and film
union, but it’s all sunshine and lollipops out there now.
Members of the union sit on the film office’s board and
contribute to its budget. “Everybody works together, which is why we’ve been so
successful,” Keezer chirps. “Dawn is a good salesperson for Pittsburgh, and
that helps us get more work,” says Chip Eccles, the business rep for Local 489,
Pittsburgh’s IATSE. “When you’re busy working, there’s no opportunity to
complain.”
That sort of kumbaya is missing in Philly, where the local
IATSE president won’t even speak publicly, while his boss in New York is
spitting daggers at the mention of Pinkenson’s name.
As Pinkenson sees it, she’s in a tough spot. A hopeless
spot, even. “I’m in the middle,” she laments. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Source: PhillyMag.com
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