Hi Everyone,

Whether this will be difinitly helpful or not we testified today in support the move by the City below. The City is looking for anyway they can encourage TV network drama production to remain here in LA. As you know when the State incentives were passed in 2009 the focus was on cable series and feature films which we were losing rapidly. Since them network drama and especially pilots have seen a drastic decline (even though improving this year) and our focus will be  on expansion, network drama and larger budget feature production in our next State film incentive push…

Till then we focus on whatever we can do to keep those jobs here:

“The Los Angeles City Council today unanimously passed a measure eliminating fees that TV pilots pay to film in the city. The politicians also passed a measure to waive similar fees for the first year for any LA-filmed pilot that is picked up for a series. Proposed last year by Councilman and Hollywood-friendly mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, the measure is designed to stop the siphoning of production and jobs from  LA  to other cities and regions. Last year, permitting organization FilmLA reported that less than half of primetime pilots were now being shot in LA.

Even with a city budget estimated to be $327 million in the red, the loss of the fees won’t hurt LA very much. The city collected approximately $231,000 in fees related to TV pilot production in the 2011-2012 fiscal year. That loss in revenue was small, said Garcetti’s argument for the waivers, because encouraging pilots to film in LA could have a greater spillover effect to the local economy – especially if the pilots become series and stay in LA. While pilot production, like almost all production, has fallen in LA in recent years it is seeing a bit of an upturn. FilmLA said earlier this year that pilot production in 2012 was actually up 2.2% from what it was in 2011.”