You might have seen the report WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge filed Friday night about the big slowdown in film production in Louisiana over the past year…

Louisiana saw one of its biggest bumps in film production around 2022 where there were close to 20 major productions on the ground per month throughout the state. As of today, that number has been cut by more than half.

“I don’t ever see us having 27 shows on the ground like we did after Covid which, everybody was at a freeze for so long,” said Executive Director for Celtic Studios Cory Parker.

Parker says two major industry strikes at the end of 2023 sent productions overseas leading to less work.

“They did pivot as the writers’ strike happened, they pivoted out of the country, and then with the Teamsters at the table it has slowed them returning back,” Parker added.

Studios are also merging and creating uncertainty within the business. Other factors like the economy and how the 2024 elections will shape out have also led to production companies taking their business abroad. Louisiana still has some of the more enticing film production incentives in the country, but in recent years, about 37 other states have followed our lead and have become more competitive.

A recently passed state law gave the state’s tax incentives an expiration date of 2031, allowing us to keep our edge on the competition. According to Parker, things should begin to turn around in the near future.

“We were the first with the program and then others have replicated it and had success. Ours is one of the strongest programs, it’s had the longest run, people rely on us, they know our crews are built around it and they love coming here,” Parker explained.

There are a ton of people, and typically they tend to be conservatives, who absolutely hate the Louisiana motion picture tax incentive program and think it’s a colossal waste of money. Every time the state budget comes up in conversation they’re howling about how this is the first bit of fluff in that budget which ought to be cut.

The counter to that comes from people involved in the film industry who say it wouldn’t even exist in Louisiana but for those tax incentives, and this state is in no position to chase off yet another industry which supports thousands of jobs.

And they’re both right in their own ways, of course. But let me offer a different perspective.

Getting Louisiana involved in the film biz isn’t a bad idea. This is a place with a lot of scenery, per capita our folks tend to be among the most creative in America, this is a state with a tremendous culture and that offers a lot of great stories to tell. Why not build a film industry here? After all, we completely missed the boat on centering a recording industry in Louisiana in the last century, letting New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Nashville dominate the music business when so many great recording artists came out of our state.

Here’s the thing, though – while what the tax credit program has done is to build an industry infrastructure here, it hasn’t truly built an industry.

What I mean is, after a couple of decades of having dozens of productions shot and produced in Louisiana every year, you’ve now built up a fat roster of gaffers, key grips, extras, caterers, cameramen and other film industry professionals. If you want to shoot a movie or a TV series in Louisiana, you can generally staff up a crew from locals with no trouble at all.

But you don’t really have an industry here.

All the decisions about those productions they’re shooting at Celtic Studios and the other film production venues around the state are made in Hollywood, not here.

Which means that while, yes, those tax credits do fund film industry jobs in Louisiana, the bulk of the money from those credits ends up in some Hollywood producer’s already-fat bank account.

I don’t want to keep making Jeffrey Katzenberg rich so he can lavish funds on Kamala Harris and Chuck Schumer. I’d rather put Katzenberg out of business. Especially when people like Katzenberg are making woke propaganda disguised as entertainment.

One reason the number of film productions is down is that Hollywood studios and their corporate overlords lose money again and again making unoriginal, politically-driven “message” films which actually demoralize their audiences rather than entertain them. Eventually, you have to cut back production because of the losses. And the film industry is tanking as a result.

Sure, there are still some good movies being made here and there. That’s less true of TV, especially compared with 10-15 years ago. Overall, the quality of the storytelling coming out of the film industry has nose-dived.

There is a very small number of people who decide what movies and TV shows get made in Hollywood. And the competence and quality of those decision-makers is worse than ever.

Continue paying these people with our tax dollars to make crappy films and TV shows which poorly reflect the values of a red state like Louisiana? Why would we do that?

But here’s the thing: we don’t have to approach this as an either-or binary choice.

Rather than that, why not actually build a film industry in Louisiana?

If you’re going to spend $100 million a year incentivizing motion picture production, maybe the thing to do is to actually invest that money in motion picture production.

Start a film fund like the ones in Quebec, Northern Ireland and the various entities in Australia. Actually use those tax credit dollars as venture capital to bankroll Louisiana production companies – we have a few, but they’re generally very cash-starved and have a lot of trouble getting productions off the ground – so that we’re then making movies and TV shows as soup-to-nuts Louisiana productions.

With the money, decision-making and values staying in Louisiana.

And if some of those productions end up as hits and big money-makers, then the film fund can get paid on the back end. Which means getting a return on the taxpayers’ investment, something those tax credits don’t really accomplish.

The opportunity is absolutely there. Hollywood has lost the ability to consistently capture audiences’ imaginations, but the public still has a sizable appetite for quality movies and TV, and moviegoers are still perfectly willing to turn out for the good stuff – almost all of which happens when it isn’t overcome by woke propaganda.

A new industry in competition with Hollywood could end up stealing the movie business away from them. It’s certainly happened before that younger, smarter, more innovative and more creative people have displaced old-money players in lots of industries, and there’s no reason why this can’t be another example.

The particulars of how this idea would work, I’m not all that committed to. But between now and 2031 when the tax credits are due to roll off, we really ought to rethink whether we just want to bankroll those jobs through tax credits shipped out to California or whether we want to leverage the infrastructure we’ve already built into something that drinks their milkshake.

I’m for the latter, for reasons that are cultural as well as economic.