Dem
47
GOP
53
This is a pretty cool little map that (Z) shows in his lecture on the history of Hollywood:
Have we shared this before? We don't think so. In any event, this was made by Paramount (as you can see) in 1927. Those were the golden days, when virtually all Hollywood films were filmed in California, because going anywhere else was highly impractical. The filmmaking equipment of that era was big and bulky and rather delicate, and long-distance passenger aviation was not yet a thing. It's a good thing that a filmmaker could do a passable Nile by heading up to the Bay Area, because the real Nile was so far out of reach, it might as well have been on the moon.
Those days are long gone, of course. Now, it is plausible to film pretty much anywhere in the world, and filmmakers are often highly motivated to do so. First, because there are certainly vistas that simply cannot be had (or acceptably faked) in the United States. Second, because many nations have established generous incentives for filmmakers to come shoot films in their countries. Third, because a lot of the labor needed to make a film, particularly the non-union labor, is way cheaper outside the United States than within.
And so, the U.S. in general, and California in particular, is losing movie jobs and production money, as more and more moviemaking goes abroad. This is a real concern, and it's one being worked on by politicians, including every prominent political leader in The Golden State. Over the weekend, right-wing actor and Donald Trump-appointed "ambassador to Hollywood" Jon Voight apparently brought the problem to the President's attention. And in yet another demonstration of the fact that Trump thinks that tariffs are a magic pill that solves all problems, he promptly announced that he was imposing a 100% tariff on films not made in the United States.
The first problem here is presumably fairly obvious to anyone whose name does not rhyme with "Crump." Imagine you have a film that is financed by people and corporations in six different nations, is written and directed by a Canadian, stars an American and a Brit as the leads, is filmed in the U.S./Mexico/Canada/the Middle of the Atlantic, has FX, editing and other post-production done in Los Angeles, and grosses $600 million in the U.S. and $1.6 billion outside the U.S. How much is the tariff? And this is not a made-up example; we imagine at least some readers recognized this as a description of the 1997 film Titanic.
A related question is exactly when and how the tariffs are collected. It's not like a movie arrives in the country on a massive container ship, where it can be evaluated by a tariff inspector. It's either a bunch of canisters of unedited film or, more likely, a bunch of hard drives with data. Most of the films that are presumably in question here don't become films until well after the raw materials enter the United States. Oh, and also note that the whole justification for the tariffs—both these and the others—is that there is a national security threat that allows Trump to create a state of emergency. Such claims already stretch credulity when we're talking about hats from China or avocados from Mexico. But they go beyond the breaking point when arguing that filming part of the next Avengers movie in Turkey represents a grave threat to mom, apple pie and Uncle Sam. Oh, and if Trump's claim of an emergency in this case is spurious, that becomes evidence that maybe ALL of his claims are spurious.
All of this said, there is one slightly interesting dynamic here, in the very unlikely event that this tariff idea sticks. Movie tickets, like sports tickets, are not linked to the cost of the product being made. That is to say, if you are going to buy a pair of shoes, and every pair of shoes uses $5 in materials, plus $20 in labor to put together, then those shoes are going to cost at least $25. With a movie, by contrast, the studios' cost is basically the same whether they sell 1 ticket or 100 million tickets. So, the price for movie tickets (again, as with sports tickets) tends to be "as much as we think we can get." They have not spent the last 10 years charging $15 for a ticket, but knowing they could really get $25 if they asked.
So, if tariffs added $5 or $10 or $15 to the cost of every movie ticket, the studios would either end up making it very clear how much of the ticket cost is tariff (even if they don't advertise it explicitly, people would figure out why that $15 ticket is now $27), or they would have to cut money out of the budgets of films, or they would have to take a probably unsustainable hit to profits. None of these things seems to achieve the goals Trump claims he wants to achieve, since he insisted the tariffs are meant to "save" the movie business.
Note that Trump also had another nutty idea that he decided to share with the world yesterday: He claims he would like to re-open the notorious Alcatraz Prison, in the San Francisco Bay.
This is yet another notion that simply does not make sense. Alcatraz was shut down in the early 1960s because the facility had degraded precipitously, and the costs of operating it and of maintaining it had become impossible to justify. It did not help that everything needed for the facility had to be transported from land. And, of course, the prison has spent more than 60 years deteriorating since it was deemed way too expensive to be worthwhile. It's certainly not going to be any cheaper, and throwing a few billion dollars at it is hardly consistent with Trump's campaign of government austerity.
So, why are we including this item in a piece that is primarily about Hollywood? Because a few sleuths tried to figure out how Trump got this idea in his mind, and they figured out that 6 hours before Trump made the announcement, the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz aired in the broadcast area that includes Mar-a-Lago. If that's really the source of Trump's "inspiration" then... wow. They better make sure not to show Star Wars in Florida anytime in the next 4 years. Actually, looks like it may be too late, based on this posting to Trump's Instagram on Star Wars Day on Sunday:
Regrettably for the White House, they do not understand the pop culture they are plundering well enough to know that in the Star Wars universe, a red lightsaber is the dead giveaway that the possessor is evil. (Z)