Study: NYC's $4B Film-Vid Industry Must Unite

By Roger Armbrust

New York City's film and video industry, while surging a mammoth $4 billion of direct revenues into the city's economy, needs to unite to realize its dynamic potential.
So says a new study released by Exploring the Metropolis, a Manhattan-based study group which included recommendations for increasing the industry's influence. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting officially praised the study.
"New York is the primary center of the nation's independent filmmakers," the study notes. "They are in the vanguard of creativity, but realizing their productivity depends upon increased support from both the public and private sectors.
The study recommends four industry-private-sector initiatives:
1. Establish an industry-wide trade association "to organize the industry internally so that its separate groups can come together to develop a basic common agenda. Together, as one major industry, they would have the leverage to advocate effectively."
Currently, the industry fragments include 20 unions and "at least as many professional organizations," the study states.
2. Establish a statistical center to develop definitions for industry employment, collect data, and monitor productivity. Such information would involve data on employment, production, and post-production activity, and include capital investment figures for sound stages and post-production houses.
3. Evaluate the cost-benefits of a permanent film industry center which would serve as a year-round marketplace and clearinghouse for independent commercial, educational, and documentary projects. The center could also serve as a training facility.
4. Explore an entertainment local development corporation to coordinate the industry's needs and advocate for the "broader entertainment arts industry cluster."
Public sector economic development initiatives could include devising policies which foster industry growth; enlisting corporate retention and expansion programs; expanding marketing efforts; and increasing information and services for filmmakers.
"We are pleased that this study recognizes the crucial participation of the film and television industries in the economy of New York City and State," said Sallie C. Weaver, SAG's director of production development-performer rights, in a letter included in the study's media packet. "We fully support the study's recommendations to develop a public-private partnership to expand information access and to focus on the industry's unrealized potential. Further, we support any effort to increase available facilities in order to maximize the potential of film and television production growth.
"We have re-established New York as a significant production center," Weaver concluded. "We must continue to build on our success."
Patricia Reed Scott, commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting, also issued a written statement calling the study "an energetic, creative analysis that grapples with the considerable challenges of gathering full and accurate data on freelance employment. While the film and television industry is largely based upon freelance employment, it is too often analyzed solely on the basis of full-time industry jobs which are merely a segment, one part of the industry's actual employment levels."
The study noted that wages for the film-TV industry in NYC "are well in excess of $2 billion.