Saving face

Oklahoma legislature sees the light on film rebate program

Between the A-list cast of “August: Osage County,” including Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, and Ben Affleck’s starring role in local genius Terrance Malick’s “To the Wonder,” and, most recently, William H. Macy’s direction of the production of his latest film, “Rudderless,” within our state’s frying pan-shaped borders, it’s clear that the stars have been out in Oklahoma.

That is due in part (to say the least) to the unflagging efforts of Jill Simpson and the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, and also to Oklahoma’s decade-old Film Rebate Incentive, which offers a 37-percent return (capped at $5 million per year) to productions that spend a minimum of $500,000 in the state.

As a tax incentive it has been wildly successful: it’s said to be responsible for over 6,000 jobs (more than 1,200 of which were directly related to actual film craft) and for injecting over $193 million, spent on wages and support, into the state’s economy as of 2011. In 2013 alone, $35 million was spent by outside film productions around the state.

The benefit of casting Oklahoma in a prestigious, forward-thinking, and positive light is less quantifiable, but huge nonetheless. There are hundreds of more-generous incentives offered to industries that never see that kind of monetary and cultural return. For every dollar the legislature spends with the film incentive, it creates three. This time, those dollars helped convince Meryl Streep to say nice things about Oklahoma in the national press.

A three-to-one return and priceless PR would seem like a no-brainer, right? Not if you’re State Rep. David Dank, R-Oklahoma City. When the continued funding of the clearly successful program came up for a vote at the beginning of March, in the midst of Oscar glow for “August: Osage County,” Dank and a disconcerting number of his didactic brethren pulled together enough votes to cut funding to the incentive, killing HB 2580. It seems they have a problem with the moral cesspool that is Hollywood, and the portrayal of a “fictional” Oklahoma family that didn’t conform to the expectations of your average episode of “Leave It to Beaver.”

“Don’t expect us to pay for a film about a dysfunctional family or a 50-year-old president that marries his 20-year-old adopted stepdaughter,” Dank said, speaking of “August” and the soon-to-be-filmed “The Ends of the Earth,” a biopic about Oklahoma Governor E.W. Marland (Oklahoma doesn’t have “Presidents” except in Dank’s most fevered, secessionist wet dreams).

Marland was a Democrat who instituted a progressive “Little New Deal” to combat high unemployment in the mid-1930s. He also married his 28-year old, formerly adopted daughter, Lydie, when he was 54. (Yep, she was the First Lady.)

That film reunites acclaimed director David O. Russell with his Oscar-winning “Silver Linings Playbook” muse and “The Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence. Which likely means the results will be noteworthy.

After denouncing those films, and incredulously wondering if an adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” was next (note to Dank: “The Grapes of Wrath” was a rather successful, classic John Ford film starring Henry Fonda that came out in 1940 and which was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989), Dank went on to ignore the inconveniently positive data on the program’s economic returns, essentially claiming they didn’t exist, much to the frustration of the bill’s author, Rep. Todd Thomsen, R-Ada.

Fortunately, Dank’s holier-than-thou grandstanding brought heightened attention to the issue and, in turn, shed more light on the truth of his (willfully?) ignorant bullshit. The following day, and after much lobbying, the House reversed course and passed HB 2580, extending the incentive’s funding until 2024.      

Of Dank and his hand-wringing colleagues, Rep. Thomsen contextualized, “I think as those individuals had opportunities to talk to various members, they were able to cut through some of the rhetoric and misinformation.”

HB 2580 next goes to the Senate, whose version of the rebate has already passed, and onto President Fallin’s desk, who has signaled that she will sign it into law.