Carl Kurlander has a pretty lengthy column in the Post-Gazette about how to make Pittsburgh more important in the film industry. Which I guess would be a good thing. But... Would it? I am sure there are lots of positive externalities. Hot starlets skulking around. Jobs for best boys. Etc. An industry is an industry. And if people can work in it, swell. Still, some of Kurlander's points seem to demand more analysis. For instance, here is how he prefaces his list of action points:
So what is to be done?
What is to be done? By whom? Why? The city? The state? Pitt? Carnegie Mellon? The Heinz Foundation? Independent, profit-minded investors?
The passive construction of the question makes it impossible to know. But it is an important question. Particularly because some of the action points... well:
4) Invest in emerging talent (i.e. young people). The entertainment business attracts and is often driven by the efforts of young people. I was 24 when I wrote the screenplay for "St. Elmo's Fire." The 35-year-old head of the studio said I should go back to Pittsburgh and raise the money for the film. I didn't do that, so Columbia pictures bet $10 million on a film that made $60 million worldwide and many times over that on DVD and elsewhere.
OK. Great. I would love to make $60 million. But who, exactly, would benefit if more screenwriters lived here? Or got their funding here? Maybe there is some obvious, wider benefit that the region would see. But I don't get it.
I would apply this to my own industry. I write books. But let's say J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, lived in Shadyside. Would Pittsburgh be better off? Why? Better off enough to justify spending someone's money on getting her to live here? Who's money? How much? I guess it take more people to make a movie. But is it obvious that more movies get made where screenwriters live? Would St. Elmo's Fire have been filmed here if the movie had been written or funded here? Do movies get filmed in Hollywood because that's where they get written? Or do they get written there because that's where they are made?
OK. I guess if we had our own version of "Columbia Pictures" that invested $10 million in movies that made $60 million, that studio would likely have a big office and hire some accountants. Is that the upside? Is the goal to recreate the Hollywood system here in Pittsburgh? To get people with money to dump more of it into movies? Or is it to get 24-year-old writers to move here?
Like I said, I am open to the idea that there would be benefits. And the more smart people a region has, the better. But whose money are we talking about here? And what's the end game? We already have the film office. Right?
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