Louisiana is back in the movies - $200 million deal to be signed today
By Jaquetta White
September 14, 2006

In a major achievement for the state's recovering film industry, a local production company and its California partner are expected to announce a deal today to bring more than $200 million in feature movie production to Louisiana during the next three years.
Under the terms of the deal, LIFT Films of New Orleans and Element Films of Los Angeles will partner on the production of at least eight and as many as 15 films. All the films will be shot in Louisiana.
"I think the state has done a remarkable job of welcoming the film industry," Element Films President Adam Rosenfelt said. "This is a recommitment to Louisiana."
LIFT Films is a new venture formed by the Louisiana Institute of Film Technology and Bart Productions, a film and television production company headed by New Orleans lawyer Morris Bart. Element will select the projects and LIFT will hire local crews to work on them, Bart said.
Each film will have a production budget in the $10 million to $20 million range, Bart said. The first film under the deal, "College," a comedy about three high school seniors who have a wild weekend while visiting a local university as prospective freshmen, will begin pre-production in New Orleans this fall. The cast has not yet been assembled and locations are still being scouted, Bart said.
Stephen Rue, president of the Motion Picture and Television Association of Louisiana, who was not involved in the deal, called the news "extremely encouraging."
"I suspect that its going to bring more of the film business back to the greater New Orleans area," Rue said. "A lot of people are hovering in the Shreveport area, unsure of the film landscape in New Orleans."
After Katrina, Louisiana's highly mobile film industry, which has had its base of operations in New Orleans for years, moved north to Shreveport. At least one major picture that was set to be filmed in New Orleans, the Edie Sedgwick biopic "Factory Girl," moved upstate. Film industry executives have maintained that the move was a much-needed expansion for the budding industry and that the filming would return to New Orleans. Recently, movies starring Denzel Washington and Fantasia Barrino have been filmed in the metro area.
While, this deal does not specify that work be done in New Orleans, there is a "personal desire to shoot as many films as we can in New Orleans," Bart said.
The deal is also significant because it spreads several projects out over three years, making the film industry more stable.
"What it means is you have a guaranteed slate," said Alex Schott, executive director of the governor's office of film and television development. "We've had a sustained level of activity, but there's always been a question about what's going to happen after the latest project."
Louisiana's film industry began taking off after the state began offering tax incentives for motion picture production in 2002. Under the tax incentive program, producers can recoup up to 15 percent of their total production costs and can offset the expenses of shooting on location. The incentives have brought big-budget films such as "Ray," "Runaway Jury" and the soon-to-be released "All the King's Men" to the state.
Those individual projects, however, did not provide industry workers a consistent business base.
"Knowing that there is going to be a certain baseline of business is only going to give people a greater comfort in staying here," said Malcolm Petal, chief executive of LIFT and Lift Films. "It'll give stability to our industry."
The deal also guarantees that the movies filmed under the deal are viewed by a national audience, a feat that many independently produced films often find tough to manage. All the movies produced under the deal will have guaranteed theatrical release, perhaps through Lions Gate Entertainment, with which Element already has a distribution deal.
"So they're not just little indie releases," Rosenfelt said. "These will be seen in theaters."
Lions Gate, which was responsible for distributing last year's Oscar winning movie "Crash," has already agreed to bring "College" to theaters.
That the movies will have theatrical release -- as opposed to television or direct-to-DVD release -- means that Louisiana's industry will get notice from national film studios, Petal said.
"Large wide releases get the (public relations) coverage that other films don't. To have nine big ones guaranteed is another step for us," Petal said. "Those are the marquee movies that allow you to really grow business. This continues to tell the world that Louisiana continues to make movies."
When "College" begins pre-production later this year, it will join a handful of other projects in various stages of development in the state. One of those is the big-budget film, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a movie starring Brad Pitt, that is expected to bring more than $100 million in production to the state. Pitt will take on the title role in the film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a 50-year-old man who begins aging backward. The film is in pre-production; filming will begin in November.
All told, there will be about $750 million in film and television production in the state this year. "We're back and we're ready to move forward," Schott said. "Not that we ever stopped."