After Addressing Hollywood’s Filming Crisis, California Is Helping Post-Production Workers Next
After approving a dramatic expansion of the California production tax incentive last year, Sacramento legislators may soon come to the aid of the state’s struggling post-production industry.
Assembly Bill 2319, which passed the California State Assembly and is awaiting a vote in the State Senate, would establish a $100 million budget allocation that would give productions that do their post work in the Golden State a base tax writeoff equivalent to 35% of qualified spending, with uplifts for productions coming from out of state and productions that do music scoring that could lift the incentive rate to 50%.
The bill has received the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has publicly pushed over the past two years for renewed government support for film and TV production.
For decades, Hollywood studios would do all their film editing, sound design, VFX, scoring and other post-production work in California, even on shoots done in other states and countries.
That has changed over the past two decades as other film jurisdictions, most notably New York, Canada and the United Kingdom, have offered additional tax breaks on top of their already generous incentives for productions that not only shoot there but complete the entire filmmaking process.
“California has a problem: Other states and countries have been luring away post-production jobs with lavish incentives. A California post-production tax credit is a piece of the solution,” said Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700) president F. Hudson Miller. “Local 700 is committed to winning an incentive that builds on our ninety-year tradition of lifting standards of employment for the world’s best post-production workers. It’s all about keeping good, union, middle-class jobs in the state that has historically been the global heart of post-production.”
One business with such jobs is Trevanna Post, which has offices in Los Angeles, New York and London and has handled finances for post-production work on films like Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and Ari Aster’s “Eddington.”
Jennifer Freed, who founded Trevanna in New York in 1995, worked with other post-production workers to push state legislators in Albany to establish a post tax credit established in New York in 2010, starting at 10% of qualified spending and since rising to 35%. Around that same time, Freed opened up a Los Angeles office for Trevanna at the urging of colleagues in the industry.
But in the 16 years since, Freed said that the strong post-production industry that was present in Los Angeles when Trevanna arrived has slowly declined, so much so that earlier this year her team had to downsize their offices even as they continue to hire new employees in London and New York.
