In my opinion, our last two governors each made a horrendous cultural mistake. Jennifer Granholm closed down the Michigan State Fair, which lost a ridiculously small amount of money but which was the only chance many urban kids had to see farm animals and other delights.
And Governor Rick Snyder destroyed a Michigan film industry which was just beginning to take off, and not only had enormous economic potential, added a sense of excitement that was like I had never seen around here. I’m not, in fact, convinced that it was actually costing us money, despite what some people claimed.
But even if it did cost the state in the short run, there’s a line from that famous old women’s rights song, “yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.”
Sometimes, it isn’t all about the money. But the numbers I saw indicated that it was economically worthwhile. The accounting firm Ernst and Young found at the time that the film industry created 6,500 jobs in Michigan in the bleak years of 2009 and 2010.
The accountants also concluded that every dollar the state spent on tax incentives had a multiplier effect that generated six dollars in economic activity. There’s other evidence; over the four years the industry was booming, the Michigan Film office approved $392 million in incentives, but that generated more than $ 1 billion in film projects, with more to come.
By the way, the decision to offer the film industry credits was, in fact, a truly bipartisan one. Republican Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville was an enthusiastic supporter of the film credits, and the bills were passed by a solidly Republican state senate.
Peter Watt, a young film producer who at the time worked for Cavalier Pictures in suburban Detroit, told me that he thought the film industry helped promote the entire region. Once, a few years ago, I did have the opportunity to ask Rick Snyder about this.
He gave me the standard Republican boilerplate answer. He said that giving any industry tax credits meant “picking winners and losers, and state government isn’t qualified to do that.”
I ought to have asked him how that differed from cutting spending for education to give business a billion dollars in tax cuts. When I mentioned this later to Watt, the film producer, he asked “Since when does Governor Snyder oppose “special deals” when almost a billion taxpayer dollars are given to failing charter school operators in this state?”
That put it far more eloquently than I could have. Snyder never got it; when he was asked if it didn’t mean something that a really good movie like Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino was shot here, he said he didn’t see what was so great about a movie where some guy gets shot on a front lawn. Steve Humphries, who owned a collectibles shop called Vogue Vintage, got it.
He told me a film producer asked him to get a bunch of 1980s bag phones for a movie, paid him well for them, and at the end of filming came in and gave them all back, which meant he could resell them. Let’s just say Humphries was none too pleased with the governor.
Business of any sort likes consistency, and I don’t know if the film industry could be lured back if the next governor were to reverse that decision and reopen Michigan to the film industry.
But I certainly think it would be worth a try.
