Lights, Camera ... But No Action

Last week was a memorable one for Fort Lee and film history. On Oct. 13 at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Theater in New York City, Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese presented the first woman director in cinema history, Alice Guy Blache of Solax Studio in Fort Lee, posthumously with a Special DGA Directorial Lifetime Achievement Award, as detailed in last week's "From the Archives" column.

Earlier that same week, the Fort Lee Film Commission arranged a press conference near Madame Blache’s Solax Studio in order to lobby for passage of a New Jersey tax credit for film and TV production called the Garden State Film and Digital Media Jobs Act. 

We hosted the current bill’s sponsors, Senators Loretta Weinberg and Paul Sarlo.  We also hosted many film and TV industry professionals as well as local business leaders, including the President of the Greater Fort Lee Chamber of Commerce. 

What we attempted to do was to gain support for the idea that the film and TV industry need to be treated as any business in New Jersey. Recently Panasonic received a NJ tax credit to remain in New Jersey following their move out of Secaucus. Currently Governor Christie is offering mall developers hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits towards the former Xanadu site. 

Why can’t we have the film and TV industry treated in the same way as other businesses, including mall developers?

The American film industry was born in New Jersey in the laboratory of Thomas  Edison in West Orange. Edison built the first movie studio in America in West Orange in 1893. Fort Lee became the birthplace of the American film industry when studio after studio was built in the borough from 1910 through World War I. Universal Studio and Fox Studio were born in Fort Lee, in addition to Blache's Solax Studio. 

So why doesn’t the governor recognize this history and--to borrow a phrase from the classic film The Godfather--understand that this is “just business,” and this business can provide jobs and an economic stimulus to a state economy with an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent.

Displayed in this piece are photos from the Fort Lee Film Commission archive that depict some film shoots in Fort Lee going back to the silent film days right up to a year ago. 

We have had no real film or TV shoots in Fort Lee for over a year since the governor did away with the NJ tax credit for film and TV production. Law & Order SVU closed down their North Bergen studio and moved to Manhattan as soon as the tax credit was killed. Up until last year, the show did multiple location shoots in Fort Lee--so often, in fact, that they made a house on Abbott Boulevard the home of one of their main characters. 

Each time this NBC Universal program came to Fort Lee, they pumped thousands of dollars into our local economy through rentals of film locations like restaurants, businesses and homes; use of local restaurants and caterers to feed the crews and a hundred other purchases in the local community that benefited the small business person in Fort Lee.

With empty storefronts on every Main Street in New Jersey, I would think we would welcome a business that could offer rentals of these empty sites and assist the small business owners in a time of economic crisis.

On Saturday, Oct. 15, The Record came out in favor of reinstating the tax credit for film and TV production in New Jersey, saying, “The film industry was born in Fort Lee. The state should be doing everything it can to bring some of it back.  While major film studios have been developed in the outer boroughs of New York City, the same has not occurred in New Jersey. There is no excuse.” 

We agree. Why doesn’t the governor get behind an effort to devote a small portion of the former Xanadu site to a film/TV studio that could house NJTV (presently housed in New York City of all places) and also bring in large scale TV and film production. The infrastructure of the Meadowlands complex, its proximity to New York City and the fact that you already have a state of the art NFL stadium at the Meadowlands, along with the arena and NJPAC in nearby Newark, makes economic sense and certainly will add more to the state than just a mall.

As Shakespeare once said, "What’s past is prologue." Lets use our history to fight for a 21st century film and television pro business atmosphere in the state where the American film industry was born.