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I suppose you had to have been living under a
rock to not have heard that Quentin Tarantino will be shooting his next film.
After a series of controversy and false starts, The Hateful Eight will shoot in Telluride, Colorado after theColorado Film Comission, never very receptive to outside productions, offeredTarantinto a $5 million tax incentive to shoot here in December, and now it's
touted that the $44 million behemoth is the first major film tobe shot in
Colorado since the origial 1969 True Grit.
So at long last, the fight is over, right? We Colorado filmmakers have finally
scueeded in jump starting a film industry here in Colorado. Something we've
been fighting for the good part of the decade. Well... Not so fast.
off, The
Hateful Eight is not the first major production to shoot in Colorado since True Grit. That would be the 2009 EddieMurphy flop Imagine That; theprincipal photography of which was done in the highly picturesque city of Denver. The whimsical family movie proved not to be all that whimsical to the
people who made it, especially Eddie Murphy. The film ended up only grossing$16 million nationwide against a $55 million budget, effectively putting
another nail in Eddie Murphy's career and tainting Colorado as a jinxed place
to shoot flops and tax shelter projects, an inside joke I heard from some
industry insiders from which I think we are yet to recover. Of course, a big
Tarantino blockbuster would be able to change that image and give Colorado a
renewed lease on life as a versatile state where all sorts of films can be
made. Be it westerns, or family friendly comedies, no matter what their
eventual box office intake is.
While most of that may in fact come true, I
have some major doubts that this one-off film shoot will change much for Colorado
film community. First off, I want to give a first hand account that Colorado is
already a very versatile hotbed for
filmmakers. Local, filmmakers, that is. I've seen westerns (easiest thing to
shoot considering the locale), hip modern indie yarn, films set in Nazi Germany
and Soviet Eastern Europe, etc, etc. Most of the people who work here already
know this about Colorado, but hardly anyone else does. Also, we're surroundedby such states as Utah and New Mexico, which already have a thriving film industry
and got a head start over Colorado, where it has been trying to develop for more than a decade, but many of our conservative house members are less than
keen on the idea of turning us into the next Georgia or New Mexico, so whatever
bill gets offered every two years to help with tax incentives for filmmakers
promptly gets squashed and we never receive any realy, depedenbale moneymakers
to set up production here; the Hallmark tv movies, television series, and
smaller budgeted studio releases/straight to video fare. These are the projects
that keep studios coming back and film people steadily employed in their craft.
So, I guess, the point of this rant is that
while having Quentin Tarantino's next opus shot here in Colorado will provide
us with brief glitz and glamour of Hollywood, sadly it won't bring any new
filmmaking jobs after they leave. Only a permanent sensible tax break for
productions and improved publicity in trade papers can do that. Hopefully,
however, I am wrong, and The Hateful
Eight is the start of something big.
~Evgueni Mlodik
