Coke, guns and cash: Billy Corben’s 2006 documentary film Cocaine Cowboys put Miami in cinematic perspective and furthered its bad rep. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

 

Everything about Stage A screams Tinseltown. The silo-like structure, which makes up the largest part of Greenwich Studios in North Miami, is the length and width of a football field with wide trailer-sized rolling doors and a vaulted roof.

 

The L.A.-style film and television production studio — founded in 1962 by cinema aficionado Ivan Tors, of 1950s Science Fiction Theater fame — was, at one time, the home of Flipper, the primary filming spot for the Miami Vice TV series and the principal photography site of such blockbuster productions as Ace Ventura, True Lies, Striptease, Bad Boys and Something About Mary.

 

Today, the doors that lead to Greenwich Studios’ offices are wide open, inviting if devoid of activity. Inside the corridor, the studio’s street address and phone number are spelled out on a dingy pegboard with missing and crooked letters and a small sign that reads “Home of Flipper.”

 

Wind gusts through the breezeway, kicking up dust into an open-air courtyard insulated on all sides by two stories of suites that look more like an abandoned hospice than Hollywood.

 

The once-bustling, now-deserted studios stand sentinel to a bygone era when Miami was a motion picture paradise. Since the 1940s, more than 250 feature-length films have been partially or entirely produced in Miami-Dade County. In recent years, however, this picturesque seaside metropolis has all but lost its silver screen appeal, in part, because of hurricanes, rising production expenses and a reputation for high crime rates. Despite the state legislature’s summertime efforts to revive South Florida’s floundering film scene, filmmakers just aren’t taking the bait. 

 

“It’s really a waste,” says photographer Paul Greco, a tenant of the interior suites who maintains a studio on the premises. “It’s a damn shame.”

 

Guerilla film

 

Twenty miles away, a car creeps slowly through a Coral Gables neighborhood, slowing occasionally and speeding up again, as though deciphering directions to an address that isn’t there. All at once, the car halts and out jumps a woman and two men sporting a JVC handheld camera, a microphone and notes.

 

The man with the camera quickly gives intense directions and calls the couple to action. They exchange dialogue while a lookout inside the car swivels her head, watching for police or any other interlopers who might interrupt the foursome’s only chance at the scene.

 

The trio jumps back into the car as quickly as they started and speeds off. There’s no time for a second or third shot. Victor Moran hopes he got what he needed in one take.

 

“Beyond low budget,” is the way Moran, a Boston native who moved to Miami with his family at age 6, describes his guerilla film company, Disturbed Cinema.

 

“It is hard to film in this town,” he says. “If you’ve got a small budget and you’re filming anything other than porn, all the constraints make it tough.”

 

Moran recounts a time he tried to set up a shoot during Miami’s Youth Fair. After obtaining all the appropriate approvals from the city and the parks department, he was still turned away on the day of the shoot.

 

Moran’s story is familiar to local independent movie makers, most of whom shoot where and when they can, living between the lines in one of the most photogenic cities in the world. 

Yet, new legislation hopes to provide such beleaguered filmmakers with an edge that 60-plus years of movie magic have not.

Legislative incentives 

A rare fervor rippled through the Florida House of Representatives during a special legislative session this summer as lawmakers debated a bill designed to expand and overhaul Florida’s existing tax-break incentive program for filmmakers. On June 20, Tallahassee lawmakers unanimously approved the new ­incentive program, sponsored by and named for Rep. Don Davis, R-Jacksonville, in his capacity as the chairman for the Committee on Economic Expansion. Gov. Charlie Crist signed it into law that day.

 

House Bill 1325, now known as the Don Davis Film and Entertainment Industry Act, allows for 15 to 22 percent reimbursements of expenses to filmmakers, television producers, commercial producers, video game creators and ubiquitously titled “digital media” purveyors who bring their projects to, and expend their budgets in, Florida. The Davis Act also lowers the bar from $625,000 of required expenditure amounts under the old incentive program to an indie filmmaker-friendly $100,000.

 

The legislation, according to Florida Film Commissioner Paul Sirmons, was an effort to quell the exodus of talent, productions and their resulting revenues from a state that graduates the third-highest number of film students in the country from its universities and colleges and employs more than 10,000 people in the film and television industries. A quarter of those employees work in Miami-Dade County, according to the Miami-Dade Office of Film and Entertainment.

 

“This state has an incredible variety of looks and experiences,” Sirmons says. “We can use this incentive to hold on to that No. 3 position. The film industry is like an ‘uber-tourist’; It comes to the state temporarily with funding from out of state, spends it here and makes it a more desirable place for other ‘tourists’ of its kind.”

 

Unlike many state-sponsored incentive bills that require production companies to use third parties to redeem their tax credit awards, the Don Davis Act provides filmmakers with an allotment of $25 million in cold, hard cash — after they’ve spent some cash of their own.

 

“Logically, the incentive will return about $7 for each dollar spent by the taxpayers because that’s how much we’re refunding [based upon a 15 percent rate], and of course we refund that money after the fact,” Sirmons says. “That is, after the companies have filed their forms, after they’ve been approved and after they’ve spent the money in our communities. By then they’ve already contributed to the Florida economy.”

 

While that’s great for the Sunshine State, the bill doesn’t do much for Miami. 

 

According to the “shooting this week” page on the Governor’s Office of Film and Entertainment Web site, there are 64 projects in various stages of production statewide, 49 of which are eligible for the incentive program. The overwhelming majority of them are being produced in or near Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville. Only 10 are taking place in the Miami area, not all of which are actually “shooting this week.”

“We haven’t been doing any filming lately here in Miami,” says Gabriel Mena of KIE Films in Coral Gables. Mena’s company, listed by the film commission as Azucar Entertainment, is currently working on Celia the Queen, a documentary tribute to Celia Cruz involving, among others, Gloria Estefan, Andy Garcia and Quincy Jones. 

 

“We’re filming in lots of places, and right now we’re transitioning from one place to another,” Mena says. “We’re still in the early stages. We haven’t done any research yet into the tax breaks and funding options here in the state. But we will.”

 

Mena’s unawareness of the state-sponsored incentives puts him in the minority of filmmakers, according to Sirmons, who proudly points out that the state film commission has received a record amount of applications. In fact, the commission received far more applications by the end of September than it had at the same time last year, outpacing applications under the old incentive plan by at least two months and accounting for nearly 80 percent of the available $25 million.

 

The overwhelming influx of submissions seem to support Sirmons’ assertion that Florida filmmakers “will find any way available” to fund their films, but it doesn’t explain why Greenwich Studios is a ghost town, why Moran and other local directors are struggling to film simple scenes or why Miami hosts so few projects.

Mocking Miami

 
Throughout Miami, buses adorned with full-size advertisements for the second season of Showtime’s critically acclaimed series Dexter unintentionally mock the situation. The cable adaptation of the nuanced book series, which follows a member of Miami’s crime scene investigation unit on a hunt to kill the very murderers he cleans up after, stands poised to join fellow network successes Weeds and Queer as Folk.

But unlike the first season, the second won’t actually be shot in Miami.

 

Citing the production costs associated with the series’ bicoastal filming schedule, Showtime announced in July that it would relocate all production on the Dexter project to its studios        in Hollywood. 

 

“Once we made a decision to shoot the episodes in Los Angeles, we had to stay in L.A.,” says Robert Greenblatt, chief of programming for Showtime. “It would be too expensive to move the show to Miami.... It just became impossible, production-wise, to shoot the whole show there.”

 

Expenses seem to be driving away the film industry, as more and more directors whose projects don’t absolutely require a Miami setting opt to film interior shots on soundstages in Louisiana and Arizona, states with competitive incentive programs much like Florida’s Davis Act. Even productions set in the city of Miami are falling victim to shots with rolling Southern California hills behind Miami Beach exteriors or, as in the case of the departed Dexter, a faux corpse-filled Biscayne Bay.

 

Descriptions of those high costs are a bit harder to nail down, perhaps because of what many filmmakers aren’t saying.

“It might not be deserved, but to people in New York and Los Angeles, there’s still the perception of high crime [in Miami],” says one production assistant who has worked on local projects for Comedy Central and HBO. “Twenty-some odd years later, they hear Miami and still think ‘Paradise Lost.’”

 

Longtime Miamians remember “Paradise Lost” as a scathing 1981 article in Time Magazine that branded Miami as a coke-crazed war zone where junkies, refugees and foreign drug czars’ flunkies dropped so many bodies that the once-serene vacation destination morphed into the murder capital of the United States. The article blights the memories of many and, to this day, still contributes to the perception that Miami is unsafe, even for filmmakers.

 

The article even made a cameo appearance in the 2006 coke-age documentary Cocaine Cowboys. The irony isn’t in the timing, but in the creative force behind the movie, as it may be the best thing local film has going for it.

 

“In Austin [Texas], they’ve developed a great film industry, in part, because Robert Rodriguez is from there and continues to bring his projects there,” Sirmons says. “I think someone like that has to emerge from an area for any local film scene to flourish.”

 

According to John Maass, a filmmaker who has taught at the Art Institute of Miami since 1998, Miami native Billy Corben could be that person. Corben, who directed Cocaine Cowboys and runs the local production shop Rakontur Films, has been lauded for his gritty documentary work and has a sequel to his opus currently in the pipeline.

“To me, he’s the most prolific filmmaker in Miami,” says Maass.

 

The ‘real cost’

 

Maass points out that while Miami has talented production crews, it doesn’t have the projects needed to support them. Maass’s program at the Art Institute enrolled about 180 film students this year, he says, but many of those graduates take their talents elsewhere.

 

“Greenwich and other locals are having a hard time, and part of the problem is insurance,” says Maass. “I think it was three years ago that changed things. Four hurricanes in one year will do that.”

 

For example, $1 million of indemnity insurance would cost filmmakers $1,540 per day for a production in Miami, while the same amount of insurance for the same production would cost only $845 per day in Arizona and $715 in North Carolina, according to quotes from Supple-Merrill and Driscoll Inc. in Pasadena, Calif. And now, budget cuts resulting from the state’s mandatory property tax reform are forcing the Miami-Dade Office of Film and Entertainment to charge filmmakers $100 application fees, beginning in November, according to Director Jeff Peel.

 

Labor costs aren’t helping either. For instance, stagehands with the International Allegiance of Theatrical Stage Employees Union who are members of Local 278 in Asheville, N.C., earn hourly wages between $11 and $13 an hour. Yet, those same stagehands earn $18 to $23 an hour working in Miami’s Local 500 chapter.

 

“I know sometimes the unions and the rates they’ll negotiate with production companies can cause people to stay away from here,” he says. “The real cost is the overall salaries that you’re paying to [union] members. That’s not usually negotiable.”

 

Plus, Maass adds, Miami is much less the film novice it once was. “When you come here now, site owners are much more savvy with regard to negotiating prices. They know what they have and what it’s worth.”

 

Still, it’s ironic, if not telling, that Corben’s production office itself recently fell victim to crime. On Sept. 15, a former Rakontur employee allegedly walked into the business office after hours and walked out with more than $20,000 worth of equipment. She was arrested four days later and held on charges of felony burglary and second-degree grand theft. She claimed to have sold the equipment for $1,000.

 

“Stuff like that is isolated, though,” says Moran. “The real cost for most independents is on a much lower level. My costs are more along the lines of just tapes and time.”

 

Whatever the reasons for its cinematic doldrums, Maass has faith the city can shake it off. “It is cyclical,” he says. “I think it’ll come back.”

 

For now, though, it is still hurricane season, insurance rates are still high, Miami Beach hotel rooms are still asking top-dollar to film there and Florida’s film crew unions still expect big wages to ply their trades. Greenwich Studios is still empty, and Victor Moran still hustles to make movies on a shoestring budget.

 

“I love film, and I love Miami,” Moran says. “I’d never think of moving anywhere else, but sometimes I think all the talent in this city is just wasted.”