Tom Cruise Was Filming Near My House

Tom Cruise's and Cameron Diaz's newest movie, an action film strangely titled "Wichita" for now, spent the day shooting about four blocks from where I live. The location is a stretch of auto repair and towing businesses, so perhaps they needed something "industrial-looking." (Unfortunately, my walk to school this morning didn't bring me close enough to see.)

Cruise and Diaz (and Katie Holmes and children, natch) have been traipsing around Boston the past month shooting this movie, as have many other actors working on other projects in about the past two years, because the Legislature decided to extend rather generous tax credits to the industry to entice it here. Productions have certainly come, with people such as Bruce Willis in tow, but the benefit are eminently debatable.

CW Unbound, the impeccable blog run by the impeccable think tank MassINC, has a very good summary of the state Department of Revenue's report on the credits. I give greater weight to the facts that Massachusetts collected 16 cents of taxes for every dollar of tax credit and much of the gross salaries are going to out-of-state actors, over the estimated $870 million of economic activity the credits have generated.

Sure, tax policy should be used to create incentives and persuade people and industries to do one thing instead of another, e.g. come to Massachusetts to do business. However, government has to be very careful about the industries it decides to favor. Movie productions' broader economic benefit is similar to the nature of the on-location shoots happening in metro Boston: They swoop into town, create a noticeable ruckus and then leave very quickly, leaving people starry-eyed in their wake. You'll talk about them for awhile, but won't have much to talk about. The downstream benefits are hard to identify because the business is very self-contained, hiring people who production directors already know and hiring them for relatively brief periods of times, without needing ancillary support for sustained periods.

Really, the biggest beneficiaries of this are the Herald's love-to-hate-'em "Track Girls," who run the paper's gossip page. Though, which makes for worse copy: Writing daily updates about what Cruise ate for dinner, as they do now that Boston is "Hollywood East" (as they like to call it), or writing about H-list celebrities and the wives of the city's sports stars, as they used to -- and still regularly -- do?

Thanks to LCD Soundsystem, which has made regular appearances on the blog the past couple of months, for inspiring the post's title.

Update: The WSJ has a good story in today's paper about Iowa's experience with subsidizing the film industry. It ended with directors using tax credits to buy Range Rovers.