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From the bay area to the box office

Low-budget filmmakers are finding the Tampa Bay area more and more often when looking for inexpensive locations.

By JAMES THORNER
Published September 10, 2006

The cameraman on the crane tilts the lens to capture the gorefest below: A skateboarding dude is vanquishing a voodoo witch doctor around the swimming pool of the Tierra Verde resort.

It’s the grand finale of Burial at Sea, a new dead teenager popcorn flick in production in St. Petersburg. Producer Rob Sterrett describes the $300,000 thriller as “I Know What You Did Last Summer with Scooby-Doo-ish overtones’’
Slasher movies are more “Gone with the Limb” than Gone With the Wind. But for the Tampa Bay region’s fledgling film industry, facing stiff competition from Miami and Orlando, they’re just what the doctor ordered.

“The locations here are absolutely amazing and not expensive,” said Sterrett, a 12-year Hollywood film crew veteran who moved to St. Petersburg in December.

“A lot of Florida could double for California. You’ve got the Pasadena look, the Valley look, the Beverly Hills look.”
Pinellas and Hillsborough counties have motion picture boosters (the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Film Commission and the Tampa Bay Film Commission). But for the purposes of wooing Hollywood, it’s an industry in which the bay is no economic barrier.

Need a beach shot? St. Pete is the ticket. Need a ethnic street scene? Try Ybor City. Crew members — make-up artists, sound technicians and special effects gurus among them — live on both sides of the bay.

Motion pictures and television shows sink about $10-million a year into the local economy for things such as hotel rooms, catering, lumber for sets and crew wages.

But that’s only for projects film offices can accurately track: productions requiring a permit to shoot on public property.

When you count the TV commercials, animation and movies that shoot indoors or on private property, the real effect is much greater, though a dollar figure remains elusive.

“We’re not Hooterville, but we’re also not New York or L.A.,” said Pinellas film commissioner Jennifer Parramore.
The Tampa Bay area is known as a setting for such big-budget feature films as 1985’s Cocoon, the space alien/fountain of youth flick, and The Punisher, a 2004 comic book action movie starring John Travolta.

This year has brought two Hollywood projects to the region, largely kept under wraps during filming to avoid fan intrusion on the sets.

Grace is Gone is a relatively low-budget movie of several million dollars starring John Cusack as a husband distraught over his wife’s death in the Iraq war.

In May, the Hilton Westshore hotel in Tampa and Fort DeSoto in St. Petersburg stood in for sites Cusack’s character visits with his motherless children.

In June, an German-American film crew came to Pinellas to film Old Love, based on the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. The movie stars B-list actors Rhea Perlman, Barbara Hershey and Elizabeth Pena. Location shots included the Olympia Hotel in Clearwater and Sea Critters Cafe on St. Pete Beach.

“Those are the kinds of projects we encourage,” Parramore said of Old Love. “It’s easier to work with a smaller production than it is the huge Hollywood blockbuster.”

Not that the region wouldn’t embrace being the setting for a blockbuster, but it’s costly to play in the big leagues.

The state Legislature recently raised the yearly incentives to lure big budget pictures. It went from $2.4-million two years ago to $10-million last year to $20-million this year.

Tampa film commissioner Krista Soroka said the state’s relatively modest handouts played a role in the city’s failure to land Deja Vu, a time travel picture with Denzel Washington that’s set for release at Thanksgiving.

Director Tony Scott chose Louisiana, which offered tax breaks for the movie equal to Florida’s film budget for the whole year. New Mexico, which nabbed 18 Hollywood films in one year, is nearly as generous as Louisiana.
“That’s a lot of film production work,” Soroka said of New Mexico. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the story about Jessica Simpson hanging out at Gov. Richardson’s place.’’

Then comes the in-state competition. Florida has 54 local film offices, but only four “production centers” with sufficient local movie-making talent: Miami, Orlando, the Tampa Bay area and Jacksonville.
Tampa-St. Petersburg ranks third behind Miami Beach’s Art Deco club scene and The-Mouse-that-Roared associations of Orlando.

Many actors and directors have second homes in Miami and relish the party scene. Parramore remembers losing out on a large TV commercial shoot for that very reason.

“They told me the director wanted to snort cocaine in Miami Beach,” Parramore recalls. “I said, 'You know, I really can’t help you there.’’’

So the Tampa Bay area survives partly on a diet of television shows — witness last year’s well-publicized Extreme Makeover episode on ABC   — and the inevitable horror flicks. Pinellas County has hosted about 10 low-budget horror films the past few years. Most cost between $50,000 and $500,000.

Recent titles include Belly of the Beast and Hallow’s Point, both in production with a grab bag of dismemberments and bloodlettings. Some have a limited theatrical release. Others go straight to video. Even if they flop domestically, they can turn a profit overseas.

Sterrett’s shoot for Burial at Sea should last a brief 10 days. His cast and crew, capped at about 25, sports one semiknown performer: MTV’s Brian Drolet.

The story line of the spring break-based horror film, like most movies in the slice-and-dice genre, features characters with diminishing life expectancies.

“We’ll kill off the first female and take it from there,” Sterrett jokes.

James Thorner can be reached at thorner@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3313.

[Last modified September 10, 2006, 13:52:39]