Eric Witt
We need money to balance the budget. I get it.
We need predictability of film production credit payouts for future budgeting. I get it.
We need to make sure our tax dollars are well invested and providing positive returns to the state. I get it.
People from film, television, and hundreds of local businesses sat for weeks, working in good faith to satisfy the fiscal and transparency concerns of the administration, while not inflicting unintended harm on this flourishing new industry in our state.
After all their hard work – and after they had come to a vehicle which, while not perfect, they could move forward and tweak through the process – they were betrayed.
While inexplicably holding up the entire state budget, this whole “debate” – and I use that term very loosely – over the film industry has become a rabbit hole of madness. One that is destroying New Mexico’s reputation as a touchstone of intelligent programs – not just film – and replacing it with a Sad Sack cartoon.
Predictable annual pay-out budgets, spread credit payments, accountability and reporting – all of these noble concepts have become meaningless under the proposal currently before the House, now a mass of technical contradictions, internal conflicts, and administrative nightmares that only Tim Burton could visualize. They should publish the bill in 3-D.
Congratulations, administration and its supporters: Through this unwillingness to engage people with actual knowledge of the industry, you have sent New Mexico plummeting from a globally respected position of leadership straight into the gutter.
In a mere matter of weeks you have rewritten a blossoming success story into a zombie film of the walking dead. Way to go.
Witt is executive director of the Motion Picture Association of New Mexico.