Bay Area gets more Hollywood action
After the pandemic slowed productions, movie and television shoots are returning
It’s been a long, pandemicdarkened year for movie and TV makers. But lights, cameras and action should be coming soon to Bay Area locations near you.
“There are a significant number of productions in the pipeline waiting to get under way,” said California Film Commission Director Colleen Bell, whose Hollywood agency administers the state’s production tax credit incentive program. “I’m very positive about getting back to some of the preCOVID numbers sometime in the future. There’s no crystal ball, but people really are setting themselves up.”
Susannah Robbins, executive director for the San Francisco Film Commission, also known as Film SF, is certainly feeling optimistic. A number of car commercials were shot in the Financial District over consecutive weekends in February. She also told The Chronicle that two independent films should be coming to the city this summer, in addition to a television series that is expected to shoot a pilot in the spring. If that show is picked up by a network or streaming service, it could be a twoyear project, she said. There’s even a blockbuster movie considering action footage in June
and more extensive filming with principal actors in the fall.
“It just feels like things are bubbling up and we’re starting on a good increase in production,” Robbins said. “I think that productions are getting more used to working under the COVID protocols that have been put into place here in San Francisco and around California. They’re getting used to the testing and the routines.”
While the spike in COVID19 infections essentially shut down production in Los Angeles — the hardesthit area in the state — from midDecember through January, the Bay
Area stayed open and actually snagged a couple of commercials that had to relocate from Southern California.
Most recently, after filming interiors on L.A. soundstages, the Starz series based on the “Blindspotting” movie from East Bay natives Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal finished nine days of exterior shooting in West Oakland on Friday, March 5.
“Nine different COVID officers were running around helping with masks and hand sanitizers,” recalled Jim MacIlvaine of the Oakland Film Office, who was on set during the
shoot. “All of the pretesting and advance work that’s been done, fast turnaround tests ... I think the industry really needs to be applauded.”
The forthcoming Disney+ reality series “The Quest” also shot for 20 days from Feb. 11 through Saturday, March 6, at the Castello di Amorosa winery in Calistoga.
As for movies, Netflix’s “Malcolm & Marie” managed a strippeddown, 14day shoot at a single location — the Caterpillar House near Carmel — last summer. However, the only major production to film in San Francisco since the state gave the OK to resume work last June was Marvel’s “ShangChi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” for a week of big action shots in October.
“That was a really great production to have here because it proved that even under COVID we could host such a complicated production,” Robbins said. “And the feedback that we got from the public was that everyone was so excited to have that come here and to have something normal going on. Down by Ghirardelli Square, where they did the huge bus crash scene, onlookers were just cheering when that thing went off.”
“ShangChi” made its base camp at Film Treasure Island, the production complex run by Mark Walter. He is also the director of studio development for Cinelease, which operates that facility as well as Film Mare Island. Walter was impressed by how well Marvel had adapted to bigscale filmmaking in pandemic times.
“They COVIDtested me, personally, and my staff,” Walter said. “When you walked in the building, they’d do a temperature check. They worked in these little pod bubbles.”
Although it reopened for business in June, Walter’s Mare Island facility has only hosted a few short, primarily exterior shoots since. He has also started working with the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, where the Pavilion has attracted the attention of commercial location scouts, Walter said.
“It’s the little things that are keeping us going,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”
Two TV series have placed holds — one at Mare Island, the other at Treasure Island — for preproduction starting at the end of March, with cameras hopefully rolling by May.
Any new shows can apply for the state’s incentive. The third iteration of California’s Film and TV Tax Credit Program, called 3.0, is safely funded at $330 million per year through 2025, according to Bell. Originally enacted to combat runaway productions to generously incentivized jurisdictions such as the state of Georgia, the United Kingdom and several Canadian provinces, it has worked pretty well for California.
Over the fiveyear span of the 2.0 version of the program, which ended in June, productions that shot mainly in California generated $11.2 billion in direct, instate spending in return for $1.55 billion in tax credits. While the incentive is good for 20% or 25% of qualifying expenditures across the board, shows that shoot outside of the studio zone, also known as the Thirty Mile Zone encircling Hollywood, get 5% to 10% uplifts for various costs. Bay Area productions that have taken advantage of the program include Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why” and “The OA” series, and feature films “Bumblebee,” “Beautiful Boy” and the upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick.”
On March 1, the California Film Commission announced 22 feature films conditionally approved for the tax credit. Sixteen of them plan some work outside of the TMZ, mostly in other parts of Southern California, but at least three will shoot farther north. None has yet indicated it will be coming to the Bay Area, however.
The Scene in San Francisco Rebate Program offers production companies reimbursement for fees paid to municipal departments, daily use fees and payroll taxes, and the city has a vendor discount program that is currently being revamped. “San Francisco has done a great job of sweetening the pot with these meaningful local incentives,” Bell said.
Still, COVID19 is a hard thing to beat. From July 1, 2020, to early February of this year, Film SF issued 131 permits for 402 shoot days, compared with 335 permits with 597 shoot days for the same time frame a year earlier. Total fees were almost cut in half, from $100,180 to $50,200, Robbins noted.
And yet, optimism reigns. Santa Clara University alum Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton White House press secretary and, more recently, Warner Bros.' corporate communications chief, now directs GoBiz, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, which oversees the California Film Commission.
“This is an important, critical industry in California,” Myers said during a February virtual conference that introduced the commission’s new website, film.ca.gov. “It’s important that we keep production here. Having been on the other side of it, I know the complicated decision making that goes into where you locate production.”
Myers made a plea to filmmakers: “Please know that the state is very committed to doing what we can to make it possible for you to do more ... to locate here.”