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Left-right front row: Director Craig Haffner, DGA First Vice President/PAC LC Co-Chair Paris Barclay, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Directors Hart Bochner, Jerry Zucker, Arthur Seidelman, and DGA Board Member John Rich.
Left-right back row: AD Bob Kozicki, DGA Secretary-Treasurer Gil Cates, Western AD/UPM/TC Council Chair Cleve Landsberg, Director John Bowab, DGA Board Member Jeremy Kagan and Director Scott McKinsey.
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Left-right front row: UPM Duncan Henderson, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), DGA Third Vice President/PAC LC Co-Chair Taylor Hackford, Directors Michael Lehmann and Ron Underwood.
Left-right back row: Director Curtis Hanson, DGA Board Alternate Robert Butler, DGA Associate Board Member Lesli Linka Glatter, Director Robert Markowitz and DGA Board Alternate Thomas Schlamme.
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The breakfast meeting drew about 30 members of the Leadership Council and touched on runaway production, piracy and the creative integrity of film and television productions. Baucus is the longest serving Senator from Montana (first elected in 1978) and chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which has oversight of all tax legislation.
PAC Leadership Council co-chair Paris Barclay welcomed Baucus, noting that the Senator met with the Council in 2003 and was immediately supportive of the Guild’s efforts to create a federal production incentive. That campaign led to a production incentive (Section 181) being included in the JOBS Act of 2004. “His guidance on our production provision was instrumental in helping it to become law,” Barclay said. “The federal legislation, on top of the various state incentives, was exactly what we felt we needed to bring this work home.”
Barclay cautioned that the incentive has fallen short of expectations because of a February Treasury Department ruling on residuals and participations that made the incentive difficult to use for low-budget feature films. “We’re looking to (Senator Baucus) for guidance on where we go from here,” Barclay said.
Baucus said he already had his staff studying the issue and he believed there might be an opportunity to address it as early as this year. “I think we can change it, but it has to be done the right way,” Baucus said. “I’ll push hard to make sure we get a change that makes good sense.”
Baucus sought to broaden his understanding of the DGA, its members and the industry by asking Leadership Council members to share their personal insights and concerns. Several members offered first-hand accounts of the creative and economic difficulties they and their team members faced as productions went abroad to take advantage of foreign incentives. Others, including PAC chair Taylor Hackford, mentioned the impact of piracy on earnings and the Guild’s plans. “Residuals are the lifeblood of our health plan and all of the things that support our members,” Hackford said. “These are the things we’re concerned with – when films that should be made here are not and when our films get pirated.”
“It’s stories like these that need to be well-known to members of the Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee because it does make a difference,” Baucus said. He said he remained committed to the fight against piracy and joined other members of Congress in talks with Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi on trade issues, including that country’s widespread piracy problem. “We’re still not as aggressive as we should be in enforcing intellectual property protections,” Baucus said. “My view is that no country – altruistically, or out of the goodness of its heart – will ever knock down a trade barrier. You need leverage such as enforcement.” To this end, Baucus said he would be supporting further efforts to enforce trade agreements.
Runaway production remains a fundamental threat to America’s economy, according to the Senator. “It’s important for us to tap into one of the major advantages that we have in the world – and that ’s our creativity,” he said. We not only have to take advantage of what we already do so well, but we also need to maintain and grow it.”
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