Zombie Marketing: “The Walking Dead” and Georgia’s flesh-eating film tax credit
At first, the decision to place the graphic novel “The Walking Dead” in and around Atlanta is fairly obvious — it’s the real world home of the Centers for Disease Control, which plays an important but short-lived role early in our characters’ struggles to survive the zombie apocalypse. There are also some fun (read: terrifying) encounters with swarms of the undead among the streets and skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta.
But soon, the importance of place in the series all but vanishes — we’re in a small Anywhere USA town, on the side of a highway, in a dense forest. This is the case in the TV show adaptation as well. And the show, magnitudes more popular than the books, has become an unlikely darling of Georgia state lawmakers, and by extension, a pricey pet project for Georgia taxpayers.
For years, films and TV shows have served, wittingly or not, as advertisements (Annie Hall, Amelie), cautionary tales (L.A. Confidential, “The Sopranos”), or caricatures (Fargo, The Big Lebowski) of the places they depict. Sometimes the impact can be so great a place’s reputation can be affected. New York is said to have benefited from a post-9/11 “Sex & the City” boost, and Kazakhstan complained about unfair treatment from Borat.
For about as long, localities have struggled to attract an industry almost universally viewed as sexy and benevolent (whatever its real merits), even if they have little control over how they’re depicted. France and Canada have subsidized their domestic film industries for years. But lately, US states and even some foreign countries are trying to loosen up California’s long-running stranglehold on the industry.
Georgia, and especially Atlanta, has become a sort-of Hollywood of the South in recent years, in large part thanks to a generous state tax credit. The incentive, first approved in 2005, grants up to a 30% tax credit on all film and TV production costs of at least $500,000 incurred in the state. Forrest Gump, Hidden Figures, The Fate of the Furious, several films in the Hunger Games and Marvel franchises, as well as Netflix’s “Stranger Things” are just some of the hundreds of productions shot there.
Georgia’s Film, Music & Digital Entertainment Office got its start after the 1973 release of Deliverance — a thriller involving backwoods inbreds (another dubious billboard for the state). Then-governor Jimmy Carter witnessed Hollywood money helping to lift up a hard-on-its-luck rural area, and wanted to see those benefits spread.
But Hollywood is a notoriously footloose and fickle industry, and it wasn’t until Georgia lost out on the shooting of 2004’s Ray to Louisiana that the state decided to start handing out incentives.
But state tax incentives for film and TV have proven to be a race to the bottom. Today 33 states offer some sort of incentive, including industry stalwart California. Film tax credits, grants and rebates have become standard calculus in a producer’s pencilling out a project.
A 2010 study of Michigan’s tax incentive program found that every dollar spent on film credits returned only 60 cents in private sector spending in the field, and each industry job cost taxpayers $186,519 to create. The legislature eliminated that program in 2015. Louisiana counted only 22 cents in benefits for every dollar spent, and scaled its program back the same year.
Defenders of the incentives claim there are hidden benefits to supporting the industry that don’t appear in cost/benefit analyses, like increased tourism and making a place more attractive for young people to live and work; in a word — reputation.
Senoia, a small town outside of Atlanta where much of the later seasons of “The Walking Dead” were shot, has indeed seen tourists arrive by the busload to take in the idyllic Main Street (and ostensibly compare it to the ravaged version seen in the show). A themed restaurant has popped up and residents make the usual gripes about increased traffic and disrespectful visitors. But what happens when “The Walking Dead” wraps and fans move on?
Atlanta does have ambitions beyond just as a shooting destination. Turner Broadcasting studios and CNN have been there for years, Tyler Perry is planning an expansion to his studio there, and animation is making an unlikely comeback in the city.
Georgia’s film/TV industry is now the third-biggest after California and New York. There has even been some proof that the state is beginning to develop the necessary critical mass of industry talent that Michigan and Louisiana just couldn’t seem to fertilize. (Of course training hair, make-up, camera, lighting and set workers is much easier than luring the highly paid writers, executives, engineers and designers who will continue to prefer life on the coasts.)
But the virtuous cycle of the growing film industry in Georgia is good reason to scale back or eliminate the incentive program. As evidenced by the shortcomings of such programs in Louisiana and Michigan, there’s good reason to believe Atlanta’s film industry success is thanks to factors out of policymakers’ control.
The authors of “The Walking Dead” (the graphic novel) thought Georgia an interesting enough place to set the books; location scouts for “The Walking Dead” (the show) probably would have considered a Georgia shoot, incentive or not — it’s cheap, the talent pool is decent, and it looks like Georgia.
