A future in film

South Portland’s armory, which is being renovated into a soundstage, is on the forefront of an effort to bring film production to Maine.

SOUTH PORTLAND — Eric Matheson’s Cape Elizabeth home is made, in large part, from set pieces he’s brought home over a lifetime in the film industry.

“Yeah, pretty much all of it,” he jokes, while flipping past pictures of the home tucked in among a portfolio of his work.

A Bingham native, Matheson, 68, learned the carpentry trade there building Bristol boats at the now-defunct Allen Quimby Veneer Plywood Co., before launching out for a Chicago art school that went under about the time he got off the bus. Not long after, he enrolled in the School for Visual Arts in New York City, eventually molding his artistic drive and his carpentry skills into a lifelong career in the film industry.

A film set technician with more than 80 feature-film credits, including "Amistad," "Cider House Rules," "The Crucible" and "Empire Falls," Matheson doesn’t get to work close to home very often. But for the occasional project which comes to Maine, Matheson finds Boston about as local as big-time movie making gets.

But that could change. Last month, following three years of on-and-off negotiations with the city of South Portland, Matheson and Mark Rockwood, his partner in a newly formed venture called Fore River Soundstage, signed a five-year lease on the National Guard Armory on Broadway.

The lease-with-option-to-buy began June 1 and runs through May 31, 2016. It includes options for two five-year renewals. In addition to the base monthly rent of $3,300 in the first year, and $6,600, starting in December, the city will get 60 percent of gross receipts taken in by Fore River on building rentals. Forty percent of the city share, Gailey said, will be reinvested into building improvements.  In addition, the city has begun to direct grant money into the buildings crumbing, concrete facade, on which the city retained an easement.

According to City Manager Jamey Gailey, if Fore River does succeed in eventually buying the armory outright, it would return the property to the tax rolls for the first time since 1942. The building has been vacant since the city bought it in 2006. A plan to consider it as a site of a new city hall failed to gain momentum last year.

A quick look inside and it’s not hard to see why. There is massive water damage from where the tower flagpole dislodged during a storm, creating a hole that has only recently been patched over. Elsewhere, walls are falling down and floorboards are coming up.

Still, Matheson has a vision. He sees a 10,000-square-foot soundstage – “the biggest north of Boston, maybe even in Boston, most of the time” – with another 17,000 square feet of office space for producers and production teams, along with studio space for Rockwood’s still photography.

Matheson said slow and steady wins the race. He has a three-phase plan, and three principal investors, expecting to pump some $5 million into the armory over five years. The first part the plan is the get heat and handicapped bathrooms running in one, back wing of the building. That will allow Fore River to begin generating revenue on space rental for still shoots, commercial work and other small-scale projects. Then comes fiber optics and the soundstage itself, to be built in the armory’s cavernous interior.

Once complete, Matheson hopes the facility will become a magnet for feature films. After all, he said, as a dedicated space, it will have a lot going for it. Most of what passes for soundstages in the Boston area, he said, are actually empty mills and warehouses rented out on a short-term basis, many in a state of repair little better than the armory is now.

“We have three people who want to come here with small projects, just as it sits right now,” said Matheson, while conducting a tour last week.

As Matheson points out where makeup rooms will go under existing skylights, and how a light will flow the art deco windows into a rebuilt front lobby, it’s not hard to get caught up in his vision.

In film parlance a “small project” is something with a budget of around $1 million, about half of which ends up spent locally in food, lodging, materials, and, perhaps best of all, jobs. With that in mind, it’s not hard to guess why Gailey and his crew in City Hall have caught film fever as well.

But can it really work? Can Tinsel Town go Down East?

Lea Girardin, head of the Maine Film Office for all of its 22 years, said Maine has a piece of the action already, in every aspect except feature films.

“Commercial work, catalog shoots, reality slows, we get all that. The Discovery Channel is here al the time,” she said.

“Maine is a great state for production work,” said Girardin. “People from all up and down the Eastern seaboard want to work here.”

According to Girardin, it was not so long ago that Maine saw as many feature film productions as any other state.

When Empire Falls filmed in Skowhegan and Waterville in 2003, roughly $17 million flowed into local coffers. At that time, Girardin said, Maine could expect four to five medium-sized projects per year, – ones with budges between $5 and $10 million – and its only real competition was the Canadian exchange rate.

However, since then, states one-by-one have been lining up to offer tax incentives as a lure to film studios. In all, 22 states have laid out the honeypot. The result is that while ad work and reality shows are up, primarily because Maine makes one heck of a backdrop, feature films production has fallen off a cliff.

As an example, Girardin points to the cliffs seen on all promotional artwork for the movie “Shutter Island.” That movie filmed in Massachusetts, because tax incentives there made it attractive to do so. But for the money shot, the crew came to Maine, spending $250,000 to shoot the cliffs and coastline that made gave the movie its iconic imagery.

“There’s no reason at all why that entire production could not have been filmed in Maine,” said Girardin, “but Maine’s current policy is such that they only came for what they absolutely could not get anywhere else.”

Today, Girardin said, Maine can look forward to maybe four small $1 million projects per year. Remember Matheson’s claim that he’s got three of those on the hook already, and you get an idea of the impact he’s making already, even before the armory has a flushing toilet.

Lance Edmands is a Mainer who left home to study film at New York University, and stayed to pursue work in his chosen field. He is just the type of artist a healthy film industry can draw back, according to both Girardin and Matheson.

“I stayed in New York mainly because of the employment opportunities in the film industry that done exist in Maine,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Edmands makes his living editing film, but this winter he’ll be directing a low-budget feature in Millinocket. What attracts filmmakers to Maine isn’t all lobsters and lighthouses, he said.

Matheson is on to something, said Edmands, because he’s making a facility in a place filmmakers would like to be. Importantly, the South Portland armory is near a major airport. That lack of proximity helped to kill another recent soundstage attempt in Camden.

Matheson adds, in typical Mainer fashion, that the Camden project was all flash and sizzle, more concerned with ancillary hotels and restaurants than building sets, or, more correctly, building a place from scratch in which to build sets.

A ready-made place like the armory, he said, is half the battle, and Edmands can’t wait to come home to hoist his petard.

“Maine is definitely the place where I want to make films,” he said. “If business side of the industry can align with the creative side, something can really solidify in this state.

“But it’s always harder to sell your film to an investor when they know if we shot it in New York we’d get 10 percent of the money back [in tax incentives]. So, I have to fight to take projects to Maine.”

“I think it’s a two-pronged necessity for most filmmakers like myself,” said Edmands. “We needs places like what Fore River is putting together, but then we also need to be competitive with what most other states offer, that Maine does not, in incentives.”

Two bills related to the film industry were presented in the legislature this year.  One, sponsored by Linda Valentino, D-Saco, passed. It provides grant money to start-up projects. The other, sponsored by John Picchiotti, R-Fairfield, promised the incentives everyone seems to be yearning for.

However, it’s been carried over to the next session, in January.

“We got a horrible fiscal note,” said Picchiotti, explaining why his bill, and everyone like it in recent years, has stalled out.

The problem, he said, is the way Maine figures its books, using what’s called static budgeting, rather than dynamic budgeting. In other words, tax dollars not collected in a given year are counted as a loss for that year, as opposed to a gain in future years, when the dominos start to fall from the opportunities created, and business activity stimulated.

Girardin said her office has done research showing that every $1 given away in tax credits to the film industry eventually results in $2.26 spent in Maine.

“The problem is, that doesn’t happen in the current fiscal year,” she said. “So, the state only sees that as a loss.”

Getting Picchiotti’s bill out of the hopper and onto Gov. LePage’s desk is absolutely vital, said Lynn “Kip” Kippax, a former press secretary in the Baldacci administration who found “honest” work, he said, where people are supposed to make up stories for a living.

Kippax, a longtime industry vet and confidant of Matheson’s jokes that he’s been contributing sweat equity as a “location man” in hopes that one of the jobs Fore River eventually creates will include one for him.

“What that will do is two things,” said Kippax. “One, it will provide an economic base that’s strong enough to attract outside productions to Maine, and two, it will then ensure that the young people who are here and committed to Maine will have a place to learn and practice their crafts.

“That’s going to require cooperation between the state, businesses and regional government,” he said.

Business, said Kippax, did its part by doing what it does naturally, reworking technology such that a start-up like Fore River does not require anything like the capital investment that would have been needed even 10 years ago for a similar project. 

South Portland, he said, did its part by sticking through the negotiating it took, and the logistical work it will require still, to put give the old armory a shot at a new, useful life.

Now, said, Kippax, a lot of young filmmakers are simply waiting for Augusta to get ready for its close up.