NY TIMES: March 9, 2010 Florida Ponders Tax as Tool to Aid Family-Values Films

March 9, 2010
Florida Ponders Tax as Tool to Aid Family-Values Films
By DAMIEN CAVE

MIAMI — The movie “Bait Shop” had too much boozing to earn the extra rebate from Florida’s “family friendly” program of incentives for film production. “Confessions of a Shopaholic” was, well, just too violent.

“There’s a scene where the woman is fighting over shoes and she is beating another woman with a shoe,” said Lucia Fishburne, the state’s film commissioner, adding: “We err on the side of conservative.”

But for Florida’s Republican leaders, that is apparently not enough. A bill that aims to expand the state’s film incentive program — an effort to attract jobs, which is likely to pass — would add language limiting a proposed 5 percent tax credit to productions that do not exhibit or imply “nontraditional family values.”

The bill’s sponsor, Representative Stephen L. Precourt, an Orlando Republican, told The Palm Beach Post that he wanted to encourage filmmaking akin to “The Andy Griffith Show.” On Tuesday, after declining requests to clarify what he meant, he released a statement denying that the new requirement for the tax break was in any way discriminatory.

It was an effort to manage a sudden controversy. State lawmakers had promoted the bill as Florida’s best bet for job creation, but this week three words left undefined started spinning through the blogosphere with the definition “nothing homosexual allowed.” One Democratic co-sponsor pulled his name from the bill, while a post on the liberal Daily Kos blog suggested Monday that Hollywood boycott the state “to give Florida exactly what they want.”

In an interview, Gov. Charlie Crist would not say whether he supported the bill’s new family friendly definition, but Ms. Fishburne said she was worried that the program was being misunderstood. She emphasized that the family friendly credit is a bonus, not a requirement: of 81 productions that received state rebates since 2007, only 8 have applied for what is now an extra 2 percent on top of the standard 15 percent. Six, including the Disney movie “Old Dogs,” have received it.

The new bill would increase all the incentives, creating a minimum tax credit of 20 percent for eligible productions with a budget of $625,000 or more. The family friendly bonus would go up to 5 percent, but the program would still be optional.

Right now the bonus can go only to movies suitable for a 5-year-old, with “cross-generational appeal” and “a responsible resolution of issues.”

Ms. Fishburne said the new bill’s language was more confusing.

“ ‘Nontraditional family values,’ we will have to be told what that is,” she said. “I’m not going to define it; there are a lot of different traditional values out there.”

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, a conservative group that supports the bill, said that “traditional” means marriage between a man and a woman. He called the proposal “a brilliant idea” that was pro-family, not anti-gay.

But Brian Winfield, a spokesman for Equality Florida, said it was not just gay people who would be left out.

“There are millions of families led by single parents, there are millions of families led by gay couples, or families with children being raised by an aunt or uncle or grandparent,” Mr. Winfield said. “Every one of these fits into what has been offered as a possible definition of ‘nontraditional family values.’ Who knows who it would discriminate against?”

Gary Fineout contributed reporting from Tallahassee, Fla.