Destination 2017: New YorkBy Benjamin Reeves

Part of Feirstein’s early success with diversity has to do with its location. Brooklyn is one of the most diverse places in the world, with residents hailing from every state in the union and 130 nations. “Brooklyn is perceived as somewhat more egalitarian and diverse than Manhattan,” says Soderbergh. “I don’t think the school would feel the same if it weren’t in Brooklyn.”

The school’s other advantage in attracting a diverse student body has to do with price. A year of tuition at the Feirstein School costs in-state students just a hair over $18,000 per year for a three-year MFA program ($27,000 for non-New York residents), whereas tuition at a similar program at a leading film school such as New York University can run almost $60,000 per year. And the majority of Feirstein students receive at least a partial scholarship, plus up to $10,000 to produce their thesis films. For aspiring filmmakers from low-income backgrounds, the difference in cost can be the deciding factor in whether they attend school or not. Kaitlyn Cortes, a post-production student, says that after studying film and studio art at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, she wanted the more rigorous experience of an MFA.

“I wanted to go back to school. I really wanted to get that experience,” she says. “But I needed something that was cost-effective.”

Amanda Reyes, a Mexican American directing student from Texas, specifically chose to attend Feirstein rather than a school in Los Angeles, where she was working as an actress, because of its embrace of diversity. “I was constantly auditioning for stereotypical Latina roles—the gangster’s girlfriend or the pregnant teen or the maid. I was looking at these films and these scripts thinking, I can write a more honest portrayal of my people.” Her stories are drawn from her own life, and they’re not your typical Hollywood fare. “I have older brothers who have been in and out of prison my entire life, and so I write a lot about being a part of an inmate family and dealing with the incarceration process,” Reyes says while communing with fellow students during a rare break in a common area. “Also, immigration—I was heavily involved as an activist in Texas. With everything going on and the political climate the way it is now, it’s so necessary for us to comment on it in media and films.”

All of this could seem like merely an earnest attempt by academics and industry to solve a social problem, and on one level that’s true. But the Feirstein School also represents a hard-nosed economic calculation by the city and state of New York. Millions have been poured into the school because New York’s civic leaders believe Feirstein is a smart economic investment for the future.

“There are three elements that go into making a decision about where you’re going to shoot a TV show or a movie,” says Vans Stevenson, senior vice president of state government affairs for the Motion Picture Association of America. “Cost, convenience and creativity,” and New York is now second only to California in volume of movies and TV shows being produced in state.
Overall, the film and TV industry in New York City generates $9 billion locally and supports an estimated 130,000 full-time jobs. In 2016, 56 television shows were shot in New York City, a record, an 8 percent increase over the previous year and the seventh consecutive year of record growth in the TV production industry in the city, according to Julie Menin, the commissioner of media and entertainment for mayor Bill de Blasio. At a time when most of the creative energy is in TV, not film, New York is competing well. “New York is the greatest backdrop in the world, and the diversity of the city’s locations is unparalleled as is its skilled workforce,” says Menin. “This provides enormous revenue to the city’s small businesses, as well as thousands of well-paying jobs.” And it’s a trend likely to continue, as 17 pilots were also shot across the city’s five boroughs during the 2016-17 TV season, another record.

Productions have been drawn to New York in part by long-running state-level tax breaks for movies and TV shows that film in the state. “There’s been explosive growth in New York because of the production incentives programs,” says the MPAA’s Stevenson. The state first introduced incentives in the early 2000s, and they’ve become more robust under governor Andrew Cuomo over the past six years. “Governor Cuomo initiated a five year, $420 million per year rolling cap program, originally budgeted at $2.1 billion,” says Stevenson. “This year they extended it by another three years through 2022.” The multiyear nature of the tax cuts has given production companies and studios a reliable barometer of costs in New York and made the state highly competitive against other leading locations such as Georgia, California and Canada.

To handle all of this activity, the city’s film production companies are on a near constant building and hiring spree. For instance, Silvercup Studios, where much of HBO’s hit The Sopranos was filmed, already had more than 400,000 square feet of production space in Queens when it built a third 120,000-square-foot expansion in the Bronx last year. And the city itself is backing the construction of a 100,000-square-foot production center along the waterfront in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.

“We’re at the busiest time that we’ve seen in New York in a long time,” says HBO executive vice president of production Bruce Richmond. “You’ve seen the advent of major tent-pole series in New York, whether it’s [HBO’s] Boardwalk Empire or something else, and once you start doing those it really starts growing the ability of other networks to come in and do tent-pole shows.” (HBO, of course, is headquartered in midtown Manhattan.)

It’s a virtual cycle: Each new production requires an expansion in facilities, technology and the workforce, which then incentivizes new productions drawn by those resources, and on and on. The city has also streamlined permitting for productions, according to Stevenson, cutting the cost and paperwork necessary to shoot. And ultimately, “New York has always had an incredible character as a location, and that’s something that people have always come to New York for,” says Richmond.

Once questions of cost and labor have been resolved, movies and TV shows are shot in New York because there is an aesthetic here—independent, artful, more diverse—that stands in contrast to big-studio Hollywood. Today’s growth is really about the industry coming full circle. The first movies weren’t filmed in California until 1910, but starting in 1907 silent films were being cranked out at a rate of as many as eight per week by the Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Company of America.

Vitagraph doesn’t exist anymore—it was acquired by Warner Bros. in 1925 and absorbed—but a dusty smokestack, more than a century old, still stands in Midwood, Brooklyn. When a developer considered tearing it down, community opposition stayed the wrecking ball, and earlier this year the developer announced it would keep the smokestack, making it a monument to the borough’s filmmaking past. And now, 100 years later, New York is still innovating, still pushing the industry forward.