New incentives expected to increase film making in Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH — We’ve seen the street closures and closed sets even an occasional movie star sighting. But post-pandemic film making is heating up, and Pennsylvania is one of the stars of the show.

“They are pounding on Pennsylvania’s door to the tune of one billion with (not sure what number is supposed to go here - please add dollar amount) dollars’ worth of production by this October,” said State Senator Camera Bartolotta.

But leading up to this point, Pennsylvania’s tax incentive programs for these film companies capped out at $70 million, and Bartolotta said that hurts our economy by having to turn business away.

“This industry in just the Southwest has had 509 productions as of 2019 and they have a $5.3 billion dollar return in revenue in Pennsylvania,” Bartolotta said.

In this year’s budget, she got that number up to $100 million to allow our state to compete for more opportunities. The benefits stretch into the small towns for business owners like Lorianne Burgess.

“We had American Rust, we had ‘Mindhunter’ on Netflix, we had ‘A League of Their Own’ and most recently we had ‘A Man Called Otto’ with Tom Hanks in it,” said Burgess, who owns Stangl’s Bakery.

Burgess said the companies have invested into her business by updating flooring and the facade to match the movies, but she said the real impact comes after the films are released.

“People start saying, ‘Oh, they filmed “Mindhunter” here’ or ‘A League of Their Own’ or ‘Oh my goodness, Tom Hanks was in this bakery, I want to go visit there.’ That’s when you start to realize the impact it has on the town and businesses in the town,” Burgess said.

Bartolotta told Channel 11 this incentive amount will hopefully stand for three years as she hopes some of these film companies will keep coming back to our city.

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