No Filming In Chinatown For 60 Days

August 5th, 2008 · 5 Comments

According to a New York Times article over the weekend, a local Chinatown community leader approached the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting a little while back with a proposal to block filming on certain streets in Chinatown for July and August, and it was approved.

Actually, only parking is banned, not actual filming, but without being able to park production and support trucks, it’s tantamount to a ban on filming.

While some business owners are thrilled, some are not. Especially miffed is an owner who missed out on $5K and a small part in Brooklyn’s Finest, which was supposed to film in Chinatown in July.

Could this happen in Brooklyn? Film shoots can be a little inconvenient, but the benefits for Brooklyn as a whole are hard to argue against. It gets a bit murkier, however, when the trucks are taking up block after block of parking in your neighborhood.

Film shoots give an area cachet, and they contribute to the local economy, either by directly paying home- and business-owners for using their property, or by locals getting hired as extras (as was to be the case for Brooklyn’s Finest), or by crew members going to local restaurants (trust me, no matter how much food is provided by the production, the crew is always asking where the good restaurants are). I think that the pros outweigh the cons, but judging from a lot of the comments I see on blogs and hear hanging around shoots, plenty of people could do without them.

Sometimes you just have to put up with things you don’t like in order to reap the benefits.

Update: Our resident location manager, Nathan, has an interesting discussion over on his blog about whether or not you need to shoot in the real Chinatown to get the real Chinatown feel. And he also has a post explaining in detail (this is why we love him) the difficulties of working around the Mayor’s Office’s ever-tightening rules, which seem to make less sense as more and more productions shoot here.

Originally posted on Filming In Brooklyn

For Better (And Worse), The Film Crews Depart [The New York Times]

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5 responses so far ↓

1 Teddy // Aug 5, 2008 at 3:32 pm

“Sometimes you just have to put up with things you don’t like in order to reap the benefits.”

What benefits ? Most of the “benefits” leave the neighborhood when the film crew leaves. Local restaurants don’t make much off most film crews in my neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, according to a couple of long-time restaurant owners I spoke to.

As for “area cachet”, many productions are often vague when it comes to location identification or even identify my neighborhood as another location (example: “Burn After Reading”, locations shot in Brooklyn Heights are identified as Georgetown, Virginia). To be honest, most of my neighbors prefer less “area cachet” when they come home from work in too much cachet Manhattan.

Now I will admit that a large number of people who work for New York-based film production companies benefit economically, including many native New Yorkers. However as far my neighbors are concerned (with the exception of the very small number of people renting out their properties to the film crews), the negatives definitely outweigh the positives.

Some limits should be set, like only a certain number of productions can occur in any given neighborhood/area/residential street over a certain period of time. Time limits for filming.

Maybe some compensation to every property owner on the blocks where film crew trucks are parked. Lets say 2-5 percent of what the production crew is paying to the owner whose property is being used for the main filming.

Better communication & transparency: At least 14-21 day notice for residents (signs put up on the street & on the doors of affected property ownes) with detailed information such as whose property (street address) will used for filming and their compensation for allowing this on their property. Let’s have some transparency here.
2 Nathan // Aug 5, 2008 at 8:28 pm

I’m not going to get into a long drawn out thing here, (cause I worked long today and can’t be bothered), but I’ll respond to a couple of things.

1. The Film Office already will put a neighborhood on the “Hot Zone List” if it’s had a lot of filming in a short period of time. There’s no set list of rules for what’s too much or for how long the spot stays on the Hot List. It’s more of a common sense thing. (A big stretch of Court St. is on the list right now.)

2. The economic impact is in a more spread out fashion, much like tourism impact is. In addition, Productions buy thousands of dollars worth of materials like lumber, paint, and hardware. Every person on the crew from out of town stays in a hotel or rents an apartment and eats every meal in a restaurant every day for as long as they’re here. It may not put money directly in your pocket, but it contributes to having a healthy economy as a whole.

14-21 days notice is utterly impractical. In the case of a movie, schedules are so fluid that anything more than a week in advance isn’t reliable. With commercials, they choose their locations as little as 2-3 days before shooting because they’re awarded the job as little as a week before shooting. No Parking signs are required to be up no less than 48 hours beforehand and the better Location Managers will post Resident Letters giving you a clue what will be going on and inviting you to contact them if you have anything going on (you’re moving and have a tractor trailer coming or you’re having an intimate dinner party with 50 of your closest friends). I’ve never had anyone contact me and then not been able to make arrangements that worked for everyone.
3 Amy // Aug 6, 2008 at 10:23 pm

What Nathan said.
4 Teddy // Aug 8, 2008 at 5:45 pm

OK, my suggestions are impractical but talking from experience, it can be a pain, especially with the hostile attitude of some film production crews where they make you feel like you’re trespassing on the street where you grew up (waiting a good half-hour to enter your property after a long day at work).
5 Amy // Aug 9, 2008 at 12:25 pm

I agree, there’s really no excuse for film crews to be hostile. I’m sure they get aggravated with all of the people passing through and gawking and asking questions, but that’s the price they have to pay for being allowed to use public city streets and sidewalks.

Luckily, the crews that I’ve encountered so far have been polite. I’ve seen over and over how they generally let people pass until the very last second before shooting starts. Just the other day on the Vanderbilt Mars location, a woman came walking down the street and got miffed when she was stopped at Dean and asked to wait. She said a little snottily “Well how long do I have to wait, I just want to get home!” and the PA was like “Really, less than 60 seconds, I promise.” When they yelled cut about 30 seconds later and he told her to go ahead, her entire demeanor changed, and she actually stuck around for a few minutes asking questions about the production.

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