Nevada remains big hit with filmmakers

Kevin Rademacher

Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005 | 11 a.m.

While the motion picture industry has abandoned many U.S. locations for incentives from international locations such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia, Las Vegas has bucked the trend.

That was a key point on Monday as executives from the Nevada Film Office boasted about strong 2004 revenue figures.

"We have once again -- for the sixth year in a row -- generated more than $100 million in revenue for the year," said Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt, chairwoman of the Nevada Commission on Economic Development, which oversees the film office.

For the year, the film office said a total of 654 production projects, totaling 3,072 production days, generated $117 million in in-state revenue. That's up from the $116 million reported a year ago.

This comes at a time when there is a "runaway production problem" in many states, Hunt said, pointing to surging business outside of the United States where incentives and strong exchange rates have been attractive to producers.

Still, Nevada's motion picture business has more than doubled since generating about $51 million in 1998.

"The world wants to see Las Vegas and Nevada," Hunt said.

Charles Geocaris, director of the Nevada Film Office, said that it will be tough to keep up such a pace of growth.

"We've been on a roll," he said. "The numbers keep going up, but five-plus years of $100 million-plus revenue is really not the norm."

While locations typically wane in popularity in a cyclical industry, Las Vegas has experienced a long-standing surge in recent years.

"It's probably one of the hottest cities in film-making right now," Geocaris said.

While locations such as Reno have landscapes that can be reproduced in Canada, the Las Vegas Strip has been tough to replicate outside of the valley, he said.

"They just haven't been able to duplicate Las Vegas on a sound stage," he said. "Reno has been hurt. British Columbia has similar terrain. But not Las Vegas."

Geocaris also pointed to the emergence of reality television as driving activity in Las Vegas, adding that he expected to spend Monday afternoon looking at wedding chapels for a reality show in the works.

"We used to be heavy in the feature films," he said. "Right now we are doing a lot of work with television."

The film office figures showed that more than half of the $117 million generated in 2004 came from television production projects.