Film & TV tax incentives in the U.S.: courting Hollywood

Entertainment tax incentives are one of the greatest tools in the arsenal of film-making.

They pay a portion of production expenditures back to the film-maker, while creating powerful economic engines for the states who implement them properly.

They are high in the list of considerations for executives to sign off before a movie receives the go-ahead for production, even to the point of dictating the location of where a production is filmed.

Yet, they are misunderstood by the film-makers who use them, the politicians who create them, the economists who measure them, and even the scholars who study them.