FILMING PICTURE IS MURKY SIZE OF LOSSES UNKNOWN.

Byline: Greg Hernandez Staff Writer

BURBANK - Entertainment industry leaders waging the battle against runaway production confirmed Friday that they are not armed with up-to-date data that would likely paint a much more dire picture of the price California and the U.S. pay when they lose productions to foreign countries, especially Canada.

``We cannot convince people there's a problem unless we have accurate numbers,'' Screen Actors Guild President Melissa Gilbert said during a round-table discussion on various government proposals to combat the situation.

Much of the data being used to lobby federal and state government leaders is at least 2 years old and comes from several different sources. Gilbert proposed that an Entertainment Research Council be established to furnish the industry with accurate numbers.

Gilbert said SAG's latest internal study, completed in 2000, showed that 90 percent of the guild's 98,000 members earned less than $20,000 that year, while 70 percent made less than $3,000 doing acting jobs.

``Today, the situation is even worse and we need comprehensive data,'' Gilbert said. ``Runaway production is costing these people their jobs.''

Actress Diane Ladd, a SAG board member and three-time Academy Award nominee, said that if she hadn't accepted work in productions in Canada last year, she would have been unemployed.

``I've been to about 25 states and investigated this, and we are in a much more devastating position than the facts show,'' said Ladd. ``The studio's bottom line is profit and I don't blame them, but we need to put our people to work. We need to level the playing field.''

Jack Kyser, chief economist of Los Angeles Country Economic Development Corp., said the entertainment industry is the fifth-largest employer in the county. But measuring the full impact of runaway production on industry jobs is difficult because many of the so-called ``below-the-line'' jobs are not always counted as entertainment jobs in various reports and studies. For example, set builders may be classified generically as carpenters or construction workers, while wardrobe employees are counted as garment workers.

``Studies about the economic impact have widely different results and lead to confusion,'' Kyser said.

California Assemblyman Dario Frommer, D-Glendale, one of the organizers of the round table, said complete statistics are needed ``to quantify losses so we can say, if we do this, we'll get this.''

Kyser said it will be difficult for the state or federal governments to offer much in the way of financial incentives because they are facing budget deficits.

It was just last month that Gov. Gray Davis proposed California's first sizable tax credit to discourage film and television shows from fleeing to cheaper locations such as Canada, where overall production costs are about 25 percent cheaper. The plan seeks to grant producers a 15 percent tax credit on the first $25,000 earned by a worker on lower-budget projects beginning in 2004. But participants in the round table agreed that the tax credit is needed sooner.

Frommer, chairman of the Select Committee on the Future of California's Film Industry, is the sponsor of the California Film Finance Act, which would guarantee loans to independent productions that spend 50 percent or more of their budget in the state. The bill was passed recently by the state Assembly and is now pending in the Senate. Frommer said the bill had been bottled up for a year, but that recent pressure from the industry has had an impact.

``We've had a lot of movement in the last three months and it's because a lot of people have been speaking up,'' Frommer said.

Already in place is the California First Program, which increases reimbursement caps for films that are shot on public properties in California, among other discounts - including film permits and public location fees.