FILMING UP 72% IN OCTOBER 'ECONOMIC ENGINE' GRINDING.

Byline: Greg Hernandez Staff Writer

Led by Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Keanu Reeves, movie industry A-listers shooting movies in locations around Los Angeles helped boost slumping local film production by 72 percent in October compared to the month before, according to figures released Thursday by the Entertainment Industry Development Corp.

The highest-profile movie to begin production last month was the Cruise thriller ``Collateral,'' which also stars Jaime Foxx, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Mark Ruffalo.

``The city gets a lot of attention from these big pictures with big budgets,'' said Kathleen Milnes, the EIDC's senior vice president of public affairs. ``They employ a lot of people so they are a big economic engine.''

Other star vehicles that began filming in October: Steve Martin in the romantic comedy ``Shopgirl'' based on his own original novella; Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the drama ``The Terminal;'' and Al Pacino and Diane Lane in the dramatic-thriller ``Void Moon.'' Reeves, whose ``The Matrix: Revolutions'' hit theaters Wednesday, continued work on the thriller ``Constantine,'' which began production in September.

The EIDC reported an overall filming jump of 7.6 percent when combining the month's production days for feature films, television shows, commercials and music videos. All four categories were up from September, when an overall 20.8 percent drop was reported from August.

While feature films had a robust month, Milnes pointed out that runaway production remains a problem with many movies currently shooting in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Eastern Europe.

For this reason, Milnes said she found particularly encouraging the 8.3 percent climb in television production with such series as ``The District,'' ``The West Wing,'' ``The O.C.,'' ``24,'' ``The Shield,'' ``Dragnet L.A.'' and ``Charmed'' all currently doing location shooting.

``The thing about television is that it produces jobs for longer periods of time than features,'' Milnes said. ``These are good, long-term gigs.''

Local production of commercials, which have struggled all year, rebounded a bit from a dismal September, when a mere 364 shooting days were reported. In October, there were 458 production days for commercials, still considerably below the 2003 high of 706 days in March.

``Certainly it's an improvement over the previous month, but we continue to see the erratic nature of commercial activity in Los Angeles,'' said Steve Caplan, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers' senior vice president of external affairs. ``We see the impact of global competitiveness on the industry and Los Angeles' share, compared to previous years, appears to be off.''

Completing the good news for October location production was music video shooting. With 148 production days reported, music videos had their second-highest numbers in all of 2003, nearly doubling the 80 days reported in September.

Greg Hernandez, [phone]

greg.hernandez(at)dailynews.com