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Film and TV Tax Incentives Renewed in Fiscal Cliff Deal, Section 181 Extended Through 2013

01.2.13 @ 5:25PM Tags : budget, financing, incentives, investment, irs, money, taxes

If you’re involved in the film or TV industry in any way, there’s a good chance you or someone you know has benefitted from Section 181 of the U.S. IRS Tax Code since it was established in 2004. Basically, it gives any investor the ability to deduct 100% of the money they invest in that same year for production costs up to $15 million dollars — and possibly as much as $20 million dollars. The good news is that as part of the last minute “Fiscal Cliff” deal, Section 181 has been renewed for 2013, which means that investors have a federal incentive to put money into a project, in addition to the various state tax incentives. More »

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Here's My Vimeo Panel on 'The Art of Getting Paid' (Bonus: the History of NoFilmSchool)

06.20.12 @ 10:30AM Tags : career, crowdfunding, kickstarter, money, vimeo

This year’s Vimeo Festival + Awards screened a bevy of award-winning awesome videos (many of which we featured here on NFS), and also featured a number of workshops, panels, and the like. I showed up on one panel as a sort-of surprise guest, joining Brian Newman (who recently guest-posted here) to talk about “the art of getting paid.” Whether it’s an art or not, in the independent film world getting paid at all can sometimes feel like a triumph, and so we talk about many different approaches, including web series, merchandising, Kickstarter, this web site, and more. The full panel is below. More »

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Where the Money Goes in Hollywood

11.15.11 @ 2:54PM Tags : craigmazin, hollywood, johnaugust, money, podcast

Hollywood’s accounting practices are so infamously convoluted that you could write a book on them. Two, in fact: author Edward Jay Epstein has written two books on the topic, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood and The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies (with an update of the latter on the way). I read his first book, but by this point my memory’s a bit hazy, so listening to the latest episode of the Script Notes podcast by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin was a great refresher on the topic of where the money goes in Hollywood. More »

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Your Film May Be More Appealing to Investors if You Start* by the End of the Year

10.12.11 @ 10:37AM Tags : budget, financing, incentives, indiewire, investment, irs, money, taxes

Did you know that for the last seven years, film investors could tax-deduct the entirety of their film investment (up to $20 million), in the same year they made the investment, regardless of whether the film made a profit or loss? This has been possible thanks to IRS Code Section 181, which, according to indieWIRE, is the only federal tax credit available for independent film investors. Section 181 is set to expire at the end of 2011, however, and is not likely to be renewed. So if you’re looking for investment in a film project of yours, and you want to entice investors with this significant deduction, you’ve got a little over two months to get started — and by “get started,” I mean getting your paperwork in order and filming at least one day (thus the reason for the asterisk). More »

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Can a blog be self-sustaining? NoFilmSchool's traffic and revenue

05.4.10 @ 12:00PM Tags : blog, career, meta, monetization, money

Can a blog like NoFilmSchool be self-sustaining? As a blogger you can make money by being a contributor to a huge tech or political blog, wherein you’re one of many staff writers churning out content every day — which I’ve done — but can you turn a profit by writing about what’s important to you, on your own site, in your own way? In my recent manifesto I talked about blog revenue being one (small) slice of the self-sustaining pie, and on this site’s about page I wrote, “a big part of figuring out how to be independently creative — and by this I mean, being able to work on your own creations, for yourself, without having a day job — is figuring out how to derive value from the content you create.” Here, then, are the traffic and revenue stats from NoFilmSchool for the just-concluded month of April: More »

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Save New York's TV and film tax credits

02.14.09 @ 5:45PM Tags : money, nyc, taxes

I’m a few days late on this, but as someone who’s been trying to get a low-budget NYC production off the ground for the past six months, this is not a pleasant specter to stare in the face: More »