Cameras Roll in the Rust Belt
by Joseph Wachowski
Maelstrom Film Crew, Top L–R: Madeline E. Allard, Sydney Baker-Hendryx, Gabrielle Nunzio, Lenny Bevilacqua. Bottom L–R: Donovan Gale, Jake Jasie, Jay Stockslader, Zachary Iqbal
The only shelter was a semi-enclosed bus stop outside City Hall, and it rattled and whistled under the stress of 45-mph winds. Inside, I agitated my last pair of hand warmers and stuffed them into my wool socks; my toes were getting numb. Over my walkie-talkie, the assistant director commanded everyone to “lock it up.” It was time to leave my refuge and return to the film set in Niagara Square. Despite the winds and snow and subzero temperatures, spectators were still out to watch filming for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021).
As a last-minute substitute production assistant, it was my job to keep fellow Buffalonians off the set and out of view. I barked at people and told them to back off, but I couldn’t fault their persistence. How often do you get a chance to spot Bradley Cooper? When was the last time you saw fifty vintage cars and a crowd of two hundred extras in 1940s-era clothing circling City Hall? When I left Buffalo for Brooklyn in summer 2014, opportunities like this were rare. But the city is changing and it’s changing fast. Buffalo, if you didn’t know, now has a burgeoning film industry.
How? It’s no secret that Hollywood is a business and its preferred bait are tax credits. In 2004, New York put into law several generous tax incentives to lure productions to the state. It took a while, but starting with 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the number of feature films choosing Buffalo as a filming location has steadily increased. In the following five years, Marshall (2017); A Quiet Place Part II (2021); Nightmare Alley (2021); Bros, a Judd Apatow–produced feature planned for 2022; and most recently, an untitled film about Mother Cabrini have all come to Buffalo. With each production, the city's film crew reserves have grown accordingly; in the past seven years, local enrollment in the International Alliance for Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) has quintupled to nearly one hundred fifty active film workers, according to a representative for the union.
What all this means for me as a filmmaker is that 2020 was a great year to return home. After a six-year stint in Brooklyn, I’ve made an effort to reach out and reacquaint myself with Buffalo’s other filmmakers. My conversations with the community have taught me just how beneficial a vibrant film industry can be to the city as a whole. A Quiet Place Part II, for instance, brought a staggering fifteen million dollars into the region. This money funds local tradesmen to build sets and local film workers to serve as crew; it pays for hundreds of meals from local restaurants and up to ten thousand nights in local hotels. [1]
Aside from these economic benefits, major motion pictures provide essential experience for young adults who want to work in the film industry. This became all the more clear to me after I met with seniors enrolled in Buffalo State College’s Television and Film Arts major (TFA for short). I graduated from this program myself in 2012, and I can see how expanded opportunities have helped students. For one, they simply know more about the formalities of the production process. They know the jargon, chain of command, and professional equipment. All of this is irreplaceable knowledge best learned on real productions. From there, it can be transferred to jobs or even independent student projects like “Maelstrom,” a thirty-minute television pilot created by this year’s senior cohort.
For TFA students, the production of a pilot episode is a classic capstone project. In an eleven-week crucible, they undertake the whole production pipeline — from concept to completion — writing, planning, shooting, and editing the single project as a class. By this point, the students will have made multiple short films, written feature-length scripts, gone through internships, and even gotten work experience on one of the many major productions to recently pass through Buffalo.
Maelstrom, film still.
Despite already knowing this, the maturity and seriousness of the students behind “Maelstrom” made a lasting impression on me. After my discussion with the key creatives behind the pilot, all I could think was that they made my twenty-two-year-old self look like an idiot. Their markedly more professional attitude is, at least in part, the result of the major’s integration with the wider Buffalo film community. The students are very aware of this; Jake Jassie, the pilot’s executive producer, believes his experience working on several local shoots influenced his approach to producing. He aspired to apply those Hollywood “union rules” he learned on these shoots to the production of “Maelstrom.” This was a commitment he did not take lightly, furnishing the crew with union-style production reports and call sheets that even he admits were overkill. While most film students avoid spreadsheets, Jassie thought the extra step would provide organization and authenticity.
Tethering the student experience to reality is a major priority of TFA. Seniors even had to submit resumes and interview for their positions on the pilot; applications among the fourteen students for the top roles were highly competitive. “It’s really tough because everyone wants to be the director, everyone wants to be on the writing team,” says Jassie. While he downplayed the desirability of his own role as executive producer, Zachary Iqbal, the pilot’s director, defended Jassie, “not a lot of people envy the EP, and it’s because they know it’s a difficult job.” In a rare occurrence for TFA, one of their peers enthusiastically vied for the position of “crafty”: the crew member who provides snacks, drinks, and other “craft” services. With insights like these, students displayed a keen awareness that there are no small roles on a film set.
The setup of “Maelstrom” is simple: the world finds itself fallen into darkness. There’s no sun, there’s no moon, no natural light whatsoever. It’s a pithy, clean premise right at home among a contemporary blossoming of post-apocalyptic content. The story follows a group of marines as they cope with and unravel the novel situation. Plenty of thrilling set pieces fill the thirty-minute runtime. But this action-packed ambition is tempered by a timely and human theme. As head writer Sydney Baker-Hendryx explains, “Even in this terrible situation where the world is dark, and there are monsters, and people can just leave one another, we see these moments where these marines decide to keep their humanity, even though they don’t have to.” Baker-Hendryx went on to parallel the film’s apocalyptic scenario and the COVID-19 pandemic, reiterating that “humans are meant to stick together.”
It’s a theme befitting of the “City of Good Neighbors.” When I asked the “Maelstrom” crew about their experience filming in Buffalo, a resounding sentiment was that you can shoot a film just about anywhere in the city. Most business owners will welcome a production with open arms, not yet jaded by monetary incentives or the inconveniences that come with hosting a shoot. In cities like Los Angeles or New York, locations are often logistically and financially inaccessible. In a city of moderate size like Buffalo, however, it is relatively easy — and inexpensive — to close down multiple blocks without causing major disruptions. This makes Buffalo a great place for early-career artists to shoot feature films.
But will that always be the case? The very legislation that has enabled Buffalo’s recent economic development is at risk of being stymied or even eliminated. Since the program’s inception in 2004, it has cost the state 7.8 billion dollars, making the tax credits a frequent target of budget tightening.[2] In 2020, a Democratic-led congress reduced the credit amount from thirty to twenty-five percent and introduced minimum spend requirements.[3] It used to be the case that film productions with budgets as low as $10,000 could make use of tax credits. Now, in order to receive any break at all, films shot outside of New York City must spend at least $250,000 — a budget hardly within reach for most students and local filmmakers.
If I’m being honest, I left Buffalo in 2014 because I believed the city’s community of filmmakers wasn’t equipped to make feature films that would look at home on a big screen. The seasoned film crews of today came from humble origins. Too poor for fog machines, we coughed through clouds of baby powder to get those desired dramatic lighting effects. We were ragtag artists with tiny DSLR cameras strapped to homemade, duct-tape-and-PVC-pipe cranes. But now? Buffalo has hardened, union film crews wielding $40,000 cinema cameras.
I was wrong to bet against Buffalo, and I won’t make that mistake again. Looking into the eyes of the “Maelstrom” creative team, I’d bet there’s an indie film inside each of them that will strike it big if only given the chance. By prioritizing and nurturing local productions, the Buffalo film industry can begin to transition toward self-sufficiency. Successful series and films produced in Buffalo by Buffalonians would create reliable work for the city’s film personnel.
Poster Art: Darryle Jackson
When asked which stories Buffalonians are best positioned to tell, local filmmaker Kyle Mecca replied matter-of-factly, “It’s stories about the underdog. The best stories are about underdogs.” As an example, he pointed to the Buffalo Bills: a sports team that’s been through the ringer, making it to plenty of Super Bowls and yet never winning one. To the Bills’ credit, though, they keep on playing. And that’s exactly what Buffalo filmmakers need to do: keep playing. However they can make their films, they must. And those who can help filmmakers, whether providing funding, locations, or even just encouragement, they must. Because we are the underdog, often overlooked and underestimated but always journeying toward something greater, always staying in the game.
Joseph Wachowski is a filmmaker and screenwriter based in Buffalo, NY. He works as a freelance producer and story consultant in Buffalo and New York City. Currently, he is enrolled in the Writing for Film and Television MFA at Emerson College.
1 James Fink, “'A Quiet Place II' Awakens Akron,” Buffalo Business First, July 17, 2019, https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2019/07/17/a-quiet-place-ii-awakens-akron.html.
2 David Friedfel, “Live from New York, It's Excessive Tax Incentives!” Citizens Budget Commission blog, October 28, 2020, https://cbcny.org/research/live-new-york-its-excessive-tax-incentives.
3 Scott Macaulay, “New York State Film Tax Incentive Renewed but Trimmed; Many Lower-Budget NYC Independent Films No Longer Eligible: Filmmaker Magazine,” Filmmaker Magazine, April 10, 2020, https://filmmakermagazine.com/109543-new-york-state-film-tax-incentive-trimmed-many-lower-budget-independent-films-will-no-longer-be-eligible/#.YZ04ni08Igo.
