Transcript: The Trickery of Tariffs & Incentives

Rob Long on why some popular ideas don’t necessarily make financial sense

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I once was running a show that I didn’t create. I came to it, already up and running, already cast, already, as it turned out, way over budget. My job was to fix that problem without making everyone furious, and to fix the stories, and to make it funnier.

I failed at everything but the first job, and mostly what I did was some old-pro tricks like shooting an additional episode in bits and pieces during a regular production week — what we cheaters call a “wraparound” show, because it wraps itself around the regular shooting schedule.

I also planned to do another budget trick, which is to shoot a couple of shows with existing sets — no new construction required — and get some savings there. A wraparound or two, a bottle show or two — that’s what we call it when you just use what you have: a bottle show — but when I started planning the episodes, the studio finance guy called me to tell me that, actually, I needed to do some construction on every episode.

It was a requirement of the cash-back incentives that the state film board was giving the giant multinational company that owned the studio. In exchange for a whopping and truly immoral cash rebate on the cost of production — something a lot of states do to lure production to their areas, something a lot of countries do to lure production overseas — the studio agreed to build something every week. We kept four carpenters employed and it only cost the state taxpayers $1.7 million.