Senators hope to halt runaways

Hoping to stem the flow of runaway productions to Canada, particularly TV dramas and movies of the week, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators is planning to introduce a bill as early as Tuesday to give tax breaks to production companies that film in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. Under the proposed legislation, producers would be allowed a 25-percent wage tax credit for films that have labor costs of more than $200,000 and less than $10 million. “That creates the margin between being forced to go to a cheaper location and having the ability to choose to stay,” Jean M. Prewitt, president of the American Film Marketing Assn., told the newspaper. Senator Blanch Lambert Lincoln (D-AR), an author of the bill, commented that it was “about parity … about trying to keep the kinds of jobs we want to keep in this country.”