Happy New Year everyone! I hope the holidays were wonderful for all of you.  I'm thrilled to be serving as President of the St. Louis chapter of MCA this year and looking forward to bringing all of you some interesting and informative meetings.  We have a great line up of monthly meetings planned and we will be kicking it off with our January meeting on film tax credits.

Last year, our film community travelled from all over the state to Jefferson City to try to gather support in raising our Missouri tax credits from 4.5 million to 10 million.  Recently, surrounding states have become quite competitive with their tax credits and Missouri, even with its incredible topography, experienced and talented film production crews and local actors, we are losing out to other states due to larger tax credits.  We were not able to get the tax credit raised but fortunately we were able to keep the one we had.

Now a new study that is unfavorable to the idea of film tax credits is threatening to cut our current credits entirely.

As you all know, two very successful and critically acclaimed films were shot in Missouri last year, Up in the Air and Winter's Bone, bringing jobs for our local talent and money to our businesses.  Our legislature needs to understand how much our whole community will thrive with work brought by the incentives tax credits.  Money spent here stays in Missouri and brings jobs to our local people.  The study says these are part time jobs but all of you know in the business, when one project ends, a new project begins!  Missouri needs to be pro-active and competitive if we want to thrive and we all know that the talent is here, let's all work to keep it here and keep us all working.

I hope you all will join us for this very timely and important meeting- learn how you can utilize the tax credits for your film, find out what we need to do to keep the tax credit here and find ways to get involved with our local media community.

I look forward to serving you this year with meetings that you'll all want to attend with a variety of topics.  Happy New Year!

Vanessa Roman

MCA-i President, St. Louis Chapter

Gayle Gallagher,(award-winning film producer and co-founder of Pirate Media Group) is spearheading a project to make the Missouri Legislators aware of how much film production goes on in Missouri and how many people the pending repeal of the film tax credits would affect.  The project will be to put together a series of videos created by the production professionals of Missouri showcasing what we do, how we do it , and documenting how far-reaching our industry is and how many different jobs, individuals, and other industries benefit from film production in our state.  Gayle is already working with media professionals in other parts of the state on this project. If you are interested in being a part of this by donating your time, your location, production equipment, studio, etc, please contact Gayle (gayle@pirate-media.net) for more information. 

SAVE THE DATE, FEBRUARY 1, FOR LEGISLATIVE DAY IN JEFF CITY

With the attack by various reporters and politicians on the film tax credit, it's vital that you attend legislative day in Jeff City.  A state commission recommended to the governor that the film tax credit be eliminated.

Several reporters, most notably Dick Nicklaus from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, have written ill-informed articles attacking the film tax credit.

Film, video, and media professionals from all over the state  will be converging on the State Capitol to let legislators know exactly how they feelabout the film tax credit.

Last year's Legislative Day was a huge success with well over 100 of us showing up.  This year we  need a large show of force, sending lawmakers a  strong message about how important the industry  is to the state and how important the tax credit is to the industry.

Without a tax credit, we would be unlikely to have any feature films shot in Missouri.  It would be sad, because the state is getting rave reviews for some of the recent movies shot here, including Oscar contenders like "Up in the Air" and "Winter's Bone."

Please mark your calendars to join the MCA, IATSE, the Missouri Motion Media Association, and others at legislative day on February 1 in Jefferson City.