Georgia speaks to Hollywood’s bottom line | www.myajc.com

LOS ANGELES — Georgia plays a zombie wasteland in the hit TV series “The Walking Dead.” Scenes shot in Atlanta will portray dystopian poverty and splendor this fall in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” A British movie giant that works on the James Bond and Harry Potter franchises is building a studio campus in Fayette County.

Yet at a Los Angeles convention to drum up movie business last month, Georgia’s spartan 10-by-10 booth gave little hint of the state’s rise to A-list stature. While Hawaii’s booth nearby looked ready for a full-blown Luau, Georgia’s featured a flat-screen scrolling clips and a logo befitting an airbrushed T-shirt.

The low-budget approach was apt. While industry folks love Atlanta’s airport, local talent base and pleasant but generic scenery, it’s something else that really gets their attention: Money.

“You shoot in Atlanta because it’s cheap,” filmmaker Peter Farrelly said during a Nerdist.com podcast recently when revealing plans to film the “Dumb and Dumber” sequel here later this summer.

A big reason for that is the gusher of Georgia tax credits that Hollywood has used, or more likely, sold, for cash — representing a hit of at least a $250 million to the state treasury from 2008 to 2011.

Georgia revamped and sweetened its tax credits in 2008, with the goal of becoming more competitive in a race among states to lure Hollywood out of Hollywood. It’s worked. Production spending here tripled to $880 million in fiscal 2012.

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