Program making dreams come true

As an Alaska resident working in Hollywood, Calif., promoting a film I plan to make in Alaska this spring - quite possibly in Big Lake - the Film Tax Incentive Bill (Senate Bill 23) is a cause very close to my heart.

I graduated from South Anchorage High School in 2005 and attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where I earned a degree in screenwriting in 2009. After college, I moved to Los Angeles, where I have spent the last two years working on my debut feature film, "The Lower 48," a story about going to high school and being a teenager in Alaska.

SB 23 has played an immeasurable role in my story getting to the place it is today. Growing up in Alaska, I knew someday I would have to leave the home I loved to pursue my dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Film production in Alaska was nonexistent and there simply wasn't a way for me to achieve the career I wanted.

In New York City I was overwhelmed by a feeling I had never experienced before - possibility. For the first time in my life it felt like my dreams were not simply dreams, but actual goals that if I worked hard toward, I could achieve. That is what I have been doing ever since.

A few years ago I set out to tell the story I had always dreamed of telling: the story of growing up in Alaska. I co-wrote the screenplay with my best friend, another Alaskan attending NYU, and we began to show the script to everyone who would read it. No matter how many eyes passed over our script, we always received the same response - "It's a great story, but it's far too expensive to shoot a movie in Alaska."

Things continued this way until the script won an online competition and caught the eye of an independent producer in New York who agreed to take on the film. Why would someone now agree when others always declined? What was different? The Film Tax Incentive Bill had just passed. Suddenly, the impossible became possible and a lifelong dream became reality.

Last December, my producer, co-writer and I flew to Alaska to explore the locations we will use, including my home of Big Lake, and to reach out to the local professionals whose help we would need to actually make this thing happen. To be completely honest, we were not expecting much from these meetings, but I am thrilled to say we were wrong.

We found a whole community of professionals who had been working in film in Alaska any way they could for years, and because of the Film Tax Incentive Bill, they were finally being given an opportunity to use those skills in the way they'd always dreamed; to make art, to make culture, to make movies.

The Film Tax Incentive Bill is a wonderful thing.

Filmmaking technology has evolved to a place where anyone with a camera and a computer really can make a movie, but the Legislature's support is necessary for the economics to work. This program is still in its infancy and to cut it short before it was really given the time needed to grow would be a tragedy. The potential results are as vast as the great state of Alaska itself, and the immediate results are already on display in the passion, excitement and hard work of the Alaska filmmaking community. Possibility has arrived in The Last Frontier.

SB 23 means the possibilities can continue to build into the future and film production can always have a home in the state of Alaska; a place that truly has to be seen to be believed.

Ben Bolea won New York University's Venable Herndon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. He has three screenplays currently optioned and in development with various Los Angeles and New York-based producers. His debut feature, "The Lower 48," co-written and directed with fellow Alaskan Joe Hardesty, is securing finance to be shot in Alaska this year.