Last week, the Sundance Film Festival opened without a single feature from Seattle for the first time in eight years. On the same day, MovieMaker Magazine posted its annual list for the best cities to work "as a filmmaker," and for the first time in five years, Seattle was not on that list. Are we seeing smoke to an actual fire? Last week, a number of local filmmakers attributed Seattle's absence from Sundance to the early exhaustion of Washington’s film incentive fund (it's capped at $3.5 million). Some also felt it needed to be increased. But can the same be said about Seattle's drop from MovieMaker's list? Can it also be tied to the smallness or handling of the incentive, which, by the way, came into existence in 2007 after it was lobbied for by an industry group in 2006?

Douglas Horn, a local filmmaker and one of the film industry professionals who met with Mayor Murray last year to discuss the needs and future of the community, explained to me that he isn't concerned about the MovieMaker thing...

It’s a magazine list and it’s hardly based on hard data. I expect they need to mix things up sometimes.

But he is concerned about what happened (or didn't happen) at Sundance:

Not having even one film at Sundance is a surprise. I think that’s a direct result of the film incentive getting used up very early in the year. Filming incentives are crucial to attracting films and even to making it feasible for homegrown films to practicably shoot here. In 2014 the state hit its cap in the spring with Z Nation and Captain Fantastic. So any other indie films we may have otherwise attracted or generated filmed elsewhere. That’s not conjecture, there are several projects that had to leave. So that did a lot to keep Seattle films out of Sundance.

Horn believes, as do other filmmakers, that the size of the incentive should be increased (it is "the fifth smallest among incentive states"), and he also recommends that Seattle establish its own incentive program to compliment the one that the state provides. Horn actually proposed this to Mayor Murray during last year's meeting.

I was able to propose a small City of Seattle film incentive which would work in tandem with the state incentive to make Washington even more attractive to producers and make Seattle a preferred destination within the state. Shoreline has something similar already. I don’t know that there has been much tangible outcome yet on our newer proposals, but these things take time and the city has a lot of issues right now.

It sounds like a great idea, and the mayor may or may not have acted on it. (I'm still waiting for a reply to a number of questions I sent to the mayor's office yesterday.) What we know for now is that there is a consensus about the incentive's size (it's too small) and the distribution of the fund (more money should be allocated to films with smaller budgets—a point Horn emphasized). But changes in this program appear to be nowhere on the horizon. And what happened in 2014, I'm told by Amy Lillard, the executive director of Washington Filmworks, is likely to happen again in 2015:

The Board of Directors of Washington Filmworks votes on all applications submitted to the program and decisions are based upon the economic impact and jobs created for Washington workers. In 2014, the program had exhausted all $3.5 million by May, and many excellent and deserving projects (such as the Greens Are Gone) were forced to find production homes elsewhere. I expect the same will happen in 2015.