Our capital city's enthusiastic adoption of the moniker Wellywood may have seemed a bit crass and derivative to the rest of the country - which managed to talk the city out of displaying its provincialism to visitors with the word writ large on the hills overlooking the airport - but
Editorial: Wellywood bonanza may be an illusion
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So how has the film industry managed to remain an exception to the fundamental rule of a market economy? The question is especially difficult to answer because the subsidies go to foreign, mostly American, film studios to lure their productions here. As Jackson says, "not a cent" of public money goes directly into his business. Without offering those incentives, he says, we would not have a film industry.
The lengths our governments have gone to to attract work for Wellywood were starkly illustrated when National changed industrial law to accommodate Warner Brothers, an act which has not endeared Labour to the incentives. Economic Development Minister David Parker tells us today the new Government is contemplating a cap on the amounts it will pay to bring productions here and it might alter National's "Hobbit law" to give actors more security.
It is hard to measure the value of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to New Zealand, because it has become part of our folklore as well as a tourist attraction.
Weta Workshop and associated entities are a source point of artistic and technological pride. But the economic benefits may be as illusory as everything they create.