Movies

LOS ANGELES – Already on the hook for billions to bail out Wall Street, taxpayers are also finding themselves stuck with a growing tab for state programs designed to increase local film production.

One of the most shocking bills has come due in Louisiana, where residents are financing a hefty share of Brad Pitt's next movie – $27,117,737, to be exact, which the producers will receive by cashing or selling off valuable tax credits.

Louisiana, one of the most assertive players in the subsidy game, wound up covering that outsize piece of the nearly $167 million budget of Pitt's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" – the state's biggest movie payout to date – when producers for Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. qualified the coming movie, a special-effects drama, under an incentive that has since been tightened. Separately, Louisiana's former film commissioner is set to be sentenced in January to as much as 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to inflate film budgets (though not that of "Button") and, hence, pay higher subsidies.

Michigan, its own budget sagging, is in the middle of a hot political fight over a generous 40 percent rebate on expenditures to filmmakers that was carried out, with little opposition, only last April. Producers of films for studios like Warner Bros. and the Weinstein Co. rushed to cash in, just as home-grown businesses were squeezed by a new business tax and surcharge. Rebellious legislators from both parties are now looking to put a cap on the state's annual film spending, which some have estimated could quickly hit $200 million a year.

In Rhode Island, meanwhile, the rules have toughened considerably. That happened after The Providence Journal reported in March that producers of a straight-to-DVD picture called "Hard Luck" – which starred Wesley Snipes and Cybill Shepherd – had picked up $2.65 million in state tax credits on a budget of $11 million, even though it had reported paying only $1.9 million of the total to Rhode Islanders.

By this year, about 40 states were offering significant subsidies. Virtually all of the programs use a state tax system to reimburse producers for money spent on movies or TV shows shot in the state.