Movies

Barney the purple dinosaur is staying in North Texas.

Hit Entertainment, the distributor of Barney & Friends, decided to keep shooting the iconic children's show in Carrollton despite very strong overtures from Florida, a state that offers heftier film incentives, says Janis Burklund of the Dallas Film Commission.

"Florida was working hard to try to lure them away," she says. "It was a combination of a lot of pieces: their landlord, the city of Carrollton and everything we could throw at it to get them to stay. It came down to the wire."

Sheryl Leach, a former Dallas teacher, created Barney after noting her son's love of dinosaurs and started selling shows on video in 1987. It's been on PBS since 1992 and a financial boon to North Texas. Hit Entertainment of London, which also counts Bob the Builder in its stable, bought the show in 2001 for $275 million.

Barney also marks the latest battle to keep and attract film and television productions to Texas. While Fox's Prison Break is moving to Los Angeles based on creative choices rather than incentives, Ms. Burklund says incentives were still the focus at a recent locations expo in California.

"I can tell you the Michigan, New Mexico, Louisiana and Connecticut booths were very busy," she says of four states offering large incentives – Michigan up to a 42 percent refund of in-state expenditures. "It used to be you'd go to a location expo and people actually talked to you about locations and crew. Now they walk up and ask about your incentives."

The Texas Legislature finally joined the film incentive scramble last year, but with a paltry 5 percent, prospective projects are still walking away. Look for film insiders, including the Texas Motion Picture Alliance, to seek an increase to 15 percent in the 2009 legislative session. That figure would still lag behind the big four but should help draw attention back to Texas' solid film crews and diverse shooting locations.

"We do not have to give away really as much as other states, because we have a lot to offer," Ms. Burklund says. "People want to live here."

While approved in 2007, Texas' incentives program has been slow to gear up. Since the rules for it were officially adopted in March, 95 completed projects have applied for funds, including Prison Break and Austin-shot Friday Night Lights. The applying projects represent $110 million in spending in Texas with pending payouts of $6 million. The program was funded at $10 million a year for two years.

But no film projects have applied. Instead, the bulk of applicants, 72, are commercial shoots, with 44 shot in Dallas. Bob Hudgins, head of the Texas Film Commission, expects even more commercials to apply in the coming year, but scant big-screen productions.

"The reason we haven't used as much as we've had available is frankly because our 5 percent is not competitive with what other states are doing," Mr. Hudgins says. It's a situation he hopes to see remedied by the Legislature.

Ms. Burklund believes the incentives battle will die down in a few years, when some states realize they are giving away too much to attract productions.

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