So, is everybody still up for a state government giveaway to the film industry?

Even before the baseball stadium farce, and certainly after, there has been speculation a special legislative session would also be held, perhaps even sometime this summer, to bring major film studios to Nevada by giving the corporations lots of public money.

In its original version, the film bill, which was heard but not acted on during the regular session, would ladle orders of magnitude more public money to giant film corporations than has been bestowed in any other Nevada government giveaway, including Tesla and the football field. In fact, at nearly $5 billion, the film giveaway as originally envisioned would dwarf Tesla (both 1 and 2) and the football field and the baseball field – combined.

Last week, before the actors joined the Writers Guild of America in the strike against film industry employment practices, the entertainment industry publication Deadline reported that the studios: 

…have become determined to “break the WGA” as one studio exec blatantly put it…

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

One might argue that Nevada has more than enough “cold as ice” employers already, thank you, so there’s no need use public money to bribe some more to show up.

One of the complaints underlying the strike is that the film industry, like a lot of industries, has become more and more precarious for workers as the industry has become more and more reflective of the gig economy – short contracts, lower pay, no benefits.

In addition to better pay, benefits, and working conditions for the non-stars who make non-star money and comprise the vast majority of striking actors and writers, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are also asking that studios don’t use artificial intelligence to exploit them.

Among SAG-AFTRA’s AI concerns is that studios will “pay them for a half a day’s labor, and then use an individual’s likeness for any purpose forever without their consent.”

Striking workers are also demanding reforms to an already often paltry residuals system that has been upended by streaming.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the group of studios that are out to “break” striking film industry workers, is made up some of the largest players in the entertainment and film industry – Disney, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros Discovery…

…and Sony, the one company that was singled out to receive billions of dollars in public subsidies under the film tax credit legislation considered earlier this year.

The industry, including and maybe especially the large film corporations, is itself a bit precarious, as it transitions to and through streaming, the post-covid theater experience (or lack thereof) and other factors that have created a lot of uncertainty going forward.

The film tax credit idea didn’t make the cut this legislative session. If Nevada Democrats, who control both houses of the state legislature, would like to participate in a special session for the deliberate and sole purpose of diverting massive amounts of funding away from the state’s perpetually underfunded public services and giving it instead to these film corporations and the shareholders for whom they stand, well, that’s Democratic legislators’ call.

The film tax credits scheme is a horrible idea, but if Nevada elected officials are hell-bent on frittering away public money on Sony and other corporate studios, those officials can at least wait until legislators next meet for a regular session in 2025. And this time the bill could be introduced early in the session, providing ample time for review and questions and analysis, instead of plopping it out at the last-minute and assigning it faux urgency as was the case this year.

But calling a special legislative session to throw a giant giveaway at this industry, this year, would be an indefensible and obscene insult to working people everywhere and a godawful humiliating embarrassment to the state.

Or, as such wild-eyed policy performances are referred to in the vernacular, the Nevada way.

A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free and which you can subscribe to here.