There actually was a time, shortly after Thomas Edison perfected the kinetoscope in 1890, when New Jersey was the epicenter of motion picture production in America; by the onset of World War One, however, southern California became the place where movies were made, and New Jersey’s role in film production was mostly forgotten. But in the last few years, New Jersey has quietly become a place where film production crews for movies like “A Complete Unknown”, “West Side Story”, “Oppenheimer” and “Mean Girls” are going to get the job done.
Jon Crowley is the executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission. He was ready for his close-up on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to say that the number of dollars spent by production crews indicates that the Garden State is an “in” place again in the film industry.
“Historically, New Jersey’s been like number seven, number eight, in terms of production hubs in the United States,” Crowley told host Larry Mendte. “Our goal on the Film Commission is to get us into that number three spot, and it’s happening, because in 2023 we had $592 million is what is called ‘qualified spend’. That’s the money that productions are spending when they’re here in New Jersey. … [For 2024 it was] $810 million in qualified spending. That’s 37 per cent that we’re up, and LA [is] down, New York [is] stagnant and recovering, Georgia [is] down, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico- down, down, down. Those are all of our major competitors.”
Much like in real estate, Crowley says three words imply why New Jersey is doing big business with the box office: location, location and location. “New Jersey geographically compacts states, but that huge variety of locations- that’s one of the biggest draws for production, as they say. ‘Well, we’ve got all these different things we need in our script’… and we’ve got all that. A huge amount of variety of locations: little towns. big cities, mountains with snow, oceans.”
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