I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Get this. Texas Gov. Rick Perry likes what New Mexico has done to attract film productions in recent years.
Sort of.
Perry touts New Mexico’s aggressive campaign to show how interstate competition works as opposed to a strong central government in a 38-minute conversation with Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune that was published this week. His remarks to Smith come in the context of a discussion the two were having on the Tea Party.
Yep, Perry uses New Mexico’s aggressive campaign to lure films to advocate for a particular view of the U.S., one in which a federal government has a limited role and states work together at the same time that they compete.
Perry works his way to that point in a roundabout way.
“Texas has historically been a place …, we recruited films to be shot here,” Perry tells Smith about four and a half minutes into the recorded audio that is on the Tribune’s site.
Perry names film classics Giant and The Last Picture Show to prove his point.
“And then in the 90s we became a place that was relatively popular. Movies were leaving out of California,” Perry continues. “And then I want to say in the early 2000s both Louisiana and New Mexico put very good incentive packages and they started getting a lot of films.”
A high-profile example of New Mexico’s prowess in attracting films at Texas’ expense, Perry notes, was “No Country for Old Men,” That film, set in Texas but filmed in New Mexico, cleaned up at the 2007 Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay awards.
Perry goes on to recount that in “The summer of 08 Tommy Lee Jones had contacted our office” and working with powerful Texas legislators “we agreed were going to put together a package of incentives.”
“It didn’t have to be as rich as New Mexico’s,” Perry tells Smith. “Today we’re getting more films in the state of Texas because there were competing states that made us uncomfortable. That is the concept. It works.”
Perry juxtaposes that scenario with one where the federal government that wants to “be the epicenter of all thought and policy. We have very different ideas of this country.”
