TV’s ‘Burn Notice’ brings boom to South Florida

From The Miami Herald:

The last time a customer steered this much work to Unique Producers Services, Phil Collins topped the pop charts and Don Johnson looked cool in a pastel blazer.

That was when the Opa-locka ”grip house” rented lights, dollies and just about every piece of production equipment it had to Miami Vice during the the hit show’s encampment in South Florida in the 1980s.

Nearly 20 years later, another show has claimed most of Unique’s inventory: Burn Notice, an irreverent spy thriller that’s the first scripted series since Vice to film a second season in South Florida.

”They’re our bread and butter right now,” said Rick Jones, who runs the company his father, J.B., started from a truck in 1975.

They bought their Opa-locka warehouse in 1986 on the heels of the Miami Vice windfall and now are investing heavily in new equipment with Burn Notice income.

The show rents three industrial generators, 250 lights and 25,000 feet of cable — enough gear to account for about half of Unique’s revenue for 2008. The company has ”confidence that it will continue to do well — that we can grow behind it,” Jones said.

His comments reflect the extra suspense for some South Florida companies as the spy thriller launches its second season 10 p.m. Thursday on the USA cable network.

Should the show — last year’s top new cable series — do well enough to secure a third season from USA and decide to remain in Miami, Burn Notice will be on its way to matching Miami Vice‘s five-season run in South Florida between 1984 and 1989.

By spending $25 million over two seasons, Burn Notice has already brought South Florida its biggest television budget since Vice.

And like Vice, the story about a droll, unemployed spy rebuilding his life in Miami has brought a rare stretch of steady employment to dozens of casting agents, grips, make-up artists, film technicians and other local crew members used to the feast-and-famine cycle of South Florida’s production industry.

”Sometimes I don’t work for a month,” said camera operator Al ”Tico” Pavoni, during a break filming a Burn Notice scene in Hollywood three weeks ago. The Miami Beach resident said he worked a total of 12 days after Burn Notice‘s first season wrapped last August, ending five months of steady filming.

”Looking forward to a paycheck each week is wonderful,” he said.

HELPING FOOT THE BILL

Florida taxpayers subsidize many of the paychecks on the Burn Notice set, putting the series at the center of a debate over how much government support Hollywood needs to film on location.

Between shooting its pilot in December 2006 and the expected wrap on the second season this October, Burn Notice is on track to collect about $4.2 million under Florida’s new incentive program, which refunds up to 22 percent of the money shows and movies spend in the state.

Without government dollars, Burn Notice executives insist former spook Michael Westen would have landed elsewhere after his superiors fired (or ”burned”) him.

A CLOSER LOOK

”You’ll notice CSI: Miami films interiors and exteriors in L.A.,” Jeff Freilich, a Burn Notice executive producer, said of the CBS crime show that’s set in Miami but mostly shot on the West Coast. “Sometimes you’ll see a hill or smog and know it’s not Miami.”

Creator Matt Nix originally wanted Burn Notice set in Newark, N.J., since Westen (played by Jeffrey Donovan) mostly broods about his post-spy circumstances. But USA balked at the idea, saying it wanted a ”blue skies” setting to match the more lighthearted feel of its other hits, Monk and Psych, said Gabriel Marano, head of scripted programming for Fox Television Studios, which produces Burn Notice for USA.

That made Miami a top candidate, but producers told state officials they couldn’t come without a sizable subsidy. ”The economics of the basic cable world pretty much mean you’ve got to go to a place with a rebate,” said Bob Lemchen, senior vice president of physical production for Fox Television.

Burn Notice expects to spend about $12.5 million in Florida this year filming the second season, as Westen grapples with his shattered career, clingy ex-girlfriend and other hassles awaiting him back home in Miami.

The show also brought 18-year-old Charlie Guanci III into the family business. The recent Sunset Senior High graduate works for his father, the show’s prop master, who’s charged with producing the bombs, sniper rifles and other spycraft used in Westen’s weekly adventures.

”This is going to be my career,” the young Guanci said on a break from a sweltering shoot at the Jimbo’s shanty compound on Virginia Key. He wore a ”Season 3 Vice Veterans” T-shirt, a souvenir from his father’s first job in the business: working under Charlie Guanci Sr., Vice‘s prop master.

”He’s walking the walk I walked,” Guanci Jr. said. “It takes me back to 22 years ago, when I was working with my dad. That was the second season I joined on that show. Sure enough, here we are.”

Along with reviving Miami’s appeal as a tourist destination, Vice gets credit for creating much of the production industry that now services Burn Notice.

TRAINING GROUND

”Virtually everyone who is at the top of the food chain today in the production industry perfected their craft on that show,” said Jeff Peel, Miami-Dade’s film coordinator. Added his Miami Beach counterpart, Graham Winick: “Miami Vice really made this industry.”

Since then, South Florida enjoyed boom times in the 1990s as a hub for fashion shoots and commercials, then saw a downturn after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Commercials remain the main revenue driver for the industry, local film offices said, though the surge in state subsidies saw a flurry of stars — Jim Carrey, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski — arrive for movie shoots in the past two years.

Even so, most recent productions — including CSI: Miami — spent a week or two in South Florida shooting outside scenes, then returned to their main filming locations. Even Marley & Me, the 20th Century Fox movie that made Coconut Grove its home this spring, can’t match the hiring offered by a series.

”Don’t forget Marley & Me lasted 12 weeks and it was gone,” Miami film coordinator Robert Parente said. “Burn Notice is here through October, and they got cranked up in the beginning of May.”

While most of the senior creative executives live in Los Angeles, Freilich estimates Burn Notice employs about 110 local people full-time, coordinating stunts, building sets, driving trucks, manning lights and other production tasks. Another dozen actors are cast in small roles each episode, he said.

Excluding the roughly 300 extras paid $100 a day per episode, that amounts to about $32,000 in subsidies per job — far more than the $8,000 companies can receive in state economic development money for each high-paying position they bring to Florida. Among the local Burn Notice employees whose salaries can be subsidized: former Cagney & Lacey star Sharon Gless, who now lives on Fisher Island and plays Westen’s manipulative mother.

JOB NEAR HOME

The show has kept Melanie Grefe close to home this summer, when job prospects for the veteran assistant director usually dry up. ”I have been asked to do two shows in Louisiana” this summer, she said while helping choreograph the action as that week’s guest star, Method Man, got kidnapped outside his pretend Miami recording studio in downtown Hollywood.

The shoot was a short drive from Grefe’s home. Without Burn Notice, ”I would be off away from my kid right now,” she said.

An analysis of figures from the Florida Film Commission shows that Burn Notice accounted for 25 cents of every dollar of in-state spending reported by television shows and movies shooting in South Florida since June 2006.

That’s just under the spending output from South Florida’s dominant entertainment product: telenovelas, which accounted for 26 cents for every spent dollar in that time frame. The figures do not cover productions that didn’t seek state subsidies.

Telemundo, the country’s second-largest producer of telenovelas behind Televisa, employs about 1,000 people at its Miami studio and films roughly 300 hours of programming a year. But the operation is mostly self sufficient and does not hire many of the freelance crew members — most of them union members — who work on the movies and television shows that come to South Florida, studio executives said.

MILLIONS OF VIEWERS

Burn Notice delivered strong ratings to USA last summer, averaging about 4 million viewers an episode. While that would be a so-so performance on a broadcast network — CSI: Miami brought in about 14 million viewers a week this year and June reruns drew about 8 million — the numbers were good enough to make Burn Notice a top 10 cable show and beat all other cable programs in its time slot, including the critical darling Mad Men.

Christopher Ganze hopes the ratings hold. The 27-year-old moved from Baltimore to break into the film business in South Florida, thanks to an uncle who works props in the industry. He landed a job as a production assistant on Burn Notice, where he spends days repeating orders he hears on his headset — ”Quiet for rehearsal!” — and helping herd extras to their marks.

”I’m learning a lot,” said the aspiring director, currently splitting time between an air mattress and a spare bed as he stays with friends in Fort Lauderdale and Miami. “If there’s work here, I’d love to stay here.”