Hollywood East Has a Back Door, and It Runs Through South Jersey

Everybody talks about Fort Monmouth. Netflix drops $55 million on a few hundred acres up in Oceanport, Lionsgate plants a flag in Newark’s South Ward, and suddenly the whole state is “Hollywood East.” Fine. Great. But if you’ve been paying attention down here — and as a Woodbury guy, I always am — you know the more interesting story isn’t the megastudios up north. It’s the quiet infrastructure being built right in our backyard to make sure South Jersey gets a cut of the boom instead of just watching it drive past on the Parkway.

That infrastructure has a name: the South Jersey Film Office Cooperative. Camden and Gloucester counties launched it as a regional film office with a simple, un-glamorous, absolutely essential pitch — be the one-stop shop that makes shooting a movie down here easy. Permitting. Location scouting. Knowing which township clerk to call and which street can be closed for a car chase. The stuff that never makes the trailer but decides whether a production picks your town or the next one.

Free, and pointed straight at our region

Here’s the part that should make every mayor from Collingswood to Glassboro sit up: the Cooperative offers that assistance for free. Productions working within the counties get people who actually understand the filming process and know these towns block by block — and they don’t get a bill for it. And the reach has grown. What started as a Camden-Gloucester handshake now operates in coordination with the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission across the whole southern tier — Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem. The Cooperative’s website has become a real front door for filmmakers: an interactive map of the most-requested locations, municipal contacts, vendor listings.

Now layer the money on top

New Jersey’s film and television tax credit reimburses up to 35% of qualified production costs down here in South Jersey, versus 30% for the rest of the state. Read that again, because it’s the whole ballgame. The state is literally paying producers a premium to work south of the credit’s 30-mile New York City radius. That’s not an accident. That’s Trenton deciding that if it’s going to hand out incentives, it wants some of those cameras rolling in the parts of the state that have spent decades being overlooked by the entertainment economy.

Just two county governments quietly building the plumbing — so that when a location manager is deciding between a soundstage in Georgia and a real, lived-in Camden County main street, we’re actually in the conversation.Vinny Vinci

Will it turn Woodbury into Burbank? No. And thank God. What it can do is put South Jersey small businesses, tradespeople, caterers and locations on the industry’s map, and keep some of that Hollywood East money on this side of the Delaware. The cameras are coming to New Jersey either way. South Jersey just decided not to let them all stop up north.

Based on reporting from PhillyVoice, ROI-NJ, NJBIZ, Camden County, and the South Jersey Film Office.