Harvey Weinstein Demands More Tax Subsidies, SOPA-Style Copyright Scheme

Harvey Weinstein, appearing at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium in interview with Ken Ziffren, Los Angeles’ newly appointed film czar, called for California to expand its production tax incentives.

“There’s no reason for us not to shoot here, except when you do the numbers here and when you do the numbers in New Orleans, it is much more attractive financially,” Weinstein said in the Q&A on Saturday.

He cited the example of “Southpaw,” directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, as project that could have shot in Los Angeles were it not for the generous tax incentives in the Big Easy.

But Weinstein said that Los Angeles and California “doesn’t even have to give the same discount” to remain competitive, noting the cost and hassle of having to locate actors and other talent in New Orleans is an added expense despite their generous tax incentives.

“Please, whatever you can go with the governor,” Weinstein said to Ziffren, a friend of California Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown has not said whether he would sign proposed legislation to expand the state’s incentive program.

Weinstein also addressed the controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s leaked script for “Hateful Eight” as indicative of the larger problem of piracy.

“It just so unnerves me that people think they can take a script…and put it on the Internet,” he said. “It is just crazy that we are not protecting ourselves as writers, producers and artists. It is just crazy that the public has some weird concept that they can just take this stuff.”

He said that the industry marketing machine should be able to come up with message of “what a lousy thing it is to do, how uncool it is” and “explain this to these kids who are doing this and proud of it.”

But he also said that there is a need to get Hollywood and Silicon Valley executives in a room to work out a solution. He said that Eric Schmidt and other leaders of Google were “reasonable” to a solution. He said that a problem is that it is up to content creators to constantly file takedown notices to user-generated sites and file sharing sites, a “constant vigilance” that puts the onus on copyright holders to spot piracy.

“We have got to sit down with these guys,” he said.