He and his wife, Lauren, moved three years ago with their two young daughters from Los Angeles to Newtown, where she had been the high school valedictorian. Their company, Chair 10 Productions, offers soup-to-nuts services for anyone making films, commercials and TV programs — using local Connecticut workers, hotels, caterers, crews and rentals as much as possible.

Oh yes, and they use the state’s lucrative digital media and motion picture tax credits to lure productions here, battling New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia and other states that have caught the Hollywood bug with its glitz and big spending.

“My job is to bring jobs here in this state, shoot the productions in the state,” Jonathan Black told me this week. His Chair 10 website makes the case, with a chart comparing states: “Connecticut’s Tax Credit Program can be more profitable and more competitive than New York and New Jersey,” the website carps.

Now Black, with a 300-member Connecticut Film and TV Alliance that he co-founded, is fighting a battle inside the state against powerful lawmakers who want to kill, or curtail, the 17-year-old tax credit program for productions and film infrastructure. Those opponents — including a rare alignment of the Democratic majority and Republican minority leaders in the state House of Representatives — say the program isn’t worth the money the state pours into the tax credits.

The legislature’s finance committee held a public hearing Wednesday on a bill to end the credits, which have paid out a colossal $1.7 billion in some 600 projects since 2007, including $112 million for 36 productions in the fiscal year that ended last June. That makes this group of three entertainment credits one of the largest economic development programs in the state.

And it’s been controversial from the start in large part because unlike, say, an insurance company or a helicopter-maker, the entertainment dream machine can work its magic in fits and starts — making the benefits hard to measure.

If we’re measuring tax dollars returned to the state for tax dollars spent, or in the case of credits, taxes forgone, the film and digital media credits have lost significant money in some years and made some in other years, according to the annual reports of the state Department of Economic and Community Development. Not a cash bounty for public coffers.

But for overall economic growth, which Black and others say generates tax dollars the state isn’t measuring, this credit has done its job, an outside study in 2022 claimed.

“For every $1 spent on the credits, $4.60 of value was created in the economy,” said the report by Olsberg-SPI, a London-based consultancy to the entertainment industry. The report covered $894 million in production credits and $110 million in infrastructure credits from 2012 to 2020.

Black and dozens of other supporters of the credits, many wearing T-shirts of the alliance, some from Hollywood, lined up to tell the legislature’s tax-writing finance committee to keep the program in place Wednesday.

“If it doesn’t make money,” Black said, “get rid of it. But it does make a lot of money and it makes a lot of sense.”

More than $1 billion for five companies

That’s not the view of state Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, who introduced the bill to eliminate the film and digital production credits. He says studies over the last 15 years in various states, including Connecticut, point to public subsidies either losing money for their states or creating only marginal benefits.

“Are we doing this for economic reasons or are we doing it for ego reasons? If we’re doing it for ego reasons, then…this program will stay in place,” Elliott told me Tuesday. “If we’re doing it for economic reasons then there’s a lot more we can do with this $100 million.”

Elliott aligns with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party alongside another opponent of the tax credits, the left-leaning Voices for Children, which favors pro-labor measures and more spending on social programs. Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, the House majority leader, is a cointroducer — as is Rep. Vin Candelora, R-North Branford, the House Republican leader.

The program offers transferable tax credits worth 30 percent of allowable expenses for productions over $1 million, smaller percentages for productions between $100,000 and $999,999.  The totals also include an infrastructure tax credit for productions building bricks-and-mortar facilities.

One question long debated is whether the state should support only those companies that have permanent operations in the state. Five corporations have accounted for two-thirds of all credits. They are Blue Sky, an animation company in Greenwich that exited after it was acquired by Disney, $268 million; ESPN in Bristol, $263 million; NBC Sports in Stamford, including Olympics coverage, $203 million; WWE in Stamford, now part of TKO Group Holdings, $194 million; and Stamford Media Center, the production house for daytime NBC shows, $181 million.

Those places alone have thousands of jobs. We know we’d lose them sooner or later if we stopped the spigot, not to mention the temporary jobs at productions Black and others bring in, along with the prestige of the industry.

‘It’s an exciting industry’

Does having a viable entertainment cluster make Connecticut more of a magnet for people to want to live here, especially young people? If it does, that matters more than the transactional value of a tax credit.

“Everybody thinks this is the Christmas state. Everybody wants to go spend Christmas in Mystic,” Black said, referring to Hallmark and other makers of seasonal movies. “You have to look at every aspect of what a film does in Connecticut.”

“It’s an exciting industry,” Elliott, who’s under 40 and knows a thing or two about pop culture, concedes. But what of it?

“What person graduates college and says, ‘Oh, I want to stay in Connecticut for the awesome film scene?'” Elliott said. “This film tax credit certainly serves as a shiny object but the vast majority of people don’t know about it, the vast majority of people don’t care about it and it ends up being money that we could spend on services.”

He added that in the last fiscal year, 28 or the 36 tax credits were sold through brokers to other companies, typically in the insurance business. “Do we want Connecticut to be subsidizing multinational conglomerates? Because that’s what we’re doing,” Elliott said.

The point is that the state is creating an incentive for the entertainment activity. Where the credit goes is a different question, all the more complex. Anyway, Black says fine, let’s turn the credit into a cash payout — something that’s not likely to happen, especially since he would not want the 30 percent reimbursement to decline.

More questions than answers

The last reel of this movie started Wednesday at the Capitol, with state Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury, and Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, presiding as co-chairs if the Finance Committee.

The state Department of Economic and Community Development, under a nominated Commissioner Daniel O’Keefe, who hasn’t been confirmed, isn’t likely to weigh in with a strong defense of the credits.  DECD said in its annual report the program should continue but a previous commissioner under Gov. Ned Lamont, David Lehman, was openly skeptical of it.

Horn is asking more questions than she is giving answers. Should the state cap total payouts like most or all the other states do? Should we focus on companies with facilities here? Should we back away now that the industry is in place and we need only to maintain the jobs that are here?

No way, Black says — the upside and the downside are both huge, thousands of jobs either way, based on the credits.

Horn suggested the debate will rage on beyond 2024.

“We are in a moment of big changes for the industry which makes me leery of making big changes in the program,” she told me Tuesday. “We’re not going to eliminate it…..This is an industry in Connecticut and I’m not ready to cut them off.”

But she added, “I am interested in taking a harder look at whether our tax expenditures are working as intended.”