EDITORIAL
By Samantha Anne Carrillo
New Mexico tracks who gets hired. It doesn’t track how much work there is.
In July 2024, the New Mexico Film Office reported that 82 percent of crew members hired on registered local productions from FY20 through FY24 were New Mexico residents. That impressive statistic comes from a multi-year economic impact study commissioned by the state Film Office and Economic Development Department. It’s the sort of number states love to publicize: high, comparable to other production hubs, and evidence the local-hire piece of New Mexico’s film incentive is working.
In FY26, key grip Tyler Gendron, who has a 25-year history working on New Mexico film sets, worked zero days.
Both of those numbers are real. They’re just measuring different things, and only one of them is doing the work of telling you whether someone like Gendron, and other local film workers, can pay their bills with film work.
The overarching film industry is still reeling from: the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, a streaming boom that inflated pandemic-era budgets and cooled fast, heightened economic competition, and accelerating corporate conglomeration.
That contradiction is worth sitting with the same week that Central New Mexico Community College opened its new 73-million-dollar Film and Digital Media Training Center, housed in the old boiler shop at the Albuquerque Rail Yards. The facility includes two sound stages and a Dolby-certified speaker system, and it will train students for animation, fabrication, hair and makeup, post-production, sewing, and visual effects work. Its first class of 260 students starts later this month.
This training center is a meaningful investment in the state’s creative workforce. It’s also a bet on a system that can’t tell the difference between an industry that’s healthy and one where the same, perpetually shrinking pool of workers gets counted as a success every time any of them get hired at all, much less with some regularity.
Film sits inside the Economic Development Department, not the Department of Cultural Affairs, which tells you what the state considers film to be: an industry to attract, not an art form to sustain. But moving the Film Office’s address wouldn’t fix what’s broken.
The address isn’t the problem; it’s the metrics and reporting requirements.
Annual spend headlines follow the same pattern as that 82 percent figure. FY26 production spend reached 327 million dollars, up roughly 4 million dollars over FY25’s 323 million dollars, the first increase in four years, and the state made sure everyone heard about it.
What that headline didn’t highlight: FY25’s total was already more than 500 million dollars below the FY22 peak of 855.4 million dollars, and a 4-million-dollar bump barely registers against a nosedive that size. A spend total can rise in a year when Gendron and others work zero days, because spend and employment aren’t the same measurement, and neither is crew composition. The state and its film office report the ones that make a better headline.
A fix that might matter is collecting and reporting data for a different kind of number. Composition tells the state who got hired. Volume would tell the state how much work existed to be hired for, how that work was distributed, how many production days New Mexico residents logged in a fiscal year, and how many registered crew members worked zero days—whether the same few hundred names are absorbing most of the work while thousands of others go without.
A volume number could rise or fall independent of the composition number entirely. New Mexico could hit 82 percent local hire and still fail its own workforce if the total pool of days worked keeps shrinking. Right now, no one seems to be asking that question.
Hawaii’s newly expanded film credit, signed into law this July, grants a 5 percent tax credit bonus to productions where local residents comprise at least 80 percent of the total cast and crew headcount—the most aggressive local-hire incentive in the country right now. New Mexico takes a different route to the same goal, capping subsidized out-of-state crew costs at 15 percent of the below-the-line wage budget and reducing the credit on those non-resident wages.
Both are composition fixes: they track who’s on a call sheet, not how many days that crew actually worked or how evenly the work was spread across the people they’re trying to protect. Hawaii hasn’t solved the volume problem either, leaving New Mexico with an opening to ask a more meaningful question.
Local filmmakers have noticed an aspect of this mismatch already. Dust Wave co-founder Alonso Indacochea created and has been pitching The Indie 50, a proposal to redirect roughly one percent of the state’s film tax credit toward resident filmmakers rather than outside productions. By his own accounting, it would produce more paid local crew days per public dollar than the existing credit does—a volume argument, not a composition one.
Indacochea has also said that agency staff he’s approached knew little, if anything, about local independent filmmakers. That’s not a personal or professional failing. It’s what happens when an agency reports the numbers it was designed to chase, outside investment and total spend, and has no obligation or inclination to report numbers that reveal whether the workforce is actually working.
That disconnect isn’t just about awareness. A review of the state’s open-access Sunshine Portal shows Film Office Director Steve Graham’s actual annual salary, $152,308—running well above the position’s own stated midpoint of $98,696—while most of New Mexico’s film industry workforce stacks non-film jobs to make ends meet.
New Mexico just spent 73 million dollars on a state-of-the-art facility to train more people into this system, and the system still evaluates itself based on two numbers, dollars spent and share of crew that’s local, neither of which asks whether trained film professionals have work.
That’s no argument to stop investing in the workforce, but it is a reason to stop trusting the metrics the state already prints as proof that its investment paid off.
The fix probably isn’t a change of address, and it definitely isn’t a new incentive to copy. It might be a change in reporting requirements: wherever the Film Office sits, whatever the incentive structure rewards, the state should have to report volume alongside spend and composition—how many production days New Mexico residents actually logged, and how that number moves year to year.
That’s a much more reasonable ask than relocating an agency, and it’s harder to shrug off in favor of cognitive dissonance-inducing, overtly rosy headlines. It would require an expansion of auditing scope, including staff funding. It’s also an ask that, when answered, would help New Mexico determine whether our latest, 73-million-dollar bet, and every dollar of incentive money and production buildout before and after, is actually reaching and supporting the people it’s supposed to.
