To the Editor:

I write this letter as executive director of the Bergen County Film Commission and executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission.  I should say that the Bergen County Film Commission is a volunteer position and I am one of six members of this Commission created by the County Board of Chosen Freeholders late in 2007.  I have been Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission since I founded the commission in 2000 as a division of the Borough of Fort Lee's Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.

I am a fourth generation film industry employee as I worked in the film libraries of NBC News in Fort Lee and ABC News in Manhattan for 15 years.  My grandmother started in the film industry as an extra when she was a child in Fort Lee in the early 1900s when Fort Lee was the motion picture capital of America.  

 The recent article in The Record on Governor Jon Corzine’s visit to the Xanadu site (April 24)  is interesting.  The Governor speaks of "entertainment" at Xanadu while he has defunded the State Film Commission (New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission).  If no action is taken, the State Film Commission will cease to exist by June 30.

The yearly budget for this entity is $500,000 and they bring in revenue and jobs totaling $92 million annually.  I don't have to be a Goldman Sachs executive to figure out that the benefits outweigh the costs, at least according to the math I learned from the Sisters of Charity in Holy Trinity School in Fort Lee in the 1960s and 1970s.

 I think our Governor, with all due respect, lacks a knowledge of the history of his adopted state.  He should read a pamphlet written in New Jersey in 1776 by Thomas Paine entitled "The American Crisis" and receive some inspiration.  On top of that he should then read Paine's "Common Sense" because his plan to defund the State Film Commission lacks the common sense we need in our leadership.

 The Hollywood Reporter has picked up the story of the Governor's move to destroy our State Film Commission.  Thus he perpetuates this state as a joke since New Jersey, birthplace of the motion picture industry (Fort Lee) and the world's first movie studio (courtesy of Tom Edison), may lose the State Film Commission.  This is nothing less than a tragedy and nothing more than a gimmick.

Tom Meyers

Fort Lee Film Commission / Bergen County Film Commission