Will Pa. tax incentive make the cut?

It's nuclear winter on Washington Square.

Well, a postapocalyptic nightmare anyway, happening 10 floors above the historic park in the Curtis Center, the block-long building where the Saturday Evening Post's presses long ago rolled.

There, in a darkened editing suite at Shooters Post & Transfer and DIVE - the city's premier state-of-the-art postproduction and visual-effects facility - director John Hillcoat could be found late in August, turning foliage gray, adding toxic hues to water and sky, and tossing in a digitally rendered decapitated head or two. Working 12-hour days six and seven days a week, Hillcoat and his editor, Jon Gregory, were putting the finishing touches on The Road.

To be released in the fall by the Weinstein Co., the film stars Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son who survive a mysterious cataclysm and are on the run from packs of cannibals, wandering across a barren, burnt-out America.

Shot mainly in Western Pennsylvania last spring and summer, the $20 million production, based on the Cormac McCarthy best seller, is a high-profile release with Oscar possibilities. While it's not unusual for Hollywood crews to shoot in the Keystone State - especially since the Pennsylvania Film Tax Credit Law was passed in 2007 - it's less common for the directors to stick around to oversee the editing, the digital effects, and the sound and music recording. Los Angeles and New York, teeming with postproduction houses, are the places to go, right?

Not if Ray Carballada and Mark Forker have anything to say about it. Carballada is president of Shooters, and Forker, lured from Hollywood's top-tier visual-effects company Digital Domain, heads DIVE (an acronym for Digital Intermediate Visual Effects). At Digital Domain, Forker worked on The Lord of the Rings, Titanic, and Ron Howard's Cinderella Man. He moved here with his family in 2006.

Shooters/DIVE boasts a staff of 70 on two floors of minimalist suites, plus a cafe, a digital screening and finishing theater, recording studios, and daunting banks of digital storage systems. A sleek, impressive operation, Carballada and Forker's company is a model for 21st-century homegrown industry: In addition to offering postproduction facilities competitive with anything in Los Angeles, New York, or Toronto, the Shooters folks create content for a variety of media.

They produce the Food Network reality series Dinner: Impossible and provide programming and resources for ad agencies, political campaigns, cable and network television, and the Internet, and assist in the making of TV commercials, shows, and movies. The company - founded in New Jersey in 1981 by Dave West (who remains chief executive officer) and two partners - even produces mini-vids for cell phones.

"It's not just feature-film work," Carballada says. "Feature-film work is a very important part of it, but the industry as a whole is starting to explode because of this need for creative content. . . . And when the content is specific to our cultural experience, to pop culture, it's not like manufacturing a sneaker. You can't produce a television show in China that's aimed for the U.S. audience."

Last month, Forker was at Pennsylvania State University, interviewing seniors majoring in film, TV, and media. He and Carballada have hired from Drexel, Rider, and Temple Universities; the University of the Arts; and other area schools. Shooters/DIVE employs more than a hundred free-lancers and has invested millions in film transfer, editing, computer-generated imagery, graphic design, audio recording, and digital finishing equipment.

"We were looking, with the tax breaks, to work in Pennsylvania," Hillcoat, director of 2005's great Australian western, The Proposition, explained in August. "And Mark Forker, who is the main creative guy at DIVE, has had a huge, long history of visual effects. . . . And it was just by sheer luck that he happened to come here just at the time that we needed him."

Now those tax breaks, which have enabled Shooters/DIVE to expand its staff and increase revenue from $11 million in 2006 to $20 million last year, are threatened. A move in the Pennsylvania legislature to remove the $75 million incentive program from the state budget will be put to a vote in June.

Shooters/DIVE and other companies in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh that rely on film production-related revenue are lobbying hard to retain the incentives.

"The tax credit is working," Carballada says. "It's growing Pennsylvania companies and increasing employment opportunities."

This isn't money that simply goes back to Hollywood, he insists. When Hillcoat and his editing team moved to town, they rented apartments at the St. James across Washington Square. The director flew his wife and son in from their home in London. They went to museums, restaurants, the movies.

Sharon Pinkenson, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, says that for every $1 spent in film, TV, and video production in the area, an additional $1.09 in indirect expenditures occurs, resulting in an economic impact of $2.09.

Carballada offers a specific for-instance.

"At times we have 50 or 70 clients in here, working on projects. Not our staff, but clients," he explains. "And we traditionally buy our clients lunch when they're in the facility - we just do. And if you said, 'OK, well how much money did you spend on lunch?' people would never guess this. We spent $192,000 on lunch last year. On lunch!"

One of the key reasons that Forker moved here - he lives with his wife and kids in Doylestown - was to work more closely with filmmakers. In Hollywood, he and his Digital Domain teams were part of a huge pipeline supplying visual elements to studio mega-productions. There was a buzz of excitement about the projects, but not much interface with a film's creative team.

Here, Forker and DIVE have worked side by side with folks like Hillcoat and with smaller indie filmmakers such as Mitchell Lichtenstein (Teeth, Happy Tears) and actor-turned-director Mark Webber, who shot his inaugural film, Explicit Ills, in Philadelphia and did his postproduction here, too.

"Just everything about being here is better than there," Forker says. "When you work on these humongous films, you have almost no time with the director. . . . There are so many people and so many levels and so many stages and so many people giving opinions. It becomes much more of a management job."

"So I'm really happy with the fact that there are more small and medium-size films that I'm working on here. The Road was a perfect example."

For Philly native Webber, shooting the $1 million Explicit Ills here - and finishing it at Shooters/DIVE - was ideal.

"It's better than what I've seen in New York in terms of the equipment and the layout and the vibe, which is really critical when you're going to a place and spending so much time there," Webber says. "It has the Philadelphia spirit."

"I was incredibly impressed, I would definitely work there again. And I would recommend DIVE to any filmmaker who shoots their film in Philly and thinks about maybe doing post in Los Angeles or New York.

"And with the tax credits, assuming that you're making an independent film, it's really crucial to the life of your film. . . . It can really make or break a lot of these small productions, including my film.

"It would be a really awful, sad thing to see that dismantled."