Last winter, Mark met with students and faculty of Minnesota schools for the deaf. Their biggest complaint was that very few movie theaters are equipped to offer captioning. As a result, those teenagers and adults have very limited opportunities to do what their hearing friends regularly enjoy: see popular, first-run movies at convenient times and locations. Shortly after this meeting, Mark offered an amendment to the Senate “JOBS” Act (S.1637) which would greatly increase the number of movie theaters that provide captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing constituents.
Mark then met with Minnesota representatives of the motion picture and movie theater industries. They told him that the costs to buy and install suitable captioning systems usually far exceeded the additional revenues from increased attendance in those theaters. Some systems also require special coding of the film prints and other additional costs. The systems have to be serviced, repaired, and eventually upgraded or replaced. It was clear that, absent a major change in the cost-benefit equation, very few additional screens would become accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing Minnesotans.
Mark’s amendment would allow a 50 percent tax credit for the costs of purchasing, installing, maintaining, and upgrading captioning systems for hard-of-hearing patrons in commercial movie theaters; for the costs of producing or purchasing specially designed film prints for the systems; and for any other, directly connected expenses. Mark believes that this tax credit is necessary to offset the present financial disincentives to providing captioning.
NATIONAL NEED FOR AND IMPACT OF THE CAPTIONING TAX CREDIT PROVISION:
- Movies should be made more accessible to the 28 million deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans.
- Mark’s provision provides a tax credit to movie producers and theater owners for the costs incurred in making movies accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons. Specifically, these costs include expenses associated with the movie captioning.
- Currently, movies can be open- or closed-captioned. “Open” and “closed” refer to the ways in which the captioning is delivered.
- Open-captioning requires the text to be either burned onto the film by the studio or projected onto the screen at the movie theater.
- Closed-captioned text is delivered to an individual unit installed at each viewer’s seat.
Of the 35,774 screens in the U.S. today:
- 53 have a cinema subtitling system which projects captions onto the screen
- 235 show movies with captions
- 70 show movies with closed, “Rear Window Captioning”
- The provision covers all technology which would make movies in theaters accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing. It is not limited to one type of technology and has no expiration date, which allows for the inclusion of new technologies.
- With the advent of digital technology in the motion picture industry, the possibilities for more cost-effective captioning technology for the deaf and hard-of-hearing are on the horizon.
This amendment has the support of:
- National Association of the Deaf
- Coalition for Movie Captioning
- WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
- InSight Cinema, California
- DTS-CSS, Agoura Hills, California
- Motion Picture Association of America
- National Association of Theatre Owners
