Excitement is all around us: students talking in class, passersby chatting on the Diag, status updates and tweets — “George Clooney is filming a movie on campus!!!” (give or take a few exclamation marks).

The movie is “The Ides of March,” which Clooney has been shooting in University locales this week. A-list stars Ryan Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei and Paul Giamatti will be alongside Clooney’s own supernova star wattage.

For much of the University’s student body, it’s a familiar thrill. Thanks to the Michigan Film Tax Incentives passed in 2008, the campus was buzzing as Clive Owen, Adam Brody, Drew Barrymore, Hilary Swank and more of Hollywood’s finest shot movies in and around Ann Arbor over the past few years.

But with Republican Gov. Rick Synder’s recent proposal to significantly reduce the state’s film tax incentives, the days of Michigan movie shoots might be coming to an end. For most students, it means the last of texting friends at Michigan State University that they just saw David Schwimmer in the Law Quad. But for University alum and current students pursuing careers in Michigan’s film and television industries, Snyder's proposal has completely shattered their world, leaving them with pangs of anxiety about their future in the industry.

The Golden Age of Michigan Movies

The idea for the film tax incentives took root at the end of former Republican Gov. John Engler’s term in 2002, according to Jim Burnstein, screenwriting coordinator in the University’s Department of Screen Arts and Cultures. Burnstein was asked to join the Michigan Film Advisory Commission, which worked to boost film production in the state.

The council’s main goals were to increase jobs by increasing film production, building infrastructure to create a permanent film industry and, as Burnstein likes to call it, reversing the “brain drain” — or losing in-state residents to out-of-state jobs.

“We were trying to keep people who I teach and people who come out of our program and all the other talented students at U of M, MSU, Wayne State and all the other great schools,” Burnstein said. “Get them to stay home, because certainly, there wasn’t anything that was getting our creative class to stay home.”

Burnstein and the council then worked with former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm to finally pass the incentives in April 2008, offering a tax credit of up to 42 percent of a production’s expenditures. Film production in Michigan exploded almost immediately after. In 2007, three movies were shot in Michigan, spending about $2 million in production costs. In the nine months of 2008 that the incentive laws were in effect, 38 projects were filmed in Michigan, including Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” and Drew Barrymore’s “Whip It” — contributing to about $125 million in expenditures.

“For five years, I said, ‘If you build it, they will come’… well they came,” Burnstein said. “And they came in greater numbers than our projections.”

University alum Marc Zakalik couldn’t have finished his Screen Arts and Cultures degree at a better time. He graduated in April 2008, and about three days later, he got a call to work on one of the first movies to take advantage of the incentives — Miguel Arteta’s “Youth in Revolt” starring Michael Cera.

“I started off as an unpaid intern helping out Miguel,” Zakalik said. “But a lot of what I was doing was helping him break down the script and helping him rewrite it … which was cool because I studied screenwriting in college. It was an amazing experience, especially so soon after graduating — I was with him 13 to 14 hours a day for about three weeks straight.”

Two fellow graduates of the University’s SAC program and native Michiganders, Danny Mooney and Eddie Rubin, were able to start their own production company in Michigan because of the incentives.