What happened next was an example of true Hollywood – or New York City – movie magic. Lucci says, “I was quoting on a job that George Clooney was going to be in. He plays an attorney and they try to kill him. And he’s driving a black Mercedes. Of course we welded the car back together, but it wouldn’t run because we had cut all those wires. We had one good running car and this one welded back together. It was the ‘double’ that we used to blow up in the movie. So Mercedes got a lot of exposure for the car in two good movies with two big stars. That ‘commercial’ would have cost Mercedes a couple of million dollars per movie.”
Lucci returns to his character lesson and says that most car companies don’t want their cars identified with “bad guys” so he takes great pains to camouflage the cars that they drive. “If it’s a ‘low-life’ character who has to drive a new car we’ll go out and buy it and then remove the signs from it. We know it’s a BMW, you know it’s a BMW, but it doesn’t say ‘BMW’ anymore.”
Lucci says that the film business is very profitable to the area in which it operates. Tax rebates are an important factor influencing a production company’s decision to shoot in a particular location. “In New York, it’s 30 percent. We just did a movie called ‘Men in Black 3’ last year. The budget was approximately $250 million. It wasn’t all in New York but I guarantee you they spent $100 million. New York gave them back $30 million. That’s a big chunk of money. I always ask the Mayor’s Office ‘how does this work out?’ Based on their formulas, for every dollar spent in New York it trickles down to between two and three tax dollars for that 30 percent expenditure. So for that $100 million spent, New York gets between $200 and $300 million tax dollars. They can prove it. It’s definitely keeping 20 families in my organization alive. I don’t think any of my guys have ever seen the inside of an unemployment office.” Lucci explains that most of his workers have been with him for 20-plus years, with the “new guy” approaching eight years on the job.
Lucci says that he often gets asked if he ever gets tired of the things he does to make cars stars. “Every day is a new challenge here. It’s a new job; it’s a new idea. That’s what keeps us going.”