Film monsters

It's a massive - no, make that monstrous - facility. On the site of an old air-strip at Ossendorf, near Cologne, where the cinema-minded observer can look at the remnants of a little two-storey control tower and imagine the Luftwaffe, or the Hindenberg, taking to the skies, some of Europe's largest and most technically advanced film studios are rising.

The largest of them, the Zeppelinhalle, is a new arenasized black box with 5,000 square metres of floor space and height that seems to rise forever; somewhere up there is a ceiling criss-crossed with walkways and lighting grids; it can accommodate seven sets simultaneously, each with its own high-tech control room. It's ready for anything, made for movie-making.

Just now there's a furniture exhibition moving into one of these enormities. A boxing match is due to be staged here later in the spring. One programme of a popular TV quiz show will stop here on its national tour. And, oh yes, there's an actual film booked in.

The north-west German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the heartland of Germany's gritty coal-and-steel belt, has embraced media production in a big way, as part of its efforts to restructure an economy based on declining traditional industries. In just over 30 years, for example, the workforce in the state's coalmines has declined from 680,000 to just 60,000; it will be half that number in another three years.

Media, meanwhile, now employ 250,000 people, and that number is growing by 13.5 per cent annually. But the statistics don't show that some parts of the industry are risky and insecure for both workers and entrepreneurs. It's not just the Coloneum, the Magic Media Company project described above, that has created vast high-tech facilities only to see them filled with conferences and exhibitions. There are simply too many studios all over the state of NRW, and elsewhere in Germany.

In fact, in order to lure a midbudget French-Belgian feature film about Louis XIV to the Coloneum, MMC has had to "coproduce" - i.e., effectively to donate its facilities in the hope that there might be some money above the line in the end. Le Roi Danse, directed by Gerard Corbiau, starts shooting in April. The state's Filmstiftung (film board) has chipped in 2 million euros (£1.57 million) of its own.

But how many elaborate period dramas will need to create their little Versailles in studios like this? A stuttering European film industry is more likely to find its voice by embracing more portable technology; in the post-Monty era, there is a huge appetite for the urban and post-industrial landscapes with which NRW, of course, abounds. (This is Germany's most densely populated state.) Run Lola Run was, in fact, shot here and supported by the state's film board. In 1998 there were over 1,500 shooting permits issued for the streets of Cologne.

The region seeks to benefit from another trend in film production: with digital technology, it's argued, it doesn't matter where a film is made. (Not perhaps good news for scenic-backdrop locations such as Ireland, where this year's highest-profile visitor, the Daniel Day-Lewis-produced Gone to Earth, sees Ireland impersonating Wales.)

Post-production facilities are also of considerable value: Irish producers Little Bird availed of NRW's support - to the tune of 900,000 euros (£708,810) - to do editing and sound work here, through a Dusseldorf-based partner, Tatfilm. The money comes with a small, standard string attached: the production must spend a carefully audited half again what it gets from NRW in the state, so there's no question of "take the money and run Lola run".

Even while German energies are increasingly and proudly concentrated on the new capital of Berlin, NRW is quite unashamedly looking west for the ideas and artists who will utilise what's here. France, Holland and Belgium are on the doorstep (the latter two bordering NRW); the English-speaking world is being love-bombed now.

"We have more money than creativity," says a matter of fact Dr Silke Zimmermann, spokeswoman for NRW's Filmstiftung. The comment finds the most unexpected confirmation when I walk around the Coloneum's single active TV set: Columbia Tristar's Nikola is a popular German hospital-based sitcom centring on a will-they-won't-they relationship between Nurse Nikola and the handsome doctor. It's written by two Englishmen, then translated for the cast. Maybe it's just another mark of globalisation, but surely you have to worry about a culture that can't even create its own formula sitcoms.

Or maybe you don't. From the media industry's point of view, a sitcom (however trashy or borrowed) is, after all, just another production. And, because it camps in the studios for months at a time, it's a particularly attractive one. In the battle to host media productions, the quality of the prize is not all that important - feel the width.

Largely overlooked in the hype about Hollywood's recent surge in sensibility and courage is the fact that California is, at the moment, losing this battle. It's not high-profile, high-prestige movies that are moving their locations and post-production to Canada, mainly, as well as Australia and elsewhere: it's much more likely to be advertisements and low-budget TV movies-of-the-week (nearly half of these are now shot outside the US).

The result: a mini-recession among craft and technical workers in Hollywood, where it is estimated that the equivalent of 60,000 full-time jobs have been lost in three years, a total loss to the local economy of $3 billion.

Zimmermann readily admits that NRW has its eye on some of that business. When The Irish Times visited the facilities in the state, there were also invited reporters present from the Wall Street Journal Europe, Screen International and the Hollywood Reporter. Our mission was unmistakable: spread the word about the infrastructure and subsidies on offer here.

The logic of global media production is unmistakable: the explosion of media outlets means there is a need for more and more "product" - from films to game shows to chat to "real TV" - but on tighter budgets and with shrinking concern with quality. Battling for the rights to manufacture that product is a glut of production facilities, each armed with a package of high technology and low costs.

The subsidies and tax credits pioneered by Ireland will remain vital (the US is itself preparing to go down this road), and there is bound to be downward pressure on labour costs as competition heats up. Perhaps it's great news for producers with the world at their feet; for audiences, for taxpayers and for people who actually make TV and movies, it's a different story.