Michigan

From New Mexico to Massachusetts, from Michigan to California, state and local governments are luring film-production business by passing increasingly competitive tax-incentive policies. Michigan recently joined the party in April 2008, with an unprecedented 42 percent return.

Over the course of two generations, Detroit has gone from a symbol of American industrial pro-wess to a shorthand term for the worst of American urban decay. The city’s hardest days are over, though—the days when commentators were calling Detroit a third-world city or, as Diane Sawyer once said, “the first urban domino to fall”—and there are real signs of recovery.