loan-out company to eliiminate employee isses?

[Randall_Oelerich]

Anybody know of a loan-out company for film production? something I read about today in a legal guide to filmmaking, so actors/crew become employees of the loan-out company that deals with the hiring and payroll issues, then the filmmaker just deals with the loan-out company.
ps: Am i not seeing a forum on dvxuser for the production/business end of filmmaking? When I peruse the forums list I don't see that.
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/

 

[msorrels]

I bookmarked these guys a long time ago, but I know nothing about them http://npientertainmentpayroll.com/
I'd love to hear any success stories (or failures) with using a paymaster/loan-out company for handling an indie production. My gut feeling was I couldn't afford to go that route but I'd love to hear some actual numbers.

 

[Randall_Oelerich]

I bookmarked these guys a long time ago, but I know nothing about them http://npientertainmentpayroll.com/
I'd love to hear any success stories (or failures) with using a paymaster/loan-out company for handling an indie production. My gut feeling was I couldn't afford to go that route but I'd love to hear some actual numbers.

You rock Matt, you the man of the hour!!! That is exactly what I was looking for, just to know it exists. Might be too cost prohibitive for microindie but definitely after that looks to be the solution, if not that company then another like it. relief. Thank you again!

 

[Barry_Green]

Bigger-name actors will have "loan-out companies", basically their own LLC that they work for. In terms of how you structure your deal, you hire their company (not the actor, but the company) and their company hires the actor and loans the actor's services to your company.

The difference is that the actor is considered an employee of their own loan-out company, and not an employee of yours. So you don't have to file unemployment and W-2 forms and everything; instead, the actor's loan-out company would have to do that. So it makes accounting a lot easier for the production company.

However, this is likely to be irrelevant for "micro-indie" producers, because micro-indies are unlikely to be able to hire the level of actors that have gotten to the point where it's prudent for those actors to go establishing their own loan-out corporations.


A payroll service is the type of thing msorrels linked to, and it's a different way of approaching the same problem. In effect, you contract with a payroll service, and the payroll service hires the actors as its own employees and loans them to you. The net effect is the same, but the difference is that you're going to have to pay the payroll company for their efforts (and, of course, if you're too small or have a poor reputation or whatever, the payroll service may choose not to do business with you at all). If you can possibly afford a payroll service, they're great things to have, in that they remove a lot of headaches and form-filing and liability from the producer's worry-list.

 

[Patryk_Rebisz]

If you have an LLC then you can loan yourselves out through your company HOWEVER some companies might not want to loan you out but simply employ you (because they were audited in the past and know that auditors have strict rules who can and cannot be loaned out).

If you do loan yourself out then your company should be able to proof to the hiring company that you have workers com - which is tricky becaue most brokers don't provide workers comps to company's owners.