Mike Groner: Production insurance I would break down into three different parts. The first being the liability; that’s your commercial general liability, also known as public liability. That’s the bodily injury or property damage to the public. No equipment vendor is going to let you out the door without liability insurance. You’re not going to get a film permit without liability insurance, and a financier is not going to give you your drawdown without liability insurance because no one wants to be sued on your behalf.
The second and most common part is the property section. This will insure your props, set, wardrobe, production equipment, cameras, lighting, grip, as well as damage to vehicles being rented by the production whether they’re on camera or behind camera. Grip trucks, mobile studio units, trailers, etc. That’s all the physical damage to those types of property.
The third section is sort of the unknown part to most people who are out to buy film insurance and that’s first-party coverage or extra expense coverage. The big one there and the one we tend to see the largest claims on is cast insurance. This insures your key cast members or your director if they get sick, injured or die. It doesn’t cover workers compensation and it doesn’t protect the artists themselves; what it’s doing is protecting the production company for expenses that the company would incur if they had to do a reshoot or shut down production to wait for that artist or director to get better. Or, in severe cases where maybe someone dies, or they’re not going to get better quick enough for the production to get done, it would cover the cost to go back and reshoot with a new artist.
Some of the big examples of this would be Heath Ledger on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) or Paul Walker dying during one of the episodes of the Fast & Furious films and that’s actually the largest cast claim in history; upwards of $50 million.
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Content courtesy of the CineVic podcast
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