If You Can’t Beat Them . . .

. . . let them decamp to the suburbs where they can close off those people’s streets:

WHITE PLAINS — Martin Scorsese’s crime drama “The Departed” may be a paean to the city of Boston, but a number of scenes featuring Leonardo DiCaprio were shot at the county courthouse and library here. It was a surprisingly apt title, since 2007, the year “The Departed” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, was also the year that many film and television shoots departed — for Connecticut.

With a proud film history dating back almost a century, to D. W. Griffith’s creation of a 28-acre production lot in Mamaroneck, Westchester County is increasingly watching production companies be lured across the border to Connecticut, which now offers them a 30 percent tax credit, compared with New York State’s 10 percent.

Since the Connecticut tax credit took effect in July 2006, that state has gone from playing host to the occasional film shoot (remember “Mystic Pizza”?) to attracting 66 feature films, television shows and commercials with a collective $400 million in production costs, the majority of it in the Fairfield County suburbs of New York.

At the same time, similar suburbs across the border in Westchester County have seen their film shoots shrivel. In 2006, Westchester was the setting for scenes from 14 big-budget features, as well as numerous independent films; last year, two movies were partially shot here.

And Blue Sky Studios, the company behind “Horton Hears a Who” and “Ice Age,” recently announced that it would leave downtown White Plains for Greenwich, Conn., by the end of the year. The studio, a unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, with 300 employees, was drawn by generous digital-animation and infrastructure tax credits that Connecticut created two years ago.

“We just sat back and rested on our laurels,” said Iris Stevens, director of Westchester’s Film Office. “New York was one of the early states to create an incentive program, but then we went into cruise control and didn’t follow through. The film industry, quite frankly, has no loyalties. They’re going to go where they get the best deal, which makes perfect sense.”

Clearly caught off guard by Connecticut’s campaign for film business, state officials in New York are rushing to address the imbalance.

New York City is somewhat insulated from the changes, thanks to its iconic skyline and the fact that the city government gives production companies an additional 5 percent tax credit, but it, too, has seen a decline in film shoots. The state’s 10 percent film credit is dwarfed not only by Connecticut’s, but also by the 25 percent credit in Massachusetts and the 20 percent credit in New Jersey.

. . .

It did not take long for the effects of Connecticut’s new incentives to be felt across the border, said Pat Swinney Kaufman, executive director of the New York Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development. In the 12 months before the introduction of Connecticut’s tax credit, the New York State film office received 60 applications from feature films for the incentive, with a projected total expenditure of $966 million. In the 12 months after, there were 39 applications, with a total projected budget of $215 million.

“It’s a very dramatic drop,” Ms. Kaufman said.

I Don’t Care If You’re Filming, You’re In My Goddamn Way.