On their last day of shooting on location in a lakeside cabin in Big Bear on Aug. 29, film producer Mike De Trana and his crew of about 30 were a little sad to be leaving the mountain behind.

“Big Bear is quiet, the people are nice, everywhere you point a camera looks amazing. It’s been great,” De Trana said.

De Trana and the writers, actors and camera operators who were with him, are something of an anomaly in Big Bear these days. The area once served as a backdrop for almost any Hollywood film that needed a forested location. “Gone with the Wind,” “Old Yeller” and “Heidi” are just a few films that have put Big Bear on the big screen. But filming here has dramatically declined in recent years.

“It has absolutely declined,” said Sheri Davis, who liaises with Hollywood filmmakers and Big Bear permit departments for Film Inland Empire. “In recent years there just weren’t the commercial and film shoots that have always been Big Bear’s bread and butter.”

Big Bear is not the only California location that’s seen a slowdown in lights, cameras and action. Film production statewide has tumbled 50 percent over 15 years, according to a report by Film LA. That is the reason Governor Jerry Brown accepted a deal with state legislators on Assembly Bill 1839 on Aug. 27. The bill, when final, will increase film tax credits in the state from $100 million to $330 million and will do away with some red tape for filmmakers. Lawmakers hope it will bring film production back to California—not just to Hollywood, but to places like Big Bear, too.

Davis, who has worked in the film industry around Big Bear for decades, said she first noticed a slump in business with the economic recession beginning in 2008. But when the economy started to pick back up, California’s film industry did not. Filmmakers had started looking to other states and countries to save money on taxes and permit costs, Davis explained.

Big Bear once had the appeal of offering mountain scenery just a few hours from Hollywood. But if filmmakers are looking for mountains these days, they may find tax incentives more inviting in Colorado or Canada—so inviting that they’re willing to travel farther.

And while sometimes Big Bear is too close to Hollywood, other times it’s not close enough. When filmmakers don’t want to travel, Big Bear can seem like too much of a drive.

“Big Bear will always have to compete with the Angeles National Forest. When they come out to Big Bear, they have the additional cost of traveling extra miles,” Davis said.

In 2007, nearly $6 million was spent on TV and film production in the Big Bear area. In 2013, the number was just shy of $2 million, Film Inland Empire estimates.

Filming in Big Bear has not disappeared completely though. The projects made here are just different than they once were. Alex Hamilton is a film location manager based in Big Bear. She said she has to take occasional projects down the hill to keep busy, but she does get some work in Big Bear, too.

“This year I’ve been nice and busy,” Hamilton said. “Most of the work here is car commercials and low budget movies.”

De Trana’s film, “House by the Lake,” falls into the latter category. He said he had originally wanted to shoot his low-budget independent horror film in Malibu, but the costs of shooting there were too high. For his production, Big Bear had advantages: cheap permits and a city government that wants to accommodate filmmakers.

“Everyone here has just gone out of their way to make things easy for us,” De Trana said. For young filmmakers like him, that’s appealing.

The city of Big Bear Lake definitely likes to have film productions in town, said Cheri Haggerty, director of intergovernmental and community relations for the city. City Council budgets about $20,000 annually toward contracting with Film Inland Empire to promote filming in the area. And Haggerty said businesses and residents don’t seem to mind.

“For the most part what we hear is a lot of support.” Haggerty said. “On occasion, when homeowners do have complaints about film crews in their neighborhoods, we’re quick to work with neighbors, and we try to find a balance. It usually works out for the best.”

Haggerty said the city is well aware of the economic impact that film crews bring with them. For example, De Trana and his crew of 30 stayed in Big Bear for 12 days. In that time, they paid for lodging, ate at restaurants and rented boats, in addition to the money they paid the city for filming permits.

That’s exactly the kind of impact Governor Brown and other supporters of AB 1839 hope to see statewide. In his official statement, Brown said he hoped the bill would put “thousands of Californians to work.”

AB 1839 has had some opponents. Critics pointed out that several politicians behind the bill rely on Hollywood campaign donations. Others were concerned about the bill’s price tag—backers had originally asked for a $400 million credit; $330 million was a compromise. And some analysts have called the bill’s projected economic impact into question. But in general, the bill has been portrayed as critical for keeping California competitive with other states and has received broad bipartisan support in the state legislature.

It isn’t officially signed into law yet, but locals in the film industry are already crossing their fingers it will do what it’s designed to do when it goes into effect in 2015.

“Film producers go where they can get the best deal,” Hamilton said. “Hopefully it will keep features in LA and that way Big Bear will get more business, too.”

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The incense was there. So was the tikka powder and the ceremonial grains of rice. So were the turbans, the saris, and the kurta pajamas. The wedding had all of the makings of a Hindu shaadi, but in one major way, it was far from traditional.

When Neil Bajpayee, a Pennsylvania-born Indian-American, made his vows in Sanskrit to Stephanie Young, a Californian raised in a non-religious family, he became the first member of his family to marry a non-Indian, non-Hindu.

Shukavak Dasa, the Hindu priest marrying the couple, had seen it all before.

Weddings between Indian-American Hindus and non-Hindus are rare. Pew Research reported  as many as 94 percent of Hindus in the U.S. were married to other Hindus in 2012. But even if interfaith Hindu weddings are uncommon now, Dasa sees them as a growing trend.

“In general Indian parents don’t like [interracial, interfaith marriages]; they would like their children to marry nice Indian boys and girls in their own community,” Dasa said, but, he added, “We have a lot of parents who are now saying, ‘I don’t really care, as long as my children are happy.”’

And that is when Dasa comes in. His specialty is interfaith Hindu weddings.

Dasa, 60, is white. He was raised in Canada in an Anglican family. He took an interest in Eastern religions as a teenager, then studied Sanskrit and Indian studies at the University of Toronto, where he earned a Ph.D. in Eastern theology. Along the way, he also became a devout practitioner of Hinduism. Then in the early ‘80s, he performed his first Hindu wedding.

“I had never even seen a Hindu wedding!” Dasa said, with a laugh.

Decades later, weddings have become Dasa’s main business. He is based in Riverside, where he is the head priest of Shri Lakshmi Narayan Temple. He performs many Hindu-to-Hindu weddings.

But word of mouth has made him a go-to officiant for Hindu mixed-religious weddings, not just in Southern California, but also worldwide. He has married couples around the U.S. and in places as far away as Russia and Hong Kong.

Dasa said that when he started out, there were few Hindu priests in California. But as South Asian communities have grown in the state, so has the demand for wedding officiants. And he has noticed Hindu priests finding niches.

“The Gujarati priest will work with the Gujarati community, the Punjabi priest will work with the Punjabi community, and so on like that,” Dasa said, “The typical scenario for me is, a young Hindu boy or girl goes off to college, falls in love with a Jewish, Christian or non-Hindu partner and wants to get married. ‘Oh, God, what can you do? Call the priest who can put one foot in both worlds.’”

Dasa, who is on faculty at the Claremont School of Theology, applies classroom-teaching skills while officiating weddings, taking time to explain Hindu customs. During the Bajpayee-Young wedding in Pasadena last May, he coached the bride’s parents through Sanskrit prayers and explained the symbolism behind the small flame, the flower garlands, and each part of the ceremony to the diverse crowd.

Bajpayee pointed out that many of his Hindu relatives had never understood what had been going on during their own weddings. “There’s just this norm in Hindu ceremonies that it’s not understandable sometimes,” he said, adding that his family members enjoyed Dasa’s informative approach to the ceremony.

Dasa is willing to customize ceremonies to fit the wishes of the couple. Bajpayee and Young, for example, asked for a shortened version of a traditional Hindu ceremony, which sometimes can last hours.

Dasa also worked with the couple to create a ceremony with more equal gender roles.

“One of the vows, literally if you translated it, was like, ‘As your wife I promise to cook you a hot meal every night,’” Young said, “I looked at it not with a lot of judgment, but I thought if I were to go through this, I wouldn’t want that.”

Dasa knows not every Hindu would agree with his willingness to occasionally break traditions. But he feels that adaptability is important for keeping millennia-old customs relevant.

Dasa, who said it took his own parents several years to feel comfortable with his conversion to Hinduism, understands some families’ hesitations about their children straying from the flock.

“I know for a fact that a Christian marrying a Hindu is not going to be as Christian and a Hindu is not going to be as Hindu, in general. So in some ways, we’re facilitating the watering down [of faith],” Dasa said. “But the other side of it is, we’re facilitating life.”

Dasa has a wife of nearly 40 years who is also a Hindu. Together, they have nine adult children, a few of whom are married. Some have chosen to have Hindu weddings, others have chosen blended or secular ceremonies. Though Dasa is a man of devout faith, he said he is happy to see his children, as well as the hundreds of young couples who he has married, choose their own spiritual paths.

Weddings, regardless of their religious style, Dasa said, “are all joyous.”

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