Celia C. Peters is all too familiar with the challenges of making films on the East Coast — the fierce competition for resources and exposure, for example, and the prohibitive expenses.
Still, when the writer and director from Toledo took on a three-month job in Columbus five years ago at McGraw-Hill Education, she didn't expect to stay long.
The coasts, after all, are where anything important in film happens, right?
Not so, she discovered.
After accepting several contract extensions with McGraw-Hill, she developed an affinity for the city and became ingrained in the film community.
Central Ohio, it turns out, is home to a growing cadre of filmmakers who are putting the region on the map. Aided by a film tax credit that lures productions to town, multiple state-of-the-art production facilities and a pool of talented graduates from Ohio film schools, the area film industry is blossoming, many say.
“There’s just so many outlets now for original content, and that creates an opportunity for people in Columbus — people who want to come back to Columbus,” said John Daugherty, executive director of Film Columbus, which promotes the city as a filmmaking destination. “There are some really talented people here.”
Peters — who plans to shoot her first feature-length science-fiction film, "Godspeed," in Columbus late this year — has already made several short films, including the 2016 movie “Mission," which she edited at the Wexner Center for the Arts' film and video studio during a six-week residency.
“I’m very excited about making film in Columbus — it definitely feels like we’re at this pivotal point,” said Peters, who lives in Clintonville. "I think there's a very bright future."
Slowly, other Ohio natives are returning to the region after working in Los Angeles or New York.
"I wouldn’t say it’s happening wide-scale yet, but as the tax credit becomes more robust, I foresee a larger number of people wanting to move back," Daugherty said. "People who are from Ohio or who went to school in the area are often drawn back here. And many who are starting families don’t always want to do that in LA or New York or Atlanta."
The potential benefit of a growing film industry is hard to understate: Nationally, entertainment is a $704 billion industry — up from $504 billion in 2011 — that employs 1.9 million people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
On a local level, Bill Lafayette, owner of the Columbus-based economic-consulting firm Regionomics, conducted an economic-impact study of the central Ohio film industry and found that every dollar invested returns $1.91 into the economy.
Just three years ago, the film industry in Ohio employed 11,000-plus people and paid $442 million in wages, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
"We can create an atmosphere where film can live and thrive and become a really ingrained part of the community,” Daugherty said.
After studying screenwriting in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, Columbus native Chris W. Freeman spent years in Hollywood. All the while, though, he waited for an opportunity to move back to his hometown.
The creation in 2009 of the Ohio motion-picture tax credit — which provides a 30 percent tax credit on in-state costs for production cast and crew wages as well as goods and services purchased in Ohio on films spending a minimum of $300,000 in the state — was all the incentive he needed to return.
“As soon as they announced it, I was like, ‘OK, that’s the thing I’ve been waiting for,’” he said.
Freeman, who seven years ago co-founded Up And Away Productions with Sudhir Dubey, has produced nine feature films in Ohio.
“We’ve got people with the brains; we’ve got people committed to the entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. “Something really cool is going to come out of these communities.”
Jennifer Reeder lives in Chicago but regularly returns to Columbus, her hometown, to film projects and do post-production work at the Wexner Center's studio, which offers residencies to selected filmmakers.
What makes the region so appealing for filmmaking (other than the tax credit), she said, is the eclectic landscapes — from the wooded areas to the urban environments — throughout Ohio.
“It could look like upstate New York," she said. "It could look like it’s rural Ireland."
And although she's pleased to see Columbus' profile grow, she hopes the city and its filmmakers strive to maintain its somewhat-quaint identity.
“What I love about central Ohio is it isn’t Chicago, it isn’t New York, it isn’t LA," Reeder said. "It is so uniquely itself.”
The mission of Daugherty’s organization is to promote existing talent by attracting production crews to town that will hire locals or by helping filmmakers distribute their work. That way, when film students graduate from nearby programs at the Columbus College of Art & Design and Ohio State, Ohio and Bowling Green State universities, they won't need to flee for Los Angeles or New York for work.
That’s what motivated Len Hartman, who returned to the region after working in Hollywood, to help found the Ohio Film Group in 2015 with Gilbert Cloyd, the company’s CEO.
Located on Broad Street near CCAD, the company serves as a post-production facility where mostly small-budget projects can be edited after filming takes places.
Hartman — a Warren native and a graduate of
Ohio State — employs 10 people, many of whom graduated from area programs. He said he plans to hire 10 more people within the next year.
“They’re the best in the business,” said Hartman, a screenwriter. “We’re competing with established post-production companies in Los Angeles and New York all the time."
Many area filmmakers still work in the commercial sector to pay the bills, Daugherty said, but, thanks to Hartman and others, they’re finding more avenues to create content — and not just with feature-length films.
Elevate Pictures, for instance, was founded in 2008 to work primarily in advertising, but the company has since evolved into an all-purpose "visual storyteller," said co-founder and CEO Jeremy Hughes. That could be anything from a music video to a short film, Hughes said.
This year alone, his company partnered with CATCO to re-create scenes and sounds from the "Star Wars" universe for one of the theater troupe's plays. The video shot and edited by Elevate served as the set onstage during the performances.
More recently, Hughes’ team worked with BalletMet on a documentary series that goes behind the scenes of “The Nutcracker,” available now on the YouTube channel of teenage-girl clothing company Justice.
“That’s what’s fun is we get involved in all kinds of different things,” Hughes said. “If it feels right and there’s a creative challenge to it to tell a good story, then we’re into it.”
Others, too, are taking on unconventional challenges with their projects.
Sasha Levinson, Alexandre Lefebvre and Karmen Dann are all part of the Columbus-area team that made “Welcome to Grandville,” a potential TV pilot about a woman who returns to her hometown after her husband’s suicide. The pilot was filmed in Granville, in Licking County.
Levinson, of New York, initially came to Columbus to film a branding project with Nationwide Insurance about company culture. Once here, she met Lefebvre and together they founded Le Film Shop, a production company based in New York with “a strong anchor in Columbus,” she said.
When she visited Granville, she said, “the area really inspired me” and “I fell in love with the town first and wrote the film inspired by it.”
They’ve cut “Welcome to Grandville” into a short film that they hope to feature this summer on the festival circuit.
Some film advocates in town acknowledge there’s still work to do to establish Columbus as a Midwestern hub of moviemaking. For years, the city has lagged behind Cleveland, which lured “The Avengers,” and Cincinnati in attracting big-budget projects with bankable stars.
That’s beginning to change.
Stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta and Bruce Willis have all starred in films shot in central Ohio.
But if the goal is to make Columbus hospitable to both local filmmakers and out-of-state productions, it might take a restructuring of the tax credit, said Freeman, of Up And Away Productions.
He said he would like to see lawmakers earmark a portion of the tax credit specifically for Ohio-based filmmakers to ensure that big companies can’t reap all the benefits.
Daugherty agreed, adding that Film Columbus advocates expanding the credit — currently capped at $40 million — to a cap of $60 million or even $80 million.
Further, he wants Ohio to follow the lead of other states — including Georgia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania — that have a per-project cap, which prevents one film from benefiting from all the money.
On the horizon, Film Columbus is working with the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts to create a separate film fund that intends to provide grants to films that are made in Ohio or otherwise shine a positive light on the area. With further support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the fund aims to be up and running this year, targeting filmmakers working on projects that can take advantage of the tax credit.
“I can’t find anything around the country that’s been done like this,” Daugherty said. “I think it could be a real game-changer.”
Meanwhile, Hartman and others are laying the groundwork for the industry’s continued growth here.
The Ohio Film Group has partnered with CCAD to build a $1.75 million animation center housed directly behind his production facility. With the groundbreaking planned for the spring, the Cloyd Family Animation Center will house the animation program when it opens in the fall.
In addition to advanced technological features such as a virtual-reality drawing lab, the facility will be physically connected to the Film Group. The result will make it easier for the two entities to collaborate, and for interns to travel between class and work, said Charlotte Belland, chairwoman of CCAD’s animation program, which became a major in 2008.
“There’s a very strong talent pool in Columbus, so it’s just a matter of giving them that opportunity,” Hartman said. “We’re really trying to help prop up an industry that we feel is going to be beneficial to the state of Ohio.”
elagatta@dispatch.com
@EricLagatta