D
eep beneath the streets of Over-the-Rhine sprawls a labyrinth of brick archways and dark tunnels where beer was aged and stored during the city’s brewery boom of the mid-1800s. It’s a historic underground world ripe for the curious visitor or adventurous local. And it has recently become a movie location attracting the likes of Hollywood.
“We created a night club in one of the sections, and we did our final chase for the film in another section,” says Darren Demetre, executive producer for The Blunderer, one of the latest movies to film in Cincinnati. “Not easy to work in,” he adds, “but dramatically very, very interesting.”
The Blunderer marked the third major motion picture to film in the Queen City in 2014, bringing Jessica Biel, Patrick Wilson and other top talent to town. Before them, Oscar winner Cate Blanchett graced downtown’s Fourth Street for the filming of Carol, directed by Oscar-nominated Todd Haynes, followed by Don Cheadle’s directorial debut Miles Ahead, in which Oscar-nominated Cheadle stars as Miles Davis. That’s arguably the most Hollywood-caliber talent Cincinnati has ever seen. Except of course for Cincinnati’s most-loved, locally bred award-winner: George Clooney.
When Clooney came to town in 2011 to star in and direct the political thriller The Ides of March, the chatter and headlines told the story of a city poised to become a dazzling Midwest movie town. The buzz garnered a satirical Academy Award nomination for “Most Overreaction to Movie Being Filmed in a City” from the Cincinnati-based satirical weekly DERF Magazine. Post-Clooney hype, the city hosted a couple of low-profile productions, including the Hallmark Channel holiday movie The Christmas Spirit starring Desperate Housewives’ Nicollette Sheridan, which filmed primarily in Lebanon, Ohio. But without the megawatt star power, the hot lights of Hollywood seemed to dim.
The moody lighting may have been familiar to those who remembered the earlier days of the local movie scene. During the late ’80s and early ’90s, the then-new Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Film Commission brought in movies as notable as Rain Main, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Other locally filmed movies from those decades include A Rage in Harlem (Forest Whitaker, Danny Glover) and Milk Money (Melanie Griffith, Ed Harris).
But by the late ’90s to early 2000s, places like Canada and New Zealand started offering Hollywood motion picture tax incentives. American studios and filmmakers became “runaways,” fleeing to other countries where the arts received government funding and were generally more supported.
As film production slowed down in the states, the Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky Film Commission searched for a new executive director. Enter Cincinnati-native Kristen Erwin Schlotman, who had been a commission employee after starting at the film commission as an intern. Schlotman was selected as the organization’s next director following a nationwide search.
“They hired me at a time when movies started chasing incentives,” Schlotman says. “I took this position when movies weren’t going to shoot in the U.S. anymore. And I’m thinking, ‘What did I just do?’ ”
Fortunately for Schlotman, the states eventually caught on and started offering competitive tax incentives for filmmakers, with Louisiana at the forefront in 2002. Seven years later, Ohio became one of the last states to pass motion picture tax incentive legislation.
The Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit today offers a refundable tax credit that amounts to 25 percent off in-state expenditures and non-resident wages, plus 35 percent off resident wages for a production spending more than $300,000 in the state.
Schlotman says Ohio’s late entrance into the incentive game allowed the commission to see what did and didn’t work in other states.
“It’s a very thoughtful, steady process where we don’t outgrow our own shoes too quickly,” she says.
The year after Ides of March, one of the first movies to film in Cincinnati since adopting the incentive, the state doubled the incentive cap to $20 million a year. Carol and Miles Ahead, both of which filmed last summer, received more than $6 million in tax credits, according to a study released in November from the University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center. The Blunderer has been approved for more than $1 million in tax credits, according to the Ohio Film Office.
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Though Schlotman and other local movie players agree that financial incentives are driving where movies are made, there’s more to being a Midwest movie town than coughing up dollars. To fully capitalize on the incentive, productions need to hire as much local crew and talent as possible. To do that, there needs to be as much local crew and talent as possible.
Jenn McLaren, a Michigan native and UC graduate, was one of more than 1,000 locals hired to work on Carol. McLaren had returned to Cincinnati in 2012 hoping to make the move from theater to feature film production. She met with Schlotman and soon found herself on the set of 2013’s The Christmas Spirit as a personal assistant to the art director before being promoted to set dresser.
“I remember moving here and hearing about smaller films like the Hallmark film and I thought, ‘Yeah, there might be some opportunity,’ ” McLaren says.
What she didn’t realize was just how much opportunity. Before she knew it, McLaren was working on back-to-back productions.
On Carol, she worked under Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, who has worked with director Martin Scorsese on more than five of his films. McLaren says the Cincinnati-based crew can learn from the seasoned professionals who come through town. Since 2013, she has worked on four feature films locally and moved up the ranks of the art department, acting as art department coordinator for The Blunderer.
McLaren is an example of how the crew base has grown, but Schlotman admits that she’d like to see some departments fleshed out with more local crew.
“I’m not sure we’re at the point that we can do two [films] at the same time, but it’s not to say we couldn’t do a big one and small non-union one because those are two different pools of people, union and non-union,” Schlotman says.
Cincinnati-based assistant director Jesse Nye, another UC graduate, says the crew base can grow and change but that more than one movie at a time isn’t necessary.
Nye grew up in the film business by working and living in New York City. He moved back to Cincinnati about 10 years ago and continues to work steadily as an assistant director, with credits on productions like The Kids Are All Right, Enough Said and HBO’s 2014 miniseries Olive Kitteridge, each of which was filmed outside of Ohio. Nye’s experience and network of filmmakers landed him on the sets of Carol and Miles Ahead in Cincinnati last summer. But Nye says he doesn’t rely on local work.
“Working here is bonus; it’s not really part of my expectation,” he says. “So I just work here and I travel to wherever the movies are, or the commercials.”
With competitive film tax credits in more than 40 states, the movies are all over the place. Though The Blunderer executive producer Darren Demetre, who lived and worked in L.A. for 20 years and is now based in Portland, Ore., considers Ohio’s incentive program competitive, other states offer more money.
“I think it’s a very strong competitor for Louisiana and Georgia,” he says. “The only downfall is that it has a cap, which Georgia and Louisiana don’t have. … So it’s still a bit of a crap shoot not knowing unless you really get in there early and get the funds dedicated to your film.”
Still, Demetre says The Blunderer was able to push through the incentive application relatively last minute after financing fell through and came back. By mid-November, after nearly two months of preproduction, The Blunderer was ready to start filming.
And just like with the two films before it, Cincinnati would become nearly unrecognizable as it was transformed into mid-20th century New York City.
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Beginning in the late ’80s and early ’90s with movies like A Rage in Harlem and Eight Men Out, Cincinnati has doubled as New York City thanks to its saturation of period architecture.
“Part of the beauty of the Cincinnati area is that it’s really embraced its history of Art Deco and the ’50s Modern movement with the architecture and the furniture that’s around,” Demetre says.
The Blunderer, which is set in 1960s New York, was produced by the same production company behind Carol, another New York period piece. That made Cincinnati an obvious choice. Demetre arrived in town before preproduction to scout the locations and get a feel for the city. Beyond period architecture, he thought Cincinnati had everything a production needed.
“It felt vibrant, a real downtown that was very active and sort of a bit of a resurgence of the arts and culture growing back in the city there,” Demetre says. “In the same breath, it still has a lot of poverty and a lot of down and out homes and areas, but that played in favor of what we were doing because we were looking to sell some seedier parts of New Jersey and some alleys and some chase scenes and SoHo [in Manhattan].”
For Rob Hofbauer, Cincinnati’s period architecture is more than an asset; it’s an unexpected opportunity. Hofbauer’s mid-20th century antique furniture gallery Leftcoast Modern Cincinnati, located on West Fourth Street where many of the recent movies filmed, supplied furniture and props to all three movies last year. For Miles Ahead, Hofbauer — who has been painting since he was 10 years old — was asked to paint two pieces in the style of Miles Davis to be used as props in the film.
“When we brought our business here [from Sarasota, Fla.] we certainly didn’t say, ‘Hey they’re filming movies based in New York in Cincinnati, we want to be there.’ It’s sort of chance,” Hofbauer says.
Though doubling as New York City may seem like a one-trick pony, Schlotman says it’s playing off of Cincinnati’s strengths.
“But I think people also need to see that we have vacant warehouses that could be sound stages, that we have more high schools than most areas and that we do have very diverse neighborhoods that still have sprawling land, and that’s something [productions] need,” she says.
Featuring those neighborhoods in Cincinnati-centric stories is something Todd Herzog would like to see. Herzog directs the undergraduate and graduate film certificate programs housed under UC’s English Department. While the programs focus on film history and theory rather than production, Herzog says that between the certificate students and electronic-media students in UC’s College-Conservatory of Music, he was able to help the film commission find interns for local productions.
Last fall, he established a Center for Film and Media Studies at UC to host special guests and organize screenings at Esquire Theatre. Herzog also says a B.A. program for film studies is in the early stages and expected to be approved this year.
“What I hope that we’re developing are those Cincinnati natives that are going to make their student film here in electronic media and it’s going to be set here,” he says. “And then eventually they’re going to make that feature film and they’re going to decide to come home and set it here and celebrate the uniqueness of Cincinnati.”
Cincinnati-native and currently L.A.-based filmmaker Andre Hyland may be on the verge of doing just that. Although Hyland moved to L.A. to realize his creative ambitions, it was a trip home that awarded him one of his first big successes.
Shot entirely around Cincinnati, Hyland’s seven-minute short film Funnel is about a man on a quest across town for a funnel after his car breaks down. The film made its way to the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and earned Hyland a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of “must-see Sundance successes.” Now Hyland hopes to one day return to Cincinnati to shoot what would be his first feature film.
“If I shot in Cincinnati it would be like it would just automatically make it more unique and it would also inform the characters a lot more,” he says. “I think when you’re there all the time sometimes you don’t realize how unique some of it looks until you step away.”
tt stern-enzi, CityBeat’s contributing film editor, says more local filmmakers telling Cincinnati stories would be great, but that production isn’t the only creative outlet for local movie lovers.
“We don’t need to have productions all the time — that’s not how I would define a movie town,” says stern-enzi, who also teaches film criticism at UC and leads an after-school film program called Watch Write Now at the Lighthouse Youth Crisis Center. “I’m working with high school students and showing them different kind of films that they wouldn’t ordinarily see, hopefully inspiring them to look into writing and production or just the critical thinking aspect of looking at the world.”
It’s a similar kind of thinking that drives Cincinnati World Cinema. Founded by Tim Swallow 13 years ago, CWC strives to bring movies to the community that entertain and inform. Swallow says CWC’s programming, which typically runs on a monthly basis, is centered on cultural diversity and the human condition.
On some occasions, CWC has premiered work from local filmmakers. Most of the events, like the upcoming screenings of Oscar-nominated short films and the Valentine’s Day screening of In the Mood for Love, are held at The Carnegie in Covington, Ky. It’s not uncommon for events to sell out. Swallow, who runs CWC full time and funds the programs with ticket sales, says it’s a labor of love. He wishes Cincinnati had more programs like CWC and more venues to host them.
“There are a limited number of places where you can see film in a non-commercial way,” he says. “If more venues, more people, more organizations were conduits, I think the quality of life [in Cincinnati] would improve dramatically.”
stern-enzi points out Cincinnati’s lack of a downtown movie theater or a dedicated film center for programming and events. When it comes to limited releases of independent, lower-budget movies, Cincinnati is often left out of the exhibition loop, but stern-enzi doesn’t think that means Cincinnatians aren’t interested.
“There are people who routinely go opening weekend to the new releases at Esquire and Mariemont,” he says. “I think if we had more screens and more opportunities to bring in even more of the independent films that are out there, I think audiences would check those out, too. They go to what comes here, but I don’t think that should limit our idea of what they are interested in.”
Swallow says local film production could change what people are interested in and what they see, a sort of “symbiotic relationship” between film culture and filmmaking. A local cast as an extra in a period movie — an increasingly common occurrence — may be more open to going to the theater to see a period movie, a win-win for all.
“I think it’s incredibly healthy and exciting to have all these various groups,” Schlotman says. “I think all of them give us an emphasis of having a healthy film culture here. I think we all do different things, but I think the more of us that do them the more people are talking about film production.”
Given the projects Schlotman says are already on her desk, it looks like people will be talking for awhile. It’s all part of the word-of-mouth buzz that began with Clooney’s The Ides of March and grew throughout 2014.
“I’ve never had so many calls and so much interest,” Schlotman says. “And I’ve also never had so many people take my meetings.”
Meanwhile, Demetre says he hopes to be back in town. He’s currently pitching Cincinnati as a location for another project, though he can’t give away details. Demetre says he has already spoken to the producer and director and that they’re budgeting for Cincinnati.
Whispers from local crew say as many as three or four movies are already looking to Cincinnati for 2015.
“It’s taken a lot of energy and a lot of pushing to get this industry to look at this city,” Schlotman says. “It’s been a long time coming.”
For updates on Cincinnati movie news, follow the GREATER CINCINNATI AND NORTHERN KENTUCKY FILM COMMISSION at filmcincinnati.com.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2015.