Oklahoma Opens More Soundstages as State Draws More Big Productions

Publish date: 2024-07-21

For two decades, Rachel Cannon lived a life in Los Angeles that many would envy. She wasn’t an aspiring actress. She was a working one with a long list of sitcom appearances to her credit, including a recurring role as Deidre on “Fresh Off the Boat.” But in 2020, she decided to return to her native Oklahoma with the idea of traveling back and forth for work, using her home state as a hub. Then, plot twist on top of plot twist, she channeled her memorable role as Don Draper’s realtor in “Mad Men” and hit upon a crazy idea: Why not turn Oklahoma City’s convention center, which was being replaced by a new facility, into a full-service film and TV production complex?

“Selfishly, it was just so I can bring more work to Oklahoma, so I can act locally instead of having to travel for all of it,” says Cannon, who made the move with her husband, singer/songwriter Noah Engh, and their young son August.

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Cannon teamed with a fellow Oklahoma-to-Hollywood transplant, TV writer Matt Payne (“Vegas,” “Memphis Beat”), to form Prairie Surf Media, then went about lobbying the city council of Oklahoma City. She told them how content creation had grown 700% since 2013, but the number of soundstages had only increased by 15%, and if they turned the convention center into a studio, it could bring hundreds of jobs to the area with an annual average salary of $106,000.

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Cannon’s pitch worked. The city agreed to partner with her and Payne to transform the convention center’s 1.3 million square feet of space into a production facility with five soundstages ranging in size from 25,000 to 32,000 square feet, dubbed Prairie Surf Studios.

“The day that I got the keys, I actually welcomed a Lionsgate project, the Kurt Warner story ‘American Underdog,’ with Zack Levi,” says Cannon. But she knew that if the studio were to attract tenants on a long-term basis, the state needed to sweeten its production incentive, so “after they finished filming, we started doing all of the soundproofing while we were at the capitol lobbying to get the legislation put in place.”

As Cannon was making her stand in the capitol, shooting on Martin Scorsese’s $200 million adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book “Killers of the Flower Moon” was getting underway in the state, putting a spotlight on the film business and giving a real-world demonstration on its economic impact. In Pawhuska, which stands in for the town of Fairfax in the film, the production took a block of Kihekah Ave. in the city’s downtown area and turned the clock back to the 1920s, covering the asphalt road with dirt, augmenting the facades with old-fashioned signage and awnings, and erecting period-correct light poles and power lines. The film’s production designer, Jack Fisk, also built a re-creation of Fairfax’s old railroad depot and brought in a vintage locomotive. According to Mike McCartney, current director of the Pawhuska Chamber of Commerce, during the six months-plus the movie shot there, the town hit a record monthly high for sales tax revenue.

All of this activity is the fruit of the Film in Oklahoma Act, which was signed into law in May 2021, raising the annual cap on the incentive from $8 million to $30 million, and upping the cash rebate on in-state spend from a flat 15% to one with a base of 20% that can go as high as 30% with a combination of stackable uplifts. For instance, if 25% of a project is shot on location (i.e., not on a soundstage) in a county of less than 250,000 people, it gets a 3% uplift, and another 2% is tacked on if its shot on location in a town of less than 25,000 people. There are also uplifts for using a certified soundstage facility (5%), TV pilots (2%), a season of a series (5%) and multi-film deals (5%), defined as three or more movies shot in three years by the same production. Spend on Oklahoma resident labor gets the full 30% regardless of the uplifts.

In the two-plus years since, the Sooner State has hosted a wealth of productions, including Season 1 of the Paramount+ series “Tulsa King,” starring Sylvester Stallone, and Universal’s upcoming big-budget reboot “Twisters,” starring Kiernan Shipka and Glen Powell, both of which shot at Prairie Surf Studios, as well as the films “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid, and “One Day as a Lion,” starring Scott Caan and J.K. Simmons.

The incentive the state offers is not the only attraction. Oklahoma also has surprisingly diverse topography.

“We obviously have the small-town look, but producers who come here are very surprised that they can get water scenes and desert scenes here,” says Jennifer Stanton, director of the Oklahoma Film + Music Office. “We also have some pretty booming metropolises like Tulsa, which can mirror Philadelphia or New York.”

The state also boasts two regional cash rebates that can be stacked on top of the state incentive. Oklahoma City offers 5% to 10% back on qualified expenses for production and post-production, and the Cherokee Nation, which occupies 7,000 square miles in the northeastern part of the state, has a 20% cash rebate on wages for Native American below-the-line workers, with an additional 5% uplift for Native Americans who are members of the Cherokee Nation or reside within its borders, along 20% back on local spend.

The Cherokee Nation has established a gaggle of entities to service the burgeoning industry, including Cherokee Film Prods., Cherokee Film Institute and Cherokee Film Studios, whose 27,000-sq.-ft. Owasso Campus features a 9,000-sq.-ft. extended reality soundstage with an LED volume and mocap system. They recently broke ground on second soundstage complex, which will have 10,000 square feet of production space, along with 10,000 square feet dedicated to offices, flex space and a mill.

“We saw that there is a whole ecosystem to be formed here that could really help us with our entire mission, which is to increase representation while creating jobs and economic opportunities here in the Cherokee Nation,” says Jennifer Loren, senior director of Cherokee Film.

The economic impact production is already being felt in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the primary shooting location for FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” which wrapped its third and final season earlier this year.
“Every year, people learned and got promoted, and since then they’ve continued to work on shows,” says Sterlin Harjo, co-creator of “Reservation Dogs.” “There’s no better example than my brother Rocky, who started out working for the location department, and now he’s one of the leading location people in the state and is continuing to work on other films and commercials.”

For Valerie Parker, the industry provided more than a step up, it was a professional lifesaver. After years of making her living as a seamstress creating custom clothing for local theater and ballet productions, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and her work dried up overnight. Then she got a call from a friend in the business who offered her a job as a costume designer on a film.

“It thought I’ll do this one, and then I’ll just go back to like normal stuff,” recalls Harper, whose credits include the upcoming movies “Blunt” and “The Beldham.” “Then I fell in love with it and just kept getting offer after offer, so I’ve been nonstop busy since May of 2020.”

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