Markee Magazine. National trade. May 1996.
Kansas: Production Report
By Jennifer Willis
For years now, Kansas has been closely associated with storybook tornadoes and images of the dust bowl. But as production companies are discovering in greater numbers, there is more to Kansas than homesteads and little dogs named Toto.
“We’re swamped out of our minds!” exclaims Vickie Henley, director of the Kansas Film Commission. With the traditionally slow period of winter left behind, the area is moving full speed ahead into its busy season.
The Film Commission first began operations with the 1982 television movie “The Day After,” which Henley says launched production in Kansas with a real “big bang.” This spring alone has a CBS Movie of the Week starring Janine Turner and a location shoot for Tim Burton’s “Mars Attack” -- featuring the likes of Jack Nicholson and Pierce Brosnan -- coming to the region.
While the Commission’s main focus is attracting national film, commercial, and industrial productions, Henley says that they also work to accommodate regional and local projects.
Henley estimates that she spends upwards of fifty percent of her time out in the field, scouting for prospective productions. At any given time, she says, she will be building portfolios for about six projects. She emphasizes the need for excellent interviewing skills when talking to production personnel to determine needs, so that the Kansas Film Commission is able to deliver precisely what the production requires.
This diligence and quick footwork have definitely paid off. Henley cited a 1989 Michael Landon production which decided to come to the area after the Commission delivered its portfolio in only three days.
Henley lists four major factors determining why a site will be chosen for production -- the first, of course, being “location, location, location.” Another issue is budget, and as the Midwest offers a rather attractive economy, many lower budget productions choose Kansas over more expensive alternatives.
Also key is the strong cooperation between cities, counties, merchants, and residents in the state, all of whom have a “Yay! Let’s go!” attitude when it comes to welcoming production to Kansas, says Henley. And finally, local crew resources are of definite importance; the area has a great base of talented personnel, and Henley often describes the region as being “a crew-and-a-half deep.”
Wichita’s Channel 3 Productions is a full-service audio-visual production company, and production manager Mike Cooper boasts that there is “nothing that we say no to.” With Cornerstone -- a custom audio facility -- under the same roof, Channel 3 is able to offer one-stop shopping to its clients.
Having begun operation in 1989, the company enjoys a healthy increase in revenues every year. Although the winter season is typically a bit slower, Cooper says that business is outstanding, and that “we’re doing great!”
While in-house capabilities gravitate toward video, the company provides film services through subcontracting. Adding to impressive digital editing suites and top-of-the-line animation and graphics packages, Channel 3 Productions also provides complete remote services.
An upcoming agreement with Knowledge Communications will expand these capabilities even further. In the summer of this year, Knowledge -- a multimedia company specializing in both original and custom CD-ROM titles -- will move into the building with Channel 3 and Cornerstone, creating a cohesive full-service facility with great potential.
About seventy-five percent of Channel 3’s production falls is corporate video, with thirty-second commercial work and dubbing services making up the balance. Other production work includes recruitment videos for local colleges.
Cooper identifies editing as the biggest potential line of growth in the coming year. He says there has been a fair amount of “weeding out” of non-linear facilities in the past few years, and Channel 3’s current technology may be replaced by the AVID Fusion D-1 system in the fall, in addition to expansion within the company’s graphic capabilities.
Cooper says another area of expansion will be in attracting more regional clients. Although the company is mostly locally based, its clients include Rent-A-Center, Pizza Hut, Vulcan Chemical, and other national companies with an established regional presence. Channel 3 has also worked with area productions of C-SPAN.
But even when long-term client Pizza Hut relocated to Dallas, they continued to rely upon Channel 3 for their production needs. When asked what inspires such loyalty in its clients, Cooper responds simply that “we push our customer service here harder than anything else.”
Kansas City’s Blackberry Castle Productions, Inc. is a non-profit organization whose focus is to boost the media literacy of area children. Under the direction of Reggie Banks, Blackberry opened its doors on August 31, 1994 and hasn’t looked back.
In an effort to educate and involve local youth in production, Banks began work on a mini-pilot back in 1993. Entitled “The Really Young and the Very Restless” and shot on Beta SP, the pilot is an educational children’s soap opera. Characters run a toy corporation and appear on a news program. Banks structured the program to teach children how to budget and manage, to develop interpretive skills, and to teach both tolerance and teamwork. For Banks, such programming is an alternative means of education which complies with new non-violent FCC regulations.
Production ran from February through April of 1995, with cast and crew working mostly on weekends to accommodate children’s schedules. While cast members are all local youth, crew members are professionals of national and international renown, all of whom gave freely of their time and resources to help make this pilot happen.
Expected to run twenty-two minutes, “The Really Young and the Very Restless” is nearly complete. Banks hopes to develop the pilot into a nationally airing series, to provide a springboard for area children.
An upcoming Blackberry event is the KC Kids Fest, slated for August 22-25. Esther Luttrell at California’s Screenwriting Partners has arranged for celebrities to interact with local children as they explore different aspects of production, from screenwriting and production to casting and learning how to audition.
Banks, who describes himself as a “kind of Renaissance man,” says that the company name comes from the majestic color of the blackberry and the impenetrable fortress of a castle -- built on the solid foundation of children in the Heartland. The organization is truly a labor of love for banks and co-founder Denise Blessman. Blackberry is completely self-financed (both Banks and Blessman have careers outside of production) and is a part of United Way.
When asked how he got into the industry, William Gilbert of The Gilbert Group jokingly gives his stock answer: “I didn’t want to work for a living.” Holding an electrical engineering degree, Gilbert was looking for more of a challenge.
Now in its twenty-fourth year, The Gilbert Group is a lighting and grip supplier based in Kansas City and offers its clients everything from generators and grip trucks to a camera car and a crane.
While Gilbert focuses mainly on a five-state region encompassing Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, the company has supplied equipment to productions as far away as Florida and California and is no stranger to dealing with both East and West Coast production companies. “We’ve done it all,” says Gilbert.
Gilbert operates the company by himself with the help of six major freelancers, enabling him to supply entire grip crews when needed.
Gilbert estimates a pretty even split between local and out-of-town clients. 1995 brought such feature projects as Steven Spielberg’s “Twister” -- to be released in May -- and “Grumpier Old Men.” Other projects included “Harvest of Fire,” a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.
1996 is busy with commercial projects as well as more corporate work, and with a heavy influx of feature production in the Midwest (including a Tim Burton picture), Gilbert predicts that “1996 is going to be a rocket year.”
Gilbert also gives seminars and lectures at schools and various professional groups. His purpose is to share his experiences in the industry and to educate others about the broad applications of available equipment, to help ensure that productions will always have what is needed when it is needed out in the field.
Emphasizing the wealth of untapped resources in Kansas, Gilbert mentions Robert Altman -- on location with his project, “Kansas City” -- who was happily surprised by the depth of talent, supplies, and services. Gilbert explains that Kansas crews make more of what is available, and that such “gusto is not available in other areas.”
And with cooperation between the state film commissions in the region, such assets as multi-talented personnel are increased exponentially, further promoting the Midwest as a hot area of production.
The region’s well-known hospitality also contributes to a growing national reputation. A “film-friendly area,” Kansas residents want the productions to come. “We don’t have an ocean,” Gilbert explains, “but we’ve got a lot of other things.”
Gilbert is excited about the increased national attention, that the rest of the country and the world are finding out that “we are not a wasteland.” He stresses, however, that the area has yet to be fully discovered.