Missouri Film Industry Members:
As many of you know, our operations at the Missouri Film Office have been scaled back significantly over the past few years. With greatly reduced manpower and funding, our focus has been, at minimum, to continue providing the basic services that will attract and support motion picture and video production in Missouri.
As a consequence, however, other areas – marketing and project tracking, as two examples – have been forced to the sidelines. One of the areas that has suffered dramatically is communications. We’ve struggled to re-institute our e-newsletter, the Weekly-Wrap-Up, the weekly newsletter that gives the latest skinny on Missouri and film-related things. Its appearance has been sporadic, though our goal now is to make it a monthly piece, and it’s now in a snappy new format. The first edition appeared last month (October), and we hope to make it a monthly newsletter and have the second issue ready next week.
But there are more things happening than can be relayed in a newsletter, and I’ve been made aware of frustrations you or others have experienced with our lack of communication about those things. I apologize. Again, our focus has been trying to handle an increasing volume of business with decreasing resources, and that left little or no time for communicating. My mistake, when our resources were cut and I had to decide what stays and what goes, was to relegate this type of communication to the non-essential pile. Well, I’ve seen the light, and this will become the first of (I hope) frequent reports on the nuts and bolts of what we’re doing, projects, tax credits, web site changes, problem resolution, etc. These won’t be fancy, and may be brief, but at least, I hope, it will give you a better sense of what’s happening with your film office. So, to get started:
Most of you by now know that the Film Office moved from Columbia back to Jefferson City in July, although Andrea Sporcic (Film Office assistant director) and I remain University of Missouri employees. There were some obvious disruptions, such as office phone numbers changing. We retained our old email address and gained another one. One very important positive as a result of the move is that we now have an administrative assistant, Jenna Vaughan, who divides her time between the film office and another division. She began in September. It’s been a real boost, one I’m still getting accustomed to; it’s been 3 ½ years since the film office had an administrative assistant. We have a general phone line that goes directly to Jenna: 573-522-1288. Jenna has not had previous experience working with the film/video industry but she’s picking it up quickly. Feel free to give her a call, introduce yourself, and tell her a little about your role in the industry.
Our new contact info:
Missouri Film Office
301 W. High Street, #720
Jefferson City, MO 65101
Jenna direct: 573-522-1288
Jenna.vaughan@ded.mo.gov
Fax: 573-522-1567
Andrea direct: 573-751-6573
Andrea cell: 573-424-4431
sprocica@missouri.edu OR
andrea.sporcic@ded.mo.gov
Jerry direct: 573-522-4938
Jerry cell: 573-690-0791
jonesjerr@missouri.edu OR
jerry.jones@ded.mo.gov OR
mofilm@missouri.edu
“Last Will” started principal photography Monday (10/27) in KC. They have about three weeks to go in the KC metro area. Andrea Sporcic (Film Office assistant director), Jenna Vaughan (Film Office manager) and I visited the set in North KC on Wednesday. I chatted with several crew and everything seemed to be going well. The research division of the Missouri Department of Economic Development also visited the set with a video crew to get testimonials for a video production they’re doing to show the positive economic benefits of film production. They interviewed several local crew and actor Tom Berenger, who said very nice things about Missouri and the importance of our incentive program.
Tax Credit Applications: We have a couple right now that we’re processing. By that I mean we and the Department of Economic Development (DED) incentives division are reviewing submitted applications, looking at key points like budget and percentage of budget that is Missouri spend, proof of financing, start dates, and likelihood of actually starting production. We have two projects – both features in the $2-4 million range – that tell us they plan to submit apps and to start production by the end of the year. Another larger project indicates that they will submit an app in the next weeks for a project next year. Right now, we have authorized or awarded approximately $800,000 in tax credits this year, leaving about $3.7 still available. We have no commitments for next year’s $4.5 million.
By the way, I don’t want to be vague about projects in the works, but a lot of these are not ready for publication, so I don’t feel comfortable putting them in an email. However, if you have some questions, give me a call and I’ll probably be able to give you more info over the phone.
Production Guide: No way around it, this has been a fiasco. We knew last year that the production guide needed to be dramatically updated, particularly the database program, which was not printer friendly and time consuming for crew members and businesses submitting multiple listings. We went to a department at the University of Missouri to create a spiffy new production guide database. The only major drawback was that we would not be able to transfer data from the existing online guide to the new guide. Assuming the change would not take long, we thought the most expedient course would be to hold changes in listings and new listing submissions until the new guide was up and running. Long story short, that process dragged on for much longer – months, in fact – than we anticipated. In the meantime, listing requests were building and building. We’re to the point where the new guide should be operational very soon, but we’ve already decided we can wait. We’ve begun vetting the backlog of listings requests and they are being added to the current guide. The vetting process should be done in about another week. When the new guide is ready to go on line, we’ll have to do basic data entry to transfer all the info from the old format to the new. That will take a lot of time, but we had reached the point where we didn’t see any alternative. So, if you’ve been wondering about your new or revised listing, it should be showing up, if it hasn’t already, in the next week or so.
We also have started a complete overhaul/upgrade of our web site and all components. Here’s a brief overview I wrote for the latest quarterly report we provide to the Department of Economic Development:
Web Site
The computer science department at the University of Missouri school of engineering is providing major upgrades to our web site. First, a graduate student who is also an instructor is developing a photo database as his masters’ project. We have never had a photo database on our web site (it’s been cost-prohibitive), while many of our competitors do. This will be a major addition.
Second, the production guide database is being completely revamped to become more user-friendly. There has been a long transition period to accomplish this, but again the database will be vastly improved.
Third, the entire web site is being redesigned. More accurately, it’s being completely replaced by a new web program developed by Dale Musser, chair of the computer science department. It’s a proprietary system that has been purchased by other businesses but is being provided to us gratis. It will be administered by the servers in the computer science department. It will also allow us to combine the two separate systems of email we currently have – DED and University – into a single system: mofilm.org.
Our upcoming schedule: Andrea is meeting with a producer who will be traveling through Columbia this week, then she heads to St. Louis this weekend for the opening of the St. Louis International Film Festival. She’ll be meeting with many of the filmmakers. I’ll be in St. Louis for a MOMMA meeting, in Kansas City to visit the set of ‘Last Will,” then in Los Angeles this weekend to meet with studio producers about a project for 09 and to appear at a seminar conducted by the Producers Guild of America on Saturday. They’ve invited two state film offices – Missouri and I don’t know the other one yet – to work with separate line producers on a project and make presentations to about 150 producers in Burbank. We’ll discuss crew, incentives, locations, lodging – the whole nine yards and, I hope, drum up some business. Later this month – Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving – Andrea and I will be in Joplin where the BBC will be filming re-enactments for a documentary on Bonnie and Clyde.
That’s it for the moment. Hope this helps bring you up-to-date. Please feel free to forward this email and give us the email addresses of anyone who wants to receive these updates.
Jerry Jones
573-522-4938
573-690-0791 cell
You see these opening logos every time you go to the movies, but have you ever wondered who is the boy on the moon in the DreamWorks logo? Or which mountain inspired the Paramount logo? Or who was the Columbia Torch Lady? 
