SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier
This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that takes very seriously the notion that it’s really a country.
Texas’s hold on our imagination is evident in how many great films and TV series are set there (whether they’re actually filmed there or not—we’ll get to that in a second), from the classics like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), George Stevens’ Giant (also 1956), Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Tobe Hooper’s genre-defying Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and stands as one of the most unnerving, subtly brilliant horror movies ever made. Then there’s the more modern Texas classics, like Richard Linklater‘s Slacker (1990), which sent a camera rambling through Austin on a seemingly aimless but entirely moving snapshot of the city, and his deathless Dazed and Confused (1993), which for many people defines not only the cinematic era in which it came out, but the 1970s and the universally fraught experience of going to high school, whether you’re from Eastport, Maine or Anchorage, Alaska. Speaking of high school, Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights (2004) is another beloved piece of Texas cinematic history. Meanwhile, the Coen Brothers’ instant classic No Country for Old Men (2007) has nothing to do with high school but is every bit as brutal.
Now, Texas is on the cusp of turning its natural appeal and rich cinematic history into something even more profound—a sustainable hub for the film and television industry. This would allow Texas to truly flex its creative muscles and become a powerhouse in the industry, the way other states (Georgia comes to mind) with competitive tax incentives have. The economic impact large-scale productions have on local communities, not just big cities like Austin, Houston, and Dallas, but smaller towns and rural communities, is very real. Take just one of Taylor Sheridan’s recent shows, Lioness season 2, which generated $133 million and 2,200 local jobs in 73 days of filming, $30 million of which was spent with local Texas businesses—restaurants, caterers, rental cars, hotels, lumber, construction, dry cleaners and more. Turning Texas into a proper entertainment hub would mean that when Sheridan, the most prolific Texan working today, writes another film like his “love poem” (his words) to his home state, the 2016 film Hell or High Water (directed by David Mackenzie), it wouldn’t have to be shot in New Mexico.
This was the subject of the panel the Motion Picture Association hosted at SXSW this year—how to harness the considerable enthusiasm for giving Texas stories a Texas backdrop, as stars like Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Renée Zellweger, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dennis Quaid have all recently implored. Our panelists were Adriana Cruz, the Executive Director of the Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office, Paul Jensen, a Naval Academy graduate and Navy pilot who has carved out a successful career in the industry as both an advocate (he was the Executive Director of the Texas Media Production Alliance) and filmmaker himself, (his doc, Love Ya, Bum! premiered at SXSW this year), and Jeremy Latcham, the producer of big recent hits like Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and the former Senior Vice President of Production and Development at Marvel, where he helped create the Marvel Cinematic Universe, producing early hits like Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Avengers, and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Cruz, who knows the raw numbers of how film and television production impacts communities possibly better than anyone else in the state, comes at the issue from a data-driven, legislative implementation standpoint, and has seen firsthand what a production can really do.
“I think there’s a great interest right now in the state legislature for the moving image industry…part of it is an understanding that production can take place in a very diverse range of cities and communities,” she says. “It’s not just Dallas and Austin that benefit, but Waxahachie, and deep East Texas, and West Texas, and all of the different communities in between.”
“I think there’s something very unique and iconic to the Texas personality,” says Jensen, a native Philadelphian who moved to the state years ago. “It’s a can-do personality. This is the type of place where people roll up their sleeves and say, ‘I’m going to make this happen.’ That’s intoxicating. As a filmmaker and someone who wants to tell stories, this is the place to do it. If we’re at a place where there’s a level playing field, Texas will absolutely win because of that spirit.”
For Latcham, an Oklahoma native who has worked on some of the biggest films of the last two decades, Texas was where he wanted to be. (It also helped that his wife, a Texan from Houston, went to the University of Texas.)
“I was feeling a disconnect between the broader Hollywood ecosystem and what the audience was after,” Latcham says. “I felt a real need for another cultural hub in the country, and Texas is the obvious spot for that. It has the most diversity in terms of cities and landscapes, and it feels like there’s stories to be told about Texas and from Texas. And so it was, ‘how do I move here, and how do I find a way to empower that?’ My goal is to be able to make movies here.”
Before she was appointed to her current position, Cruz was working in economic development at the Greater San Marcos Partnership, in Hays and Caldwell County, both between Austin and San Antonio. San Marcos, Cruz points out, is where Richard Linklater’s Boyhood filmed—which was shot, incredibly, over the course of 12 years between 2002 and 2013—and it was in Lockhart where HBO’s The Leftovers was shot.
“The economic impact of these productions in these smaller communities is really, really compelling,” Cruz says. “We did an economic impact analysis for our two county footprints that we provided to our state legislators. A production coming to a small, rural community, like The Leftovers bought all the lumber in that lumberyard in 40 days. They made their year in one, 40-day production. It’s the caterers, the restaurants, the lumber yard, the carpenters, and the local economy that benefits when a production comes into town.”
“This is an industry that’s motivated by incentives,” Jensen adds. “We don’t get to practice economics in a laboratory, this is the real world, and if we want this industry and the benefits of this industry, there’s 39 other domestic programs that we’re competing against…these are high-paying jobs that are able to essentially be floating factories that inject into 180 film-friendly communities all across the state.
The numbers don’t lie. The Texas Moving Image Incentive Program (TMIIIP) is a reimbursement for the funds spent in the state, and Cruz has the figures to back up why advocates for the industry, like Jensen and Latcham, have a great case to make.
“For every dollar of grant, it results in $4.69 spent locally within the state of Texas,” she says. “That’s a really great return on investment from an economic perspective. We’re seeing these productions that are being filmed in different, diverse parts of the state, whether that’s Landman (recently renewed for a second season) in West Texas, Bass Reeves in East Texas, The Chosen up in North Texas…and I’m just going through TV series.”
Cruz has had key allies in the state government, including Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and Senate Finance Chair Joan Huffman, whose support could help Texas boast one of the top film and TV industry programs in the country.
“One of the things that I think is so important is to have a program big enough to keep multiple crews working year-round,” he says. “In order to have really great crews, we need crews that are working every day. I remember this executive walking onto one of the Marvel sets one day, and he looked at the director and he goes, ‘The least experienced member of the crew.’ Because a director spends three years trying to get a movie made, then they shoot for 35 days, and then they go to the edit. They don’t do it every day, but a grip, an electrician, a carpenter, a plasterer, a hair or makeup or prosthetics person, if they’re good they work every single work day that they can.”
Jensen pointed out that not only do productions bring immediate economic benefits to communities across the state, but there are after-effects that carry on longer after a particular production has wrapped.
“Hope Floats was shot [primarily] in Smithville, Texas, which still has ‘The Home of Hope Floats with Sandra Bullock’ on their water tower,” Jensen says. “Film tourism is a huge piece of this….we used to call it the Waco effect, you used to drive as fast as you could from Dallas to Austin on 35, but the show came around, Magnolia Entertainment, and all of sudden people are going to Silos Bakery and experiencing Waco in a new way because of content that was created there.”
Texas is big in ways literal and metaphorical. It has mountains, deserts, coastal marshes, pine forests, it has vast plains and river valleys, and, throughout all of this varied topography, it has a wealth of cultures, which in turn have a wealth of stories to tell. If you asked someone in Tokyo or Tehran or Toronto if they had an idea of Texas in their head, they’d likely conjure an image from a film or a TV show. And if Texas were a country, which many Texans believe it is, it would be the 8th largest economy in the world. As Cruz said during her testimony before the Texas Senate Finance Committee, Texas is the top exporting state. “The moving image industry allows us to export perhaps our most important commodity—our Texan culture.”
Learn more about the film and TV industry’s contribution by state.
