WVU Student Looks At Return Of State Film Office

The West Virginia Film Office has had a bumpy ride to get to where it is today.

As part of his capstone project Max Bruce, a recent graduate from West Virginia University (WVU), took a look at the new film office’s effect on the state’s burgeoning entertainment industry. He spoke with Chris Schulz about his reporting, which you can read here.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Schulz: What is the film office?

Bruce: The film office is an organization set up by the government under the Department of Economic Development. It acts as an all encompassing resource for filmmakers and creatives in the state to get films, music videos, TV shows and anything in a visual medium created and supported.

Schulz: What attracted you to report on this office and their work?

Bruce: For me, it was because originally I shifted into media from civil engineering in college. I wanted to get more involved in media and make people laugh and do something creative. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a film program at WVU, so the closest I could get was working with media, working with camera equipment, editing software, took me down the route of journalism. My professor brought up the idea when I was scratching my head for topics for this. And it just made sense as someone who had such a passion for film growing up to bring it back around and do this ultimately, really, really fun project.

Schulz: The film office has kind of had a bumpy road to get to where they are today. The West Virginia Legislature approved them and then unapproved them and then re-approved them recently. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? 

Bruce: The original film office was dissolved actually by the legislature in 2018. They didn’t see it as bringing in sufficient economic gains, apparently, they were minimal. The tax credits were capped instead of being uncapped, and the benefits that they were seeing were not substantive enough to warrant keeping them around. So there was a vote in both the House and the Senate. They dissolved it, they brought it back four years later in 2022. That passed overwhelmingly with major sweeping changes and they’ve been on fire ever since, they’ve just been on a roll, doing some really great stuff. Really, really good people over there. 

Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit about how the film office is actually making these changes to foment a film industry here in the Mountain State?

Bruce: Some of the major changes, like I mentioned, we now have really, really robust tax credits. You can get up to 27 percent back on major productions if there are over a certain amount, I believe the amount is $50,000. And that is uncapped. So we will be able to provide you with more services that are available. Plus, there’s an additional 4 percent that you can get back totaling up to 31 percent total if you have a certain amount of crew members that are from Appalachia, and are from the region.

Schulz: How is the film office helping people who are working in this industry? If I understand correctly, you hope to be one of them. How are they being helped?

Bruce: You’re very much correct. And I do hope to be one of them. The film office has actually been doing some really interesting things by creating a service on their website, a catalog of sorts, of people working in the industry. Say, for example, you’re working on a production and you need another accountant or you need a grip or something along those lines, there’s actually a resource that people can go through, that are in the process of making productions, are in the very early stages of productions, and find those people and match them. So it’s a good way of connecting local West Virginians, and Appalachians, for that matter, to productions and allowing them to expand and work on these productions. It’s a phenomenal resource, and it’s surprisingly robust as well.

Schulz: Tell me a little bit about some of the people that you spoke with for this story, who are the filmmakers in West Virginia?

Bruce: There’s quite a few really cool people that I had the pleasure of talking to. Obviously I spoke to a gentleman over at the film office who’s spearheading this endeavor. His name is Dave Lavender. Everyone I talked to in my reporting had told me like, ‘You need to talk to Dave, you need to talk to him.’ Yeah, after speaking with him, he is the coolest guy you could possibly talk to, and he’s exactly the kind of person you want. Just really passionate about films in West Virginia and getting things done. He’s a real, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s have some fun. Let’s get this taken care of’ kind of guy.

I spoke with Tijah Bumgarner, who is a professor now at Marshall University. She grew up in West Virginia, and moved out to California at a certain point to pursue a career in film, bounced around for a tiny bit and then settled back down. She is now creating, or helping to create with the film office, the first filmmaking program in the state of West Virginia at Marshall University.

[Joe Stretchay’s] not quite in West Virginia anymore, he’ll come back and work on productions, but one of the other people I spoke to that really stuck out to me was Stretchay, who is legally blind. He’s been a consultant for film and TV in different projects. His most recent project was working on the Apple TV series See, with Jason Momoa. But he’s also famous as being the coordinator for Charlie Cox on the Netflix series Daredevil.  He told me that, ‘Yeah, unfortunately, I didn’t get to do a lot of fun stuff with punching and fighting in the Daredevil stuff. But I helped Matt Murdock move around and brought that character to life.’ He said it was a great experience. He’s a wonderful fellow as well. He’s based out of New York now, I believe.

Schulz: What exactly is the timeline for seeing some progress and maybe some productions here in the state? 

Bruce: I think the big thing to acknowledge is that there’s already productions that are happening, I don’t think that ever went away. A lot of it is fostering the current crop of people that are in the state, but then also bring people in from outside. It’s not quite that productions haven’t been going on, we’ve seen that they’ve happened in the past, and there’s been a steady stream. It’s just, unfortunately, not as widely publicized. You’ll see actors all the time from all over the state and all over the region. I mean, I was watching Mad Men a couple of nights ago, and I saw one of the guys on there, I pulled his IMDB page, and he was from Huntington, West Virginia. The guy who played Cole Phelps, in the video game LA Noire. He was from Huntington. So you see it all the time, you just don’t realize it. I mean, we know the famous ones. We know the really prolific people like Don Knotts and Jennifer Garner, and so on. But it’s more common than you think, it just takes a sort of trained eye to look for it.

Schulz: What has your reporting told you about the future of film in West Virginia?

Bruce: That it seems incredibly bright. It seems like we’re moving in a very good direction. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a lot of the people I interviewed and talked with that they’re interested in coming around here. They’re interested in seeing what we can do and making more films. There’s been Lifetime movies that have been filmed here. There’s been a couple actually, music videos are still popping up. There’s a lot of buzz and interest in it, especially because of how competitive the tax credits are, but also how versatile the state is. There’s a beauty to it. That’s, I feel like in some cases, overshadowed for the stereotypes of West Virginia that I don’t want to even mention because everyone’s already rolling their eyes.

Schulz: Is there anything that I haven’t given you an opportunity to discuss about your reporting about this industry? Or something that you’d like to highlight that we already discussed?

Bruce: Yeah, again, I want to make it clear that the main takeaway I wanted from this is that the industry in West Virginia is very hopeful. And for someone growing up, regardless of where you are, regardless of what part of the state you’re in, or even that you’re from West Virginia in general, there are opportunities for you to be creative, there are opportunities for you to be successful. And there’s opportunities to tell the stories you didn’t think would ever get told, like your stories and people that are like you.

It’s an amazing time to be a filmmaker in West Virginia and to be a creative in this state. And I only see that flourishing as time goes on. I only see that growing more and more as people start coming towards the state and as we revitalize the industry here. I mean, towns in Georgia when The Walking Dead were coming on blew up overnight by being tourist attractions and bringing money and people into the state and bringing more attention to it. And I think given enough time and given certain productions and given the strong backbone that the industry has now, I can see that easily happening.