How did you get to where you are in your career, and what led you to Hill Country Studios?
I started with MTV, and MTV International in New York for about seven, eight years as well as a small stint in London. During that time I worked with some of the Pinewood Studios team from the London hub and stayed in touch as I sort of made my way out to New York. Pinewood Studios was building stages in Atlanta, their very first studio in the US. … That was during the largest Georgia production boom that happened between 2015 and 2018. It’s still going on now. From that position I found my way to Netflix, which at that time had a huge amount of content to produce and set up in multiple markets. I got connected with the Hill Country Group through some colleagues. … I thought it was a really exciting, unique opportunity to jump into something ground up that could really change the Texas film industry.
What makes Hill Country Studios unique?
It’s unique in a sense that it can provide these premier facilities, great stages that supports offices, all the facility lots that you can really hit any range of production or credit requirement, multiple shows or types of productions. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a large-budget feature, which it’s well suited for, or medium-sized television or independent or commercial or branded content. That is, we want to be a full production service partner. With facilities [such as] a large amount of land, a large studio lot and you can really help kind of fill the needs that any of these type of shows or budget ranges would require. And then [there will be a] production service partner. We want to have vendors, whether on- or off-lot that we can resource to have multiple productions [to help] grow and with the workforce development, the training, be a partner to those groups, and hopefully kind of [create] more crew depth and new training in the area in the local region. So have an awesome integration within the studio; I think that would make us really unique and really beneficial to any show coming into Texas.
What advantages are there with the studio's location between San Antonio and Austin?
On the Texas State [University] front, working with their students or their ongoing training or classes are structured so that we can help provide facilities, partnerships to collaborate with them and other universities. We’re very open to that. There’s been a lot of great results when these state universities can partner with professional businesses, whether it’s the vendors or studio group productions themselves, and come on and collaborate because it really would accelerate the training and can be really quick to kind of purpose fit for what is needed in that area and for immediate jobs and long-term career development. [This] location is really, really great and equal distance in some ways to San Antonio and Austin, near the middle with all the growth and sort of growth into San Antonio. People move into Austin and San Antonio. A lot of production folks I’ve talked to and producers, they’ve had some interest to go to San Antonio, some will be going to Austin. There’s attractions to both places, so it’s nice to be sort of [be] right there in the middle.
How did you get started in the film industry?
Born and raised in Northwest Indiana. So high school, college I was just trying to study filmmaking, media, all kinds of production, whatever program I could get into. So from Indiana, I interned on a film that was able to get me into an internship with MTV. From there I moved to New York and was an intern with the international department. I did eight years of production and production management operations while producing on the side and any other kind of moonlighting. ... That sort of helped me navigate in different areas in the business and do different jobs, writing, try different paths, which ultimately led me to be more in studio operation.
What makes a studio outside of Hollywood unique?
I think the big thing is—this comes up all the time—L.A.’s the center of the industry, the center of everything that ties in the industry, every company, every job, the production, the financial teams. All the billing for business operations is all there. So I think from having a studio with the amount of production, the size of these productions, the footprint and what they need, space is such a premium. Some studios in Georgia have so much space to really accommodate the full size of a large Marvel movie or Western, they take an incredible amount of space and to have it all contained on one lot is most of the time unique to what they can get in L.A., because you’re usually just kind of piecemealing or patching production plants together [in L.A.] because of what’s available and where locations are. Georgia was unique, as the studio in San Marcos will be that you can really bring everything kind of full service within the studio walls, which is a huge logistics advantage. It saves time, saves money to sell to creative the full operation, because you can really just have a nice large and multiple large productions, able to get what they need to do or within the studio, and they’ll also find that they can sort of rely on just the space and the footprint to be contained, which with another location is just harder to do.
