Blockbuster films have a notoriously high budget, with records broken every year. For example, the highest grossing film currently is 2015’s “Star Wars Ep. VII: The Force Awakens” which ran a production cost of $533.2 million, according to The Numbers movie data website. That’s not small potatoes, as the production of big budget films are a huge financial risk for production companies. One flop can bankrupt a studio, as seen in the case of the 1995 film “Cutthroat Island,” whose box office failure sent Carlco Pictures into bankruptcy, according to Collider.com.
One of the larger budgetary line items for a big budget film, after securing the A-list protagonist and buying all of the fancy equipment needed to produce the film, is the location. According to FilmLocal.com, location can represent up to 15% of small budget films budgets and can cost as much as $2,000 a day in permit fees for some locations. That means before the cameras and dolly grips even land on site, the production company has already spent tens of thousands of dollars on film permits. Mind you, this cost is specifically for the filming permit. It doesn’t even take any additional permits into account that may be required for encroachment onto public streets, or the operation of pyrotechnics for that cool explosion scene, or the insurance costs for employees and actors.
Sacramento itself is no stranger to the film industry. Films such as 1979’s “The Klansman” and 1999’s “American Beauty” filmed some scenes in Sacramento, but it wasn’t until 2017’s “Lady Bird” that both the local film community and municipal leadership saw it as an opportunity to increase Sacramento’s exposure as a film location. This film, alongside California tax incentives enacted in 2020, stood as the impetus for Sacramento to make an active effort to become a major destination for film production companies.
In an effort to help filmmakers navigate the complicated requirements of municipal permitting, the City of Sacramento’s Department of Convention and Cultural Services has been retooled to make this whole process a little more accessible for production companies looking to film in Sacramento. Sacramento Film + Media, the genesis of this department, follows a strategy put forth in a five-year plan prepared by Metris Arts Consulting and other contributors with expertise in the film and the arts. Previously, the Sacramento film commission was under the auspices of Visit California, and during that time existed as a truncated version of its current iteration.
“We were kind of a reactive film commission that if the phone rang with somebody wanting to shoot a commercial or a movie, we would help them, but we didn’t do a ton of outreach. There was a lot of criticism from local filmmakers that we were only focused on people from the outside, which is what our mission is,” said Mike Testa, president and Chief Executive Officer of Visit Sacramento. “So it made sense when the city approached us, [and asked if] we would be interested in letting the city take care of it, and, and reassume the film commission.”
The plan, designed to be completed at the end of this year, highlights the advantages that Sacramento carries both in its location as well as through incentives. At the time of the release of the 2019 report, the California Film Tax Credit had been approved for its third iteration. The plan recommends exploiting those credits while developing and implementing a more robust Sacramento film department which would be better prepared to accommodate a film industry that California was looking to recapture back from other states. This is in conjunction with a quarter-million dollar rebate program designed to entice the larger productions to film in town. What Sacramento residents are seeing in the many film productions primarily filming in their own backyard, such as with the 2025 film, “One Battle After Another,” is the culmination of this effort.
“From a film industry standpoint, anytime you can bring something of significance, it helps the bottom lines for local businesses because it’s unanticipated revenue that they get,” Testa said.
That significance is being harnessed and utilized by a new Sacramento Film + Media division who has only recently aged past its first year of existence under the new organization, although the new organization has been a long time coming to those involved.
“We just launched on July 1 of 2024. Before that, the three different programs for special events, film, and music venues were in three different departments in the city,” said Jennifer West, Sacramento film commissioner in a Zoom call with the Current. “Between the special event, the program specialist and myself, we’ve sort of been lobbying for the last five years to say to the city that we belong together.”
Now that everything has been brought together into one department, a considered effort to be the guiding light for Hollywood types looking to film somewhere in California is the department’s priority. Whereas other regions in California may be relegated to the specific climate and environment they are known for, Sacramento is a shining beacon of landscape diversity with the region holding several different types of filming locations, whether they be rural, urban, or somewhere in between. That diversity, however, makes the permits and safety requirements as numerous as they are necessary.
“There are so many different departments within the city. In order to bring their film to life, you’re gonna touch traffic engineering, you’re gonna touch PD fire, parks, streets, etc., [when filming in Sacramento] we’re the first stop,” West said. “We’re the ones that gather the information from the producer and then make it happen for them with everything they’re going to need.”
It’s fairly common for public use permits, like the ones needed to film in a public area, to be detailed and involved projects that last several months before authorization is provided. These permits are designed to keep businesses from producing unsafe conditions for the public or create an unnecessary burden upon public infrastructure. For example, a Sacramento Minor Encroachment permit, or a permit to work within the public right-of-way like a sidewalk or a street, includes requirements that differ depending on the street classification or whether that road has been recently resurfaced or not. And this is under the presumption that filmmakers need a Sacramento city encroachment permit and not an encroachment permit from Sacramento county. For a big budget film featuring a car chase, becoming immersed in the intricacies of Sacramento municipal zoning requirements may discourage directors from coming to Sacramento to film, instead preferring a city with less regulation.
“If you need parking, or if you need to close down a street or do intermittent traffic control, you’re involving PD. If you have simulated violence, that’s going to PD and they’re going to determine how many officers you’ll need on sets. If there’s pyrotechnics, like there were in ‘One Battle After Another,’ that is a whole fire issue. We had to go to the state fire marshal and get all of the approvals we needed,” West said, explaining the complication of securing permits for the 2025 film “One Battle After Another,” filmed partly in Sacramento.
Not all filming is multi-million dollar, big budget cinematic masterpieces that require a myriad of interconnected permits. In many instances, the film production is for smaller commercial applications, such as filming for commercial advertisements.
“Commercial projects happen very quickly. By the time they decide they’re filming in Sacramento, they’re hiring the crew. By the time they’re contacting the production office, they know exactly the locations they’re gonna film at, and it can be turned around in usually 5 to 7 days,” West said. “There’s so much that happens in pre-production on their end between creative, production and their location managers. [During] the larger productions like the Warner Brothers film ‘One Battle after Another,’ I was speaking with them a year in advance because there was so much coordination.”
Considering how much investment in time and labor resources goes into a movie production as compared to something on a smaller scale, a region that offers a wide variety of backdrops like Northern California seems like an obvious choice. Northern California offers cityscape, mountains, marshes, rivers, lakes and on and on, but the appeal of a city like Sacramento comes from its architectural ambiguity.
“There aren’t a lot of identifiers, aside from maybe the Tower Bridge or the Capitol that really say ‘this is what Sacramento looks like’. We can be anything, so a lot of car commercials will shoot here in Sacramento.” West said. “That’s really our bread and butter. We can be anything and everything all at once.”
This investment in greasing the wheels of the film industry so it travels up north doesn’t just put Sacramento on plastic marquees nationwide, there’s a return on that investment that comes from attracting the film industry to your town such as the $5.3 million brought in by the filming of “One Battle After Another,” per West.
“When you bring in a film that nobody knew was coming, that you’ve got the crew staying here for, let’s say 30 days, spending money with local restaurants and local hotels, that’s not something [the restaurants and hotels] had on their budget previews,” Testa said.
Those big city dollars have been seeing their way back into the community through local film advocacy as Sacramento Film + Media provides a wealth of opportunities through sponsorship.
“Last year, we had the Norcal Film Expo, and I think we do about five or six film festivals in Sacramento that we regularly sponsor. Those are great for the community because whether they’re a local filmmaker that got into this film festival or whatever it is, it’s an opportunity to be shown on the big screen,” West said. “We’ve also created an internship program through Sac State and Los Rios College, where we take interns throughout the school year. In the summer, the internships are open to anyone interested in film. The summer internship is paid, the fall and spring internships are for credit only.”
Sacramento residents may want to keep a pen and paper on them at all times, because with the investment that Sacramento and California are making to bring back big budget films, there’s a good opportunity they’ll have a chance to get an autograph with an A-list celebrity as Sacramento’s economic relationship with the film industry becomes more intertwined. Testa adds that credit for that signature should go to West and the whole FilmSac team, whose efforts have brought Sacramento up from a fuel stop on the way to filming in Vancouver to a lower cost draw for Hollywood producers and directors mitigating their production costs.
“She gets a ton of credit for [increasing Sacramento’s exposure to production studios]. When you’ve got somebody who’s passionate and who’s leading the conversation, that’s when you see results.” Testa said. “I think Jennifer’s taken it up a notch because she’s so passionate about it.”
Follow William Forseth on Instagram @WilliamForseth or email him at [email protected]
