225BatonRouge.com

Jordan Kessler’s hand roves beneath his powder blue oxford button-down. Curiously, he reads aloud an ominous warning from a tag inside the shirt: “Remove before wearing.”

“This is how busy we are,” says Kessler’s business partner, Jerry Gilbert. “Jordan just doesn’t have the time.”

Kessler, 29, started his film career as a child actor and even appeared in the hit Steve Martin comedy Parenthood. He pretty much eats, sleeps and breathes movies, but in a matter-of-fact, casual way that the Quentin Tarantino school of hyperactive movie nerds probably wouldn’t understand.

He is relaxing on fresh laid carpet in his post-production company’s new, mostly-empty offices inside its second building. The air is thick with the sting of fresh paint. His cell phone beeps, and he scans the incoming message. It’s a catering company that wants to provide craft services for his movies. “I’ve got to take my e-mail off the Web site,” he says to Gilbert. “It should just be info@louisianamediaservices.”

It’s a typical conversation for young CEOs to have at a post-production film company, one that is shaping up to be the front-running success story for how to build self-financed infrastructure in Baton Rouge without depending on incentives from the state.

Louisiana Media Services opened last fall as the first full-scale post-production company in Baton Rouge and is providing services to a slate of more than a dozen outside films.

About 25 LMS employees, most in their 20s, edit video, mix sound, design graphics and assist filmmakers in every nook and cranny of the building. Cackey Miltenberger, 24, is a recent LSU grad who worked for a Covington insurance company and checked lafilm.org daily for job postings until she saw an LMS ad for interns and signed up. After she worked as a production assistant on A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Kessler hired her full-time.

“I feel like I have learned so much in a short period working here and still have so much more to learn,” Miltenberger says. “There are always new problems to solve and people to meet, which I think is what I really enjoy about it. And it’s just neat to see how LMS is expanding so quickly and how they take advantage of opportunities that come along.”

Years of experience in the Hollywood system has Gilbert, Kessler and third partner Nick Thurlow trained to look for those opportunities.

Recently, Gilbert served as a sound supervisor on Saw, and Kessler was an associate producer of The Black Dahlia. Most of Kessler’s long days are spent on the phone with Los Angeles producers and directors.

His job is to secure film productions that will want to buy at least one service from LMS, be it a complete editing package or simply providing monitors and rooms for filmmakers to watch their dailies.

Gilbert comes behind him to manage the day-to-day workflow on those projects.

The group made several scouting trips to find the right location for business in Louisiana. Kessler passed on Shreveport because he couldn’t see himself living there, which left only New Orleans and Baton Rouge as viable options.

“I like that the state is here, that it’s the capital,” Kessler says of Baton Rouge. “I like that it’s close to New Orleans without being New Orleans because there are a lot of problems there obviously. We went down to New Orleans, and they wanted us to move into the NEMS Center, but for me Baton Rouge has always been the place.”

The key, it turns out, was meeting with Kip Holden. Seeing how excited the mayor was for promoting filmmaking in the city made all the difference to Kessler. “Kip,” he emphasizes, “has been phenomenal. Everyone in the state has the same programs, but the reason we’re in Baton Rouge is because of Kip.”

There have been many complaints about the tax credits program for film infrastructure, Kessler concedes, but he has not let that deter his plans. Ironically, LMS received a pre-approval letter for tax incentives from LED just a few days after 225’s cover story on that subject was published at the end of March. “Maybe because of you guys,” he adds. “But it’s probably better in the long run if you think of state incentives as short term and gravy. If your business plan is not predicated on receiving a large sum of corporate welfare, then I think you’ll do OK. We’ve done OK, and we put our own money in.”

Walking through the LMS offices, groups of talented film professionals collaborate like they were secluded cliques plotting in a high school cafeteria. Race to Glory director Joseph Sassone is busy overseeing automated dialogue replacement (known as ADR). He stands in the dark in front of a large movie screen watching footage of stock cars speeding along the track and contemplates what should be added from an off-camera commentator calling the race. The flash-fried growl of monster engines bounces off the walls.

Back in the new LMS offices, things are airy and quiet. It is the first day of principal photography for Kessler’s self-financed production, a horror film called Geo Hunt, and the crew is on location. Eventually the company will fund a larger slate of its own films, but for now, servicing the post-production needs of other movies is working out just fine. It means a more immediate cash flow and allows LMS time to plan ahead.

But today it feels like the calm before the storm. That is, until an employee’s car alarm rings out below in brain wracking repetition.

Kessler stands from the floor and peers out the window. Gilbert just grins and shakes his head, “I thought I got away from this when I moved from L.A.”

The alarm goes silent, and Kessler and Gilbert go back to discussing who’s going to move into which office. “I’ll need some lights in here,” Kessler says gesturing to holes in the ceiling where fixtures have yet to be installed. “Or else I’ll have to go home at 6, which is way too early.”