Flipping the script

Sitting in Strands Café, sipping from a large glass mug of hot tea among the exposed red brick, Old World artwork and dark, wide-plank wood floors, Donna Reichman is just around the corner from her downtown office. But the new executive director of the Baton Rouge Film Commission feels like she could be in Europe.

This is how Reichman, an industry veteran who took the reins of the local film office after Amy Mitchell-Smith departed last fall to launch Cienega Motion Picture Group, sees the city she has called home for the past year: not as what it is now, but what it can be. In the hands of skilled professionals, what can Baton Rouge look and feel like on a movie screen?

For Reichman, every neighborhood, skyline and dirt road is a location—in the Midwest, the East Coast, Southern California. Every overlooked environment is an opportunity, be it pristine or blighted.

This is what the industry calls “cheating.” And Reichman aims to have Baton Rouge doing a lot more of it.

As A&E hit Breakout Kings continues shooting its entire second season in and around Baton Rouge—cheating certain scenes for New York City—and Tom Cruise’s sci-fi epic Horizons is poised to begin shooting at Celtic Media Centre next month, Reichman’s roles are that of promoter, pitching Baton Rouge as a city of multitudes to studio executives, and facilitator, coordinating logistics with productions of all budgets and sizes.

“The city itself is so varied, then not far away you have swamps and farmland,” Reichman says. “You have some areas with a real period feel. You have suburbia and many different styles of architecture. It works, but still, it amazes me that we’re being used for New York.”

And Reichman knows New York.

While earning a master’s degree in nutrition and health from NYU in the late 1970s, Reichman, now 61 and a mother of two, volunteered as a “script girl”—one of those outdated titles like “stewardess” that has been replaced with “script supervisor”—for a film student friend. She was struck with a vivid vision of her future.

“I was bitten by the bug,” she says. “I just knew immediately this was something I’d be doing for the rest of my life.”

After a brief attempt at marrying her nutrition studies and filmmaking into one project, Reichman realized she had not mastered either well enough to accomplish that and chose to concentrate on film.

“It seemed like a whole lot more fun,” Reichman says.

She gained experience fast as a production assistant in Manhattan. It was an era when television and commercial work dominated the East Coast industry, with only a few icons like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese proclaiming New York City streets as a thriving and edgier non-Hollywood Hollywood. Reichman even tried her hand at directing after conceiving of a comedic short film that spoofed Blondie singer Deborah Harry, the platinum punk and jagged “Heart of Glass” chanteuse who was quickly becoming one of the hottest stars on the planet.

“It was a crazy, funny piece that looked at the kind of young pop star that was trendy in New York at the time,” she says. “The Blondie and Madonna types.”

Friends populated the cast and crew, and Reichman shot much of it in her apartment. It was a modest, independent movie, but a project that thoroughly fortified her passion for filmmaking.

In 1985, Reichman landed a job working on documentaries for HBO, and two years later she and her husband Karl moved to Los Angeles, where she transferred to the production division of HBO Films and worked for more than two decades.

“I’m not suited for freelancing and going from production to production,” Reichman says. “I wanted something stable, so HBO suited me.”

Reichman traveled the world, working on more than 150 film projects for the premium cable network as a liaison between production teams in the field and studio executives in California.

“Donna is perfect for running a film department,” says Dennis Bishop, who was the vice president of production at HBO during Reichman’s tenure there. “She will be charming, yet tough when appropriate. She is one of the few people at HBO that I have maintained contact with, and for good reason.”

Reichman’s methodical nature and communication skills were put to the test working with producers of all stripes and experience levels. It is the same challenge she faces now in Baton Rouge.

“That (HBO) job was about keeping processes consistent and setting up good communication systems,” Reichman says. “Productions are set up in a similar manner no matter the size, big or small. Only the locations and the story and the cast and crew change. That means you can never truly master film production. It’s just vast, so that’s the challenge. It’s a process each time. But that’s what fascinates me.” filmbatonrouge.com