The small business of big moviemaking

The old joke about Los Angeles is that everyone there is an actor: your interior decorator, your IT guy, your governor … every waitress you’ve ever tipped. “Hollywood South” will never approach that saturation point, but in Baton Rouge it’s becoming common to find venture capitalists investing as executive producers, artists moonlighting as set dressers and costumers and soccer moms taking the odd weekend off to play extras.

Entrepreneurs, too, are finding ways to stake their claims in the Hollywood game as the economic tentacles of the industry reach farther past soundstages and talent agencies.

Baton Rouge native Brinkley Maginnis began as a background casting assistant for The Dukes of Hazzard in 2004. Her career accelerated quickly from there to serving as Los Angeles talent casting director for Jessica Simpson’s upcoming Blonde Ambition. This year she launched her own BAM Casting LLC to provide local, Los Angeles and background casting to film, television and commercial productions across the state.

Going from part-time casting assistant to her own boss in three years has truly changed the 28-year-old’s life. Though she works in Acadiana and New Orleans as well as Baton Rouge, Maginnis moved to Shreveport because more major studio productions shoot there. Since BAM launched, she is on call seven days a week, 15 hours a day. Maginnis is lucky to get home before 11 p.m., and she usually turns around for a 5:30 call time the next morning.

“This is such a rare industry to be able to have the opportunity to be a part of, so the hours, days, months, years fly by for me because I love every detail involved in making a movie,” Maginnis says. “I am going to ride this wave as long as I can.”

Of course, casting is just one of the services Los Angeles-based productions look for when they roll into Louisiana. Shanna Forrestall is a commercial and character actor who knows those companies will just as soon bring as many L.A. services with them as they can fit on the plane if they have no clue what locals have to offer. This year she launched Louisiana Film Resources to help pitch local businesses to incoming movie productions. Serving as an agent, Forrestall signs all types of client companies — from massage therapists and caterers to two-way radio operators—offering their services to production companies and movie studios.

“I went to the producers and directors I knew and said, ‘What do you need; why aren’t you using Louisiana companies?’” Forrestall explains. “A lot of the reasons they gave were valid. I hope I’ve built a structure that will help the film industry grow and develop and stay here in Louisiana. I don’t want it to come in for two or three years and leave, ’cause I don’t want to have to move to L.A.”

Essentially, Forrestall’s company has become a privatized version of what a proactive state film office would be. But with grand juries and whistle-blowing lawsuits keeping the Department of Economic Development occupied, Louisiana’s film and television office has little time to shepherd economic development like this at the grassroots level. It’s a gap Forrestall saw widening even before the federal investigation began into LIFT’s alleged bribery of a state official and abuse of the tax credit system.

“The corporate world needs to be educated about how to deal with the industry,” she says. “That’s part of the problem. They don’t understand the time constraints and budgeting of moviemaking.”

While Maginnis and Forrestall launched niche operations to feed off of the movie industry, other already-established small business owners are figuring out how they, too, can hook up with Hollywood.

Along with his wife Denise, Paul Lockett manages JPS Security, a firm trying to work its way into film productions by providing executive security details that are a hybrid of a traditional bodyguard and a personal assistant. “Good personal protection guys are like one and the same with the client,” says Lockett, 47. “They know everything: your schedule, who your friends and family are, what you’re allergic to, what medications you take. They have the duty of protecting your life.”

After keeping Master P, Mystikal and other No Limit rappers out of harm’s way during the height of the East Coast-West Coast feud in the 1990s, Lockett struck out on his own and founded JPS in 1999. The firm has worked the American Music Awards, the Soul Train Awards and various MTV events, but it wasn’t until last year that Lockett really set his eye on the movie business.

Now Lockett receives copies of the riders that production companies issue containing the wish lists (read: demands), of their star actors. The detailed lists include everything from what type of accommodations and automobiles they want to their favorite flavor of Doritos. And they almost always list the star’s security needs. So the Ketel One has to be chilled, the M&Ms must fill the bowl, and the security has to be in place before they arrive.

“Baton Rouge has a lot to learn about the movie industry,” Lockett says. “You can’t pay this type of service what normal storefront security gets. Actors and producers expect and require more. It’s a whole new market. But Shreveport is beginning to pick up on that.”

Shreveport may be getting a few more star-powered productions than Baton Rouge, but for Lockett, Hollywood is moving in next door … almost literally. Successful post-production house Louisiana Media Services has purchased the building directly across the street from Lockett’s office.

Even Boomer generation mom-and-pop shops want their shot at showbiz. John and Verbie Benoit of Benoit’s Country Meat Market have hooked up with Shanna Forrestall’s Louisiana Film Resources and want to see their sausage and boudin in the center of craft service tables in the area.

“We have specialty meats other people can’t offer, so I’m hoping these film companies will see that,” John Benoit says. The Acadiana-born couple is even pushing their vintage digs in Addis as a great country store location for a movie, but neither of these wishes have been granted just yet.

As area businesses continue to market themselves in new ways to the film industry and fight the good fight against Los Angeles-based companies tagging along into Louisiana with Hollywood productions, a grassroots group of locals has organized and meets monthly on the topic. One of the goals of the Baton Rouge Music & Film Meet-up group is to serve as a go-between for locals and the state film office.

For more information, visit filmind.meetup.com/228.