Moviemaking likely wasn’t at the front of Howard Hughes’ mind when he moved to Las Vegas in late 1966, though the aerospace pioneer and business magnate had done plenty of it. He’d produced more than two dozen films, directed 1930’s Hell’s Angels, and even ran a studio, RKO Pictures, from 1948 to 1955, during which time he produced such film noir classics as Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night.

But Hughes came to Vegas to buy. He acquired hotels and casinos, media outlets, and significantly, thousands of acres of open land. Hughes had big Vegas ambitions that included a massive airport and a high-speed rail line, but he vacated the city as unexpectedly as he’d arrived, leaving those dreams unrealized. At the time of his death, the company known today as Howard Hughes Holdings owned some 25,000 acres on the west side of the Las Vegas Valley, which it chose to develop as a master-planned community named for Hughes’ paternal grandmother, Jean Amelia Summerlin.

“Howard Hughes [Holdings] is kind of the brainchild of Jim Rouse, who started Columbia, Maryland, which is the first master-planned community in the country, and George Mitchell, who started The Woodlands [community in Texas],” says David O’Reilly, CEO of Howard Hughes Holdings. “They didn’t set out to build bedroom communities for other cities. They set out to build that kind of utopian area that was live, work, play. George Mitchell said, ‘I want one-and-a-half jobs per rooftop in The Woodlands.’ We hit that about eight years ago. And now we want to get there in Summerlin, and we’re going to get there a little differently.”

Two years ago, O’Reilly met with a new Summerlin resident, Boogie Nights and The Departed star Mark Wahlberg, who’d said he’d like to work a bit closer to his home. “I said, ‘If you want to film movies in Las Vegas, we’ll build you the studio,’” O’Reilly said. A few days later, O’Reilly met with Wahlberg again, who was this time accompanied by Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra. “And Mark said to him, ‘This is the guy that’s going to build you the studio.’”

Construction of Sony’s proposed $1.8 billion-dollar, 31-acre studio, to be located at Town Center Drive near I-215, awaits an expansion of Nevada’s film tax credit program—essentially a film and TV production rebate that’s contingent upon how much a production spends and how many local jobs they create—to be introduced during the Nevada Legislature’s 2025 session. Sony/Hughes say that construction of the studio may create up to 19,000 jobs, and upon completion, it could employ up to 15,000.

And they’re not alone. If the expansion passes, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) says it will also commit to filming in Southern Nevada, becoming the primary tenant of the Nevada Campus Studios at UNLV’s Harry Reid Research & Technology Park. The university aims to develop the 34-acre studio in the southwest Valley with WBD and Birtcher Development. The two studios have promised to generate billions in economic impact and tens of thousands of Valley jobs—again, if that tax credit clears the governor’s desk. It’s a proper MacGuffin.

Nevada’s current incentive program consists of a 15% transferable tax credit for eligible productions that spend at least $500,000 and 60% of their total budget on “qualified Nevada costs,” which include in-state cast and crew. (The Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development unpacks it nicely at shorturl.at/DeKvj.)

In an email statement, the Nevada Film Office (NFO)—which administers the tax credit, advocates for Nevada as a film destination and helps productions to source local crews and locations—says that existing incentive isn’t competitive. “Of the 39 states that have a film tax incentive program,” they say, “only a handful are funded at a lower amount than Nevada.”

What that means is that Marvel’s ever-growing cadre of costumed A-listers soar over Vegas headed for Georgia and its 20% tax credit. The Happy Gilmore sequel tees off in New Jersey, where it earns a 30-35% credit (with a possible 2-4% “diversity bonus”). And Netflix shoots Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, a film set on the Las Vegas Strip, at locations in New Mexico, which offers tax credits up to 40%.

But expanding Nevada’s film industry makes sense for reasons other than rubbing New Mexico’s nose in it. We’re close enough to LA for talent and crew to commute home on weekends. (Weekends, nothing: With our easily accessible airport, they could commute home for dinner.)

And film is a perfect second industry for Vegas, one that connects almost seamlessly to an existing economy comprised of thousands of performers, sound and lighting technicians, costumers, camera operators, food service workers, landscape artists, drivers and (fingers crossed) perhaps even writers who don’t yet know they could be in pictures.

“Fifty percent of the below-the-line employees have to be Nevada residents,” O’Reilly says. “That’s important to us, and I know it’s important to the Legislature, because if it’s just folks flying in to film and flying home, that’s not helping to grow the economy the way it would be if we’re actually training and using local talent.”

Associate Dean of UNLV’s College of Fine Arts Warren Cobb, who’s keen to ensure that Nevada Studios Campus remains true to the mission of UNLV’s film school, says he sees the studios offering real educational possibilities.

“I oversee architecture, film, theater, dance, music, entertainment, engineering, technology. All those areas kind of cover film; just look at the end credits,” he says. “I want students to make movies. … When we bring in people that [make movies] as a profession, whether it’s a makeup person, a carpenter, a set builder, a painter, a wallpaper hanger ... it does something to the students. It opens their awareness.”

The making of moviemakers

This is about more than another tax incentive like the ones we used to entice half of Oakland to move here with their uniforms on. This tax credit—and the subsequent investments by Sony and Warner Bros. Discovery—could be a boon not only to Vegas’ film students, but to the film industry workers who are already here, like Chris Ramirez.

Ramirez has a CV that’s pure Hollywood in all but its home address. He performed location management and other related positions on Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and two of Todd Phillips’ Hangover movies. He’s worked alongside Nicolas Cage, Jason Statham, Lauren Ambrose and other above-the-title names. And his production company Lola Pictures made several pictures in Vegas, including the 2016 noir Frank & Lola with Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots, and the 2020 punk rock road picture Viena and the Fantomes, with Dakota Fanning, Zoë Kravitz and Jeremy Allen White.

(Full disclosure: For a time, Ramirez also ran a multimedia-rich Las Vegas movie locations bus tour, for which I wrote a script filled with behind-the-scenes stories and obscure trivia. Did you know that Angelina Jolie made her screen debut in Vegas at age 7, in the 1982 comedy Lookin’ to Get Out? Or that the 1952 Howard Hughes production The Las Vegas Story had the first car vs. helicopter chase ever seen on film?)

Ramirez was introduced to filmmaking by a high school friend, Trent Othick, who had worked on several film crews. In 2001, Othick invited him to the set of a western picture shooting in New Mexico, and Ramirez got a walk-on part as a cavalryman. Intrigued, Ramirez soon cut his teeth by making a music video with local band Slow to Surface.

“I grabbed my parents’ Sony Hi8 video camera that they’d never touched, and I followed this band around,” Ramirez says. “They had their biggest gig ever up at Lawlor Events Center in Reno, opening for Yellowcard, and I went up there with them. I videoed them at a bunch of local bars they play at, and I taught myself how to edit on a Sony Movie Magic Editor.”

Shortly after Ramirez enrolled in UNLV’s film school, Othick called him again, asking if he’d like to work on a Kal Penn comedy (2006’s Vegas, Baby), soon to shoot Downtown. Ramirez threw himself at the work, setting up production offices with landlines, power lines, photocopiers and furniture over Thanksgiving weekend, and endeared himself to the crew by knowing where to get lunch. (“The art department liked that I knew where the best Mexican restaurants were.”)

From that point on, Ramirez kept getting hired to bigger and bigger projects. He’d discovered a secret of working in entertainment: If you’re out there doing the work, more work will come.

“If Trent didn’t hire me in 2004, and then make me his location manager on Yonkers Joe in 2007, I wouldn’t have had enough location experience to be the location guy on Hangover and Disney and so on,” Ramirez says. “That’s where so many people got their chops and get enough credits on their résumé to move to LA and work. The trickle-down is real.”

Shahab Zargari, an award-winning filmmaker (for A Shoah Survivor Choreographic Collaboration, Best Documentary Short of the 2022 London Indie Short Festival, and for The Doomed Shortcut, Best Film of the LA Sci-Fi Film Festival) and a communications specialist for UNLV, agrees that crew skills are best learned on crews—but he also suggests that Vegas doesn’t offer enough windows of opportunity like the one Chris Ramirez found. Not yet, at least.

“Can we produce a Sony film [using just homegrown talent]? Can we produce an $80 million Guardians of the Galaxy film? At the moment, we can’t,” Zargari says. “What we should be focused on now—and I think there’s a lot of really good people in town who are focused on it—is what we can do to prepare the city so that when that happens, we are able to handle all of it.”

Ramirez says potential crewmembers who do currently exist in Las Vegas can be spread thin and can, at times, be a bit inexperienced.

“When we made Viena and the Fantomes, you could only have one movie at a time going on in the city because there’s not enough of a crew bench,” Ramirez says. “When we did Viena, my friend Jessica Chandler was doing a horror movie at Lake Mead. We took all the crew that was decent, and she was using the next tier of people that, yeah, weren’t great. But they’re getting better and better.”

Fortunately, Vegas’ colleges are great places to cultivate and strengthen those skills, Zargari says.

“They can get that training at the [College of Southern Nevada]. They can get it at UNLV,” he says. “We have people in UNLV’s film program that have worked, or are currently working, in television and in film. You know, the professor of sound design [Thomas Bjelic] is huge in film; he did the sound design on the Saw films. Andi Isaacs, who has a production class, produced the Twilight movies. UNLV’s film department is a real diamond in the rough.”

UNLV’s Cobb says that program is turning out “dedicated and committed” filmmakers, but even the most passionate young filmmaker has reservations about relocating to Georgia, New Mexico or even LA. If the revised film tax credit is adopted, and Sony and Warner Bros. Discovery follow through with their investments, it will change not only how students regard a film industry career, but their parents as well.

“If this passes, it relieves so much pressure,” Cobb says. “It’s very difficult for parents to send their students off [to film school] knowing that they’re gonna move away. … If the parent can see, ‘Well, there’s those studios; there’s where my kids could get a job’ … it makes a huge difference. Having the studios here, having a physical presence, will make it real for both the students and the parents.”

A local industry IN ACTION

Vegas needs more than students and studio lots to nurture a film industry. And corporate investments won’t nurture individual filmmakers and individual productions. For that, you need local investors who are willing to gamble on art and dreams.

“I have options for several stories, several books and adaptations, and it’s not that you couldn’t do it on a micro budget, but that’s when you get into ‘asking for a favor’ territory, and you don’t want to do that for a 65-day shoot. Let’s get everyone paid,” Zargari says. “[We need] the guys that just bought their sixth house and seventh RV, who drop $12,000 a bet at the Cosmo on the weekend.”

And the film industry isn’t strictly confined to the major studios. If you drive around LA, you see it spilling out everywhere; recording studios, editing suites and other production facilities pop up in storefronts and strip malls. (And available soundstages are at a premium, which is why the studios are eyeing Vegas’ undeveloped land. Ramirez even suggests that many ofthe Valley’s vacant big-box and department stores could be easily converted to soundstages.)

What that means is, if the film credit passes, Hollywood may not wait for those multimillion-dollar Summerlin and southwest Valley facilities to be built. Some productions may want to jump in as soon as the incentive money becomes available—and they’ll find studios like Collectivo already up and operating.

Collectivo, a “Latino-focused entertainment studio” run by producer-director Jay Torres, Vision Vegas CEO Jason Soto and tech/media C-suite executive Sam Toles, aims to “basically replicate what Tyler Perry did in Atlanta” for the Black film community, but instead for Las Vegas’ Spanish-speaking population, which is one of the largest in the country at 32%.

“I’ve been trying to diversify the entertainment business for many, many, many years, without success,” Torres says. “Our numbers are still in single digits for episodic television, and we’re in about 3% of the film business. The population of America is 20% Latino, yet we buy 30% of the [movie] tickets.

“We’re trying to do universal content and work on creating genre films, and to create a space in Vegas not only to produce projects there, but also to create a studio—not from a [studio] lot perspective, like a Sony or a Warner Bros., but to create content driven by Latinos, with Latino executives.”

Torres met Soto while working on a project that fell through. Soto suggested that, rather than battling it out in LA, Torres consider making something happen in Vegas. Soto pointed to Vision Vegas’ 40,000-square-foot studio with its state-of-the art LED backdrop, recently used for productions with Nicolas Cage, Mark Wahlberg, Carrie Underwood, Shaquille O’Neal and J Balvin.

“[Collectivo’s] very forward-thinking,” Soto says. “It’s a thought leadership company that’s not just carrying the diversity flag, though obviously, that’s the most important. But we’re also bringing a lot of tech, a lot of great people and a big pipeline.”

And Torres is wholly in agreement with UNLV’s Cobb that the “great people” we need are already here. They just need nurturing and recognition.

“Emerging talent comes from anywhere. I look at myself still as emerging talent. I feel like, even with all my experiences, that I haven’t totally made it, that I still am looking because I’m underemployed, right? Which so many Latinos are,” Torres says. “There are a lot of Latinos that are underemployed, not because they don’t have the talent, the skill set, or the potential, but because they haven’t had the opportunity. So, for me, it’s about bringing opportunity to everybody.”

Building a local film industry has never been about movie stars running things from on high. The star of this production is, has always been, Las Vegas itself—a city with entertainment threaded through its every fiber. Film-in-Nevada boosters like Wahlberg, Cage and Jeremy Renner are just reminding the industry what Nevadans have always known: Our state economy was built for this. With the Legislature’s blessing, Vegas is ready to embrace this wild opportunity—to really Howard Hughes this thing.

“I love to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that this is sewn itself together in a compact, bite-sized bill that the Legislature can swallow with the certainty and credit of Howard Hughes and Sony Pictures backing it, on owned land,” says O’Reilly. “It seems to have all the pieces of the puzzle.”

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