Cathy Ackerman: Welcome to Sweet Tea and Strategy, a podcast by Ackerman Marketing and PR featuring business and community leaders throughout Tennessee talking about issues and trends of importance to our state and beyond, and sharing some of their very best sweet tea recipes and tea-sipping stories. I’m Cathy Ackerman and I’m very pleased to welcome Bob Raines, executive director of the Tennessee Entertainment Commission to our podcast today. But before we dive into our actual interview Bob, let’s hear your thoughts and preferences on sweet tea, that true Tennessee staple of drinks. First of all, are you even a fan of sweet tea? And if so, is there any that you’ve had that is worth mentioning?
Bob Raines: Oh, Cathy, thank you for having me on and giving me the opportunity to talk about the Tennessee Entertainment Commission. Yes, so sweet tea, you know, I’m born and raised in the South and the truth is, you know, my first recollection of sweet tea is my Mamaw, and Mamaw Raines had just the best sweet tea I believe that I had ever tasted. And of course, it came with lots of sugar, and you know, she used, she would put at least a couple cups of sugar in it but it was a staple. It was a staple at every lunch, at every dinner.
Cathy Ackerman: You know, as we have been doing these podcasts and mentioning sweet tea at the beginning of each one, probably 50% of the people that we have spoken with say that their grandmother, their Mamaw, was the one who either introduced them to sweet tea or made them love it, and the key ingredient is always lots of sugar. So you’re fitting the mold there in terms of why we like it, right?
Bob Raines: Of course. Of course. It was always the Dixie, it was always the Dixie sugar. Remember that?
Cathy Ackerman: Yes. I think it was called Dixie brand sugar. That’s so funny. All those memories. We appreciate that Bob, thank you very much. But let’s dive into what has to be a fascinating, fast-paced and hopefully very rewarding career that you’ve had and are having in the film and music industry. Why don’t you begin by just giving us maybe some basic grounding in terms of the Tennessee Entertainment Commission and what your organization does?
Bob Raines: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, our basic, first off we're an office of the Governor. The Tennessee Entertainment Commission was established in 1980. We currently work under the umbrella of the Department of Economic and Community Development. And really our vision statement is to increase high-quality job opportunities for Tennesseans that are in the creative field. And because we have a great creative class, we use the Tennessee Entertainment Commission as a vehicle to promote and to implement our programmatic initiatives that help to reinforce the state of Tennessee as a relevant market for production and the development of multimedia products here in the state of Tennessee. So, you know, this is all about trying to expand and diversify our economic landscape here in the state, and the entertainment sector here is just one of those very unique assets that we happen to have that not all other states have.
Cathy Ackerman: And we’ve been known for it for a long time. So it’s not something that we’re introducing as a new thing, it’s been sort of deeply rooted in who we are in this state for decades.
Bob Raines: Yeah, I mean the music industry alone is over a hundred-year-old industry in the state of Tennessee. It’s been around and been established for a very long time, and you know, now it’s grown into a multi-billion dollar industry across the state. So we look at all those facets, the Tennessee Entertainment Commission, we put our name in as entertainment because we felt it was important to encompass content creation. And that meaning film and television, and then also of course the music aspect of it as well because like you pointed out, it is such an historical industry here in our state.
Cathy Ackerman: So Bob, what got you interested initially in working in this field? Are you a musician and/or an actor yourself?
Bob Raines: No, not at all. So location scouting. Location scouting is what brought me into the door really. I was working on a political campaign when I was in my early twenties, and in that campaign, one of my jobs was to do advanced scouting where we would go out to a county area and we’d advance the location for the candidate. And what that sort of, my skills got built up around going in and negotiating around parking and all the logistics and fees and things that went into having to have a certain location. And it was very fast-paced. Then I got to travel to all 95 counties in this state. So I found myself within a year anyway of being on this political campaign that I had went to all these 95 counties and had been a part of some sort of location scouting component of it. And really from there I transitioned those skills into location scouting for productions because they were basically similar skills and I just applied the logistics of location scouting and really the knowledge of a unique location and topography because by that time I’d went from the East part of our state all the way to the West part of our state, it was just such a dynamic topography that we had here. And so I was able to leverage my relationships and other things whenever I would be dealing with movies, which is what I initially did. They would come into the state and they would want to know, I need a place to film that has a church with mountain backgrounds. And so I was able to find that for them and then I was able to also connect them with the right people within the area just because of those relationships I had gained. So that’s how I maneuvered my way.
Cathy Ackerman: Yeah, you got the lay of the land literally from one end of the state to the other that was perfect for the kind of work that you would eventually go into. So what is it about the state of Tennessee that makes it a natural and particularly suitable place for the production of films as well as for the recording industry? What do we have here generally speaking that other states might not have? What’s our competitive advantage?
Bob Raines: Well, the main two competitive advantages are workforce and our infrastructure. Our workforce here is a very uniquely positioned workforce in the music industry primarily because you have so many musicians that are here in the state of Tennessee. We actually are ranked number one in the nation in the music cluster anyway relative to the total workforce size that we have. We also rank number one in artists and groups. And having that mechanism around our workforce, our musicians, along with our engineers and our producers, that’s also part of that number one status that we have here, the people that actually do the technical side of things, that gives us that unique advantage along with the infrastructure. So we have lots of great studios here that have been utilized for many decades now, not only the new studios online but the historic studios that people come to and want to record in. So on the music side, we just have this great infrastructure here, we have this great workforce here. It makes it extremely easy whenever you’re talking to somebody out in Los Angeles let’s say, when I’m having those conversations with people in LA and we’re talking about music scoring, which is a huge growth industry in our state right now because there's so much content being created that people need music scores for video games now and television and film and there's just so much of it being done. And when you’re looking at the price points, you’re looking at Los Angeles which is very expensive compared to Nashville, Tennessee. You are looking at musicians in Nashville that can actually record quicker than they can in let’s say Eastern Europe which is the other competing country that we compete against within the music scoring realm. And Nashville also has better quality than Eastern Europe has. And then we also are able to compete on price with London. And so when you look at the big major music hubs, you’ve got London and you’ve got LA and now you’ve got Eastern Europe and Nashville just sits, at least on the scoring side, we sit in this great sort of competitive niche and that’s because of our workforce and our infrastructure.
Cathy Ackerman: And film and television?
Bob Raines: For film and television, it's the same thing. Film and TV, extremely transient workforce, but however talent attracts talent. And that’s what brings these people to us because they talk to their friend who moved out from LA, they came to Nashville, they love it and they call them up, you got to come here. And then these people they just sort of attract one another. And you end up with a workforce like film and television because we have a huge migration of people coming from Los Angeles right now into Nashville. We have for the last five years. I think we're one of the top ten places that people are migrating out of, if not top five, from California right now. So the benefit of that is we're getting this great workforce, this workforce has worked on television series, they’ve worked on films, they’ve worked on commercials, they’ve worked on music videos. So they have a great background as well and they’ve got a background that is at least ten years. So let’s say when Nashville the TV series came here, it started really building up a lot of our workforce and then of course infrastructure started becoming built around it. So that’s where we sort of end up when we talk about what makes Tennessee unique to let’s say Kansas, I mean we just have a creative class.
Cathy Ackerman: Yeah, it sounds like we have it all, no missing pieces and those pieces are actually fairly well integrated one with another because there's a history of coming together here to make music and film happen. Yeah, that’s an exciting story and really has happened pretty quickly. I mean over the last five years I would say there have been dramatic changes in terms of sort of the image of coming to Tennessee and doing things that used to only be done on the West Coast. Now obviously Nashville is known internationally as Music City and I would guess that the music business has been a huge contributor to Nashville’s exponential growth over the last few years. Now do you see that growth continuing? And if so, what are the major elements that will keep fueling it?
Bob Raines: Well yeah, absolutely we see music, certain subsectors within music to have growth potential. One of those I was discussing was music scoring because we’re in the golden age of content creation. Because you have to think with Netflix and Amazon and Apple, the content explosion over the last five years is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our history here in the United States and so obviously music is a huge component of that. So again we’ve seen about a 50% growth rate in scoring for video games, films, television shows over the last five years here in the state. Now what is sort of limiting that right now is the infrastructure because if you want to have big orchestrational scores you have to have bigger places and so we’re limited I think on our studios in that realm, but however as we grow and as we become more of a hub for that sort of thing investment will come into it to build the cluster out. So I see that as definitely being something to watch for in the next five years is going to be our music scoring.
Cathy Ackerman: The other thing?
Bob Raines: The other thing I think is tour origination. With all of the music acts, we’ve had tour origination meaning so tour origination is when you’re Brad Paisley for example, you need to set up your summer tour, you need to set up your stage, your lighting, all the LED screens, everything has to be set up because it’s a stage performance and so what they need is they need a space, usually it’s a large clear-span 40-foot studio where they can set their stage up and lights and coordinate everything at one time. And there's a lot of companies here that already do that so we already have a really great base here in the state for doing that. However, we have a lot more growth potential in doing this because Nashville as you pointed out has become sort of an international brand at this point and so what’s happening now is you’re getting a lot of interest from these bigger acts who are currently going to a field up in Pennsylvania to do all this and they would rather do it in Nashville. With that you are seeing interest in people building out specific studios to try to accommodate tour origination. And so when you see this start, which you’ll see this start in the next few years, it’s already sort of underway right now, but once you see that happening then you’ll see the other businesses, the service industry around it start to grow too and that’s where sort of the big economic impact boom comes from. So that would be, build it and they will come, but you have to build it with the thought process that you have a creative element already in place in Tennessee so you know that you have a baseline here already to make the investment worthwhile and then once you sort of build off of that I think that there's such room to grow in that industry.
Bob Raines: And then a subsector of the music industry that I would say, the third thing in terms of like the music sector is that the Music Modernization Act, which was recently passed. This is one of the most significant pieces of copyright legislation in decades that helps update our current laws to reflect the modern consumer preferences and the technology development in the marketplace, aka streaming. And what this will do for us, what this will do for us is this will allow our songwriters and our musicians to get paid and where our middle class of our musicians has been hollowed out, this will bring that back. And I think, you know, that will of course surge into the community and that will have an indirect effect of course to the economic landscape of our town and of our state, but it’ll also keep attracting more talent to come in once they see that they can make a living doing this. So I think that will be the other thing that we will see will have a huge impact on our music industry.
Cathy Ackerman: Bob, what about the rest of the state? What do you consider to be the primary drivers for economic development around this industry in Memphis and Chattanooga and Knoxville for instance relative to being able to take advantage of the growth that’s happening in Nashville?
Bob Raines: Memphis has always been an indie filmmaker's town. There's so much texture in Memphis. I love Memphis. Memphis is just one of my favorite cities just because of the creativity and the DIY of the town. And it’s captured in the personalities, it’s captured on film and it’s been rated I think the last five years it has been in the top ten best places for independent filmmakers to live and work in MovieMaker magazine. It’s one of those places where the cost of living is still in a good place where people can afford to be there and they can afford to create whereas Nashville has sort of changed. I mean I feel like when I first got here 20 years ago you could rent a place for $500.
Cathy Ackerman: No more.
Bob Raines: That doesn't exist anymore. But Memphis is just one of those great places, the community there is very tight, they’re very creative together and what you see emerging out of there is really amazing stuff. And we’re able to put stuff there, I mean we recently did an NBC TV series called Bluff City Law with Jimmy Smits, it was on NBC this past fall, we located that there and it’s a great series for Memphis. We’ve located a CMT TV series called Sun Records there, there’s been numerous movies like The Brian Banks Story which was filmed there. And a lot of that was you have people like Craig Brewer and Tom Shadyac that are located in Memphis. And of course Tom Shadyac, you probably know Tom and know his name from he did all like the Ace Ventura movies with Jim Carrey. So he was a big name and he came to Memphis and bought a place across from Stax and basically started it to bring in youth and to help the community there. He’s a terrific guy and he did a movie called Brian Banks and which is on Netflix now. Terrific movie that we did there. But Memphis again just has that very great community feel to it with people and patrons that are living there, working there, they’re really involved.
Bob Raines: Moving to the other side of our state, because our state is so different, is Knoxville. And Knoxville is unique, not a lot of people know this but it is a television hub for non-scripted television. You know, Discovery is headquartered out of Knoxville now. HGTV started in Knoxville. Discovery bought Scripps which had all the brands and now Discovery which is this huge international company, they’ve got 14 brands underneath them there now and of course located in Knoxville. And what happens in Knoxville is this sort of has built up this engine around Scripps and now around Discovery for these other production companies like Jupiter or Lusid Media or North South and River Media, and they go and they produce content for these networks. And that has created its own little unique cluster around non-scripted television or reality television or docudramas or whatever you want to call it, but it’s just another unique component of our state that we're able to plug into on the entertainment spectrum.
Cathy Ackerman: It’s been fun to watch so many production studios crop up just in the last 10 years. Our state has a lot of geographic diversity obviously, you mentioned that just a minute ago when you drive from Memphis to the Tri-Cities and upper East Tennessee you pass through a lot of geographic areas that look very different from mountains and lakes to cities and beautiful idyllic rural sort of farm-looking areas. Talk a little bit about how you sell the various locations in Tennessee to film producers and just generally sort of how that sales process works in the industry. Do they typically come in and you drive them around or how does that all work?
Bob Raines: Yeah, I’ve been around doing this for about 18 years. I have a lot of relationships now that I’ve built up with studios and independent producers over all of these years and sort of how usually the way it happens is that they’ll give me a call or contact us and they’ll have a script, they’ll be looking at the creative elements of it. They’ll want to know, do you guys have X location that will meet this creative sort of the primary creative needs of my script? We look at it, we break it down, we do what’s called a location breakdown. We then have a locations database and this locations database has tens of thousands of photographs in it from all over the state that we have gathered over the years. I think we’ve had our locations database for, well I started it, so yeah about 18 years when I started doing location scouting and so we’ve built this up over the many, many years. We typically put together a locations package, we give them all of the main components of the script that they need to make it happen creatively, we send it out to them, they of course review it. Then the second step is typically if they find something that they like they’ll come to the state. Sometimes we’ll do location scouting with them, meaning my office, I have somebody in my office that does that and we’ll do some location scouting with them. Then we prefer to hand them over to somebody in the community because we obviously want people to get paid here because that’s our job as economic community development. So we like to hand them off to other location scouts that can help them sort of branch out into other places that they might be looking for. And I think after that once they get a feel for what their needs are here, we call it emotionally moving them in, and what we find is that when we do get people on the ground here we sort of emotionally move them into the locations and they can sort of see that they can do this creatively, then it really comes down to you start connecting with people in the community. You start connecting them with infrastructure, so do you guys have grip and electric companies, do you guys have camera rentals, do you guys have first ADs and second ADs and directors of photography? And so we start getting into those conversations and it starts culminating around what can I get here in this state, what can I get on the ground because obviously it's more cost-effective for them to get stuff here in the state and that’s what we want to do. So we start putting all those elements together for them and then they can start seeing, okay well what do I need to bring in from outside the state versus what I can actually do here and what is the cost efficiencies of doing that. So we sort of go through that dance and then of course in the middle of all that it comes to incentives. And that’s part of the other big conversation that we have is incentives and if I could tell you what 90% of my day entails, 90% of my day entails talking about incentives to production companies.
Cathy Ackerman: Who do we feel particularly competitive with along those lines? Are there states that are really throwing out huge incentives to try to attract companies to their neck of the woods or how competitive are we when it comes to incentives?
Bob Raines: The incentives game is highly competitive. There's about 43 other states that have incentives right now. On that list Tennessee falls in probably the lower fifth percentile of states that is competitive as far as incentives go. Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico sort of being your top tier states that are highly competitive. And so the difference between those are Georgia will offer a 30% it's called a transferable tax credit on all above the line, below the line, resident and non-resident labor. And they basically have they, you know you broker a tax credit and so you sell a tax credit off to people that have tax liabilities in Georgia so it's not limitless but it definitely gives you resources to go in and capture big productions. So Disney does a lot of their Marvel stuff there, a lot of the big studios do their big motion picture tentpole movies we call them there. Louisiana is the same structure the same way and so you see a lot of these big tentpole movies that go to those type of states because they can get their actors incentivized, they can get them incentivized like at 30%. So it’s very lucrative for these people to go do that. Tennessee is structured differently, we are structured as a grant and so what I get into my program is a finite amount of money each year and then I have to allocate that money to the best projects so that I can allocate the money that has the best return on investment for our state taxpayers. And so the way that we work within the tax game is it’s not a first come first serve, it’s what’s in the best interest of the state of Tennessee. And what’s typically in the best interest of the state of Tennessee is can we find things that have Tennessee connections to them, meaning can we do stuff that has maybe a tourism element to it to help with the broader economic impact of providing film and television incentives. And I work within the context of maybe smaller films or TV series in these smaller budgets because I don't have the large tax credits that the other ones do and so we’ve positioned ourselves as a little bit of a boutique state in the realm of film and television because if you’re an independent producer and let’s say you have a $5 million production, if you go to Georgia yes you might get 30% but you might not have a big star attached to it and so that might not be a great payoff for you, but you’re not going to get the crew because the crew is working on a huge $200 million Disney movie and so the producers start weighing that out. And that’s where I really come in at, I mean as far as what I really do on a day to day basis is that I’m the guy whenever they start looking at Georgia and Tennessee and we start to look at the nuances between, you know hey your star talent doesn't necessarily have like a $30 million price tag, you’ve got a $2 million price tag on this, you know Tennessee can offer you great crew and great infrastructure, I can do that at a cost maybe 15% less because of our cost of living versus like a Georgia. And all these nuances start to come in play and so that’s what my job really starts to come into focus is I start going down into the weeds with them and we start talking through what really what practically makes sense for you on a practical level. I know you like Georgia because it says 30%, but you can come here to our state you can be one of maybe a few other film and television productions going on here you can get great crew, great infrastructure, you know our rebate is solid and we pay it back quickly. So all these things are going to the conversation outside of of course workforce infrastructure topography, but then you have to really dive into the nuances. And sometimes I work for two years on these productions.
Cathy Ackerman: Do you see our state ever moving more in the direction of increasing the incentive opportunity?
Bob Raines: That’s a great question, I really don't know the answer to that. I think that we definitely can, I don't believe in putting large amounts of money towards these types of incentives, you have Georgia which as I think has put something like almost a billion dollars into their program. I think obviously taxpayer money should be used for other things than really film or television, but what I do look at is that right now we at least need to have enough funding to compete on a what I would say we're a tier-two state, we're not New York or Los Angeles but we do have the infrastructure to support moderate productions here and so I think that right now we are severely underfunded for what our workforce and our infrastructure capacity is. I think that we could be funded up to meet what that capacity is and then that would help us stabilize and grow. And that’s the way that at least in the conversations that I have with legislatures or with other government leaders is I try to shift this conversation to these are folks that are working in transportation, these are folks that are electricians, they're driving trucks, you know they're involved in textiles or construction. Or they own a small business which can service the into the movie industry because the film and television industry is so broad with what it touches when it comes here. I mean just think of what’s on a set, when you look at a camera and you look at the set, you see couches and picture frames and flowers, all that stuff has to come from small businesses. And that’s the focus, the focus is not on Hollywood because I mean we don't, that doesn't do anything, who knows like okay Hollywood great, but the thing is that we have this great creative class here and if we want to maintain it and keep it we want to give people the opportunity to work in it. Then I think that’s where we need to position incentives to help do that, not to necessarily do what Georgia or Louisiana does but to find I think productions that we really feel are great for our state.
Cathy Ackerman: Bob you have a fascinating job and I really appreciate you sharing your extremely interesting perspectives on a pretty important aspect of our economic development activity here in the state of Tennessee. Is there anything else that you want to add to the conversation?
Bob Raines: Kathy, thank you for having me, giving me the opportunity to, yeah talk about our entertainment industry. You know, I really just want to put focus on our creative class here. I mean that’s really what I feel my job and what I try to put focus on my job day to day is growing our creative class, giving our creative class the unique opportunity to work in their state and to work near their home which is what we all want and to raise their families and to provide educations to their kids and do all the stuff that we all want to do. And I think that’s really the most important focus in what we do at the Tennessee Entertainment Commission in making sure that we're growing that and we’re retaining that. And I always encourage everybody, if you are in the entertainment industry, I encourage people to reach out to their legislatures, I encourage people to reach out to their government leaders on a local and state level to let them know that I work in this industry and to humanize it because I think people get the image of what’s in front of the camera, and that’s all people see or what they hear on the record or over the radio. You sort of get the end product.
Cathy Ackerman: There's so many parts and pieces that go into it.
Bob Raines: Exactly. There's just so much that goes into that and the end product is great and we all enjoy it and that’s very important that we try to retain that here in our state because it’s a unique asset and when it’s gone it’s gone, it doesn't come back. And so again I encourage folks who might be listening to your podcast if they are in the industry to reach out to people who make the decisions on growing this industry here in our state.
Cathy Ackerman: Very good. Bob, we appreciate your time and your insights and we just wish you the very best moving forward. It sounds like you’re doing a great job and a job that you truly love. So thanks for talking to us today on Sweet Tea and Strategy.
Bob Raines: Thank you. Thank you. Anytime. Pleasure.