Candid Conversations with Adrienne Barker, MAS with guest John Lux of Film Florida
In this conversational interview, Adrienne Barker, MAS, speaks with John Lux, Executive Director of FilmFlorida.org, about the state’s film and television ecosystem. Lux explains Film Florida’s nonprofit structure, its diverse membership ranging from students to industry professionals, and the organization’s funding model based on affordable tiered memberships. He details the economic benefits of productions—local hiring, spending on hotels, restaurants, construction, and the ripple effect on tourism—citing examples such as The Florida Project, Bad Boys for Life, Bloodline, Dolphin Tale, and Moonlight. Lux highlights Florida’s lack of a film‑incentive program, which hampers competitiveness against neighboring states like Georgia, leading to lost billions in potential revenue. He discusses the organization’s collaboration with Visit Florida on film‑induced tourism, the pandemic’s disruption to the industry, and Film Florida’s adaptive outreach (social‑media, podcasts, a project map). The interview also touches on Lux’s career path from Disney Ideas to leading Film Florida, and provides resources for interested parties, including website links and a map of filmed projects.
Chapters
Okay, 3, 2, 1. Who likes film? Because I absolutely love film. Hi everyone, it's Adrienne Barker. How are you? Happy Monday. So excited, the executive director of FilmFlorida.org, John Lux, is in the house. Executive director John, first tell us about your position, and then I do want to know who doesn't like film.
Yeah, we kind of think the same thing, film and television. So yes, I am the executive director. Film Florida is a not-for-profit organization that represents all aspects of the film, television, and digital media production industry here in Florida, which means we, you know, represent students from, you know, your high school production class all the way up through feature film and television series that come to Florida.
So, okay, so that— so it's a lot of power, a lot of money that's going to be spent in Florida when filming comes in. Which, by the way, I'm in Daytona Beach, so was there Tom Cruise film something in Daytona?
Uh, well, actually, a good portion of Days of Thunder way back when was filmed at the Daytona International Speedway. Yes.
And actually, many cities lay claim to an actor or an actress who lived in their community. Like, you know, I was born in Connecticut, so I think of all the different— growing up you would hear this area's, you know, for this actor. But Florida is such a beautiful place. So are you— you're full Florida, right? South Florida all the way to North Florida?
Yeah, we have members literally tip to tip from Pensacola all the way to Key West. A lot of our members are strewn all over the state, which is great. We get a full perspective. Our membership is primarily industry professionals that, you know, work in the industry, companies that work in the industry. We have a lot of local film commissioners that are all over the state, some colleges and universities, as well as students, some labor unions, some smaller organizations that want kind of a statewide voice and presence, so they join under us. And a lot of folks that just support the industry and want to see us grow and make Florida's economy stronger, more diverse, more high-wage jobs here in the state. So we run the gamut in terms of people we represent and those that support us.
I love it. So I'm a proud member. I joined, and what membership category am I in exactly? Because that was very affordable.
Yes, you're an individual member. We actually labeled them a couple of years ago, giving them tiers as if they were production crew members. So technically, technically your level is the production coordinator level, which is $75 a year. So yeah, we believe from an individual standpoint it's very affordable. Our organization is funded entirely by members, so our ability to do anything, whether it be marketing, professional development, networking, advocating, any of those things that we do, it's completely dependent upon membership. And obviously right now is a tough spot for, for us to be asking for people to join and renew and And, you know, some people have had to defer memberships right now, their renewals, because it's such a tough time for everybody. But by and large, our membership is staying pretty consistent. We obviously want to grow because now is the time for us to really be effective in terms of helping Florida's economic recovery. You know, you mentioned it earlier, every time a television series or feature film sets up shop in Florida, that's $20 million usually minimum that they're going to drop in a local community in a relatively short period of time, like 3 to 4 months. So think about that now, all the small companies that would benefit, all the individuals that would benefit, all that money would be going directly into Florida's economy, which right now we all need it.
So interesting. So every state actually has an organization like this, correct?
Well, I mean, in a roundabout way, probably most do. You know, some are a little bit smaller, some of them are are tied in, you know, a little bit maybe more to the state government. We actually got a call, it was actually funny, about 2 weeks ago from another state, and they said to me, it was, this was a legislator from another state and one of their industry professionals, that we don't have anything like you guys in our state, and we really need it because, you know, the industry is kind of going in a million different directions. Everybody has a voice. The legislators need help from the industry to kind of move their initiatives along, but when there really isn't a point of contact, so that's what I was actually really proud that they reached out to us and said, you know, we see you guys speak in a single voice and do a lot of great things. And how can we get one of you guys, you know, your organization over in our state? So that was pretty cool to see that at least we're, to the outside world, at least we seem to have our act together.
How long? So actually, if I remember correctly, you were with a company that did some— I don't know if I could say it or not— began with I and very colorful. I remember the I-D-E-A-S and, and they— Disney, was there something? Was it a division of Disney?
So when I moved to Florida in 1998, it was to work for the division at that point was called Disney Ideas, and we were a kind of the production, post-production arm on the backlot of— at that time was the Disney-MGM And a couple years after that, our division went independent. So essentially, the vice president at the time bought the division and went independent. And so we went home on a Friday afternoon, went over to the Disney Casting Center, signed resignation papers, turned in IDs and all that, and then went back to work on Monday in the same building doing the same work for the same clients, except now we were a startup. And so I worked there between the two organizations there for about 18 years. And then, you know, the owner wanted to kind of change directions, and he did a pretty significant downsize of the organization. And I was in charge of the operation. And when you go from 25 people down to about 7 or 8 in a short period of time, there really isn't much of an operation to run anymore at that point. And so I had kind of— my job was kind of eliminated. It had run its course. And at the same time, I had been with Film Florida on a volunteer basis because all of our members are volunteers for a couple of years, and we knew that for the organization to kind of take the next step, somebody needed to focus on it all day, every day, 24/7. And so they hired me as the executive director. I'm the only full-time quote-unquote employee of the organization, but we have an executive board, a board of directors, our general membership. We have a lot of committees and councils, and they all come in to do the work as needed. So my job, I see it as kind of keeping the train on the tracks and keep things moving forward. And then, you know, you were a part of our marketing committee call recently, and so we have all those, and people come in and participate as they can given the fact that they have full-time jobs. But having me in this role allows us to always be making progress and bring people in as I need to, but make sure that You know, in the end, it's about making sure our members see value in paying money to become a member. If they don't see value in it, then they're not going to renew, and then we don't exist. And so we got to make sure that our members feel like their voice is heard and their, their, you know, their opinions are heard. And so that's my job, is to make sure that we keep moving forward.
I'm jealous. It's an excellent position. Can we take an example? And I'm embarrassed, I can't remember the name. And Netflix, I think, just had it out. It was the story of the children growing up homeless in Kissimmee on 192. And what was that one called?
It was called The Florida Project.
The Florida Project. Sorry, it really is— it was difficult to watch. There's a lot of beautiful people. I was on Give Kids Safe Shelter. I don't know if you know this, but I was chairwoman of the Celebration Area Council and then on the board of the Kissimmee Osceola, and I got involved with Give Kids Safe Shelter, which was an amazing organization, Children's Advocacy Center. So all of it, I was, I was always interested in what was going on. But take the Florida Project. So they come in and they film, and then what are the benefits really? Like, what, like, tell us, were they staying at the hotels? And I think they would give kids a world, right? Did they go to give kids— was that one?
No, they did not. That was— so the Florida Project, I mean, you, you picked, uh, both a great example and a little bit of tough one. So the Florida The Florida Project was an independent film. So independent films by and large don't have that big of budgets. So, you know, you think of, and, you know, we've had some great independent films through the years, you know, Moonlight, which won the Best Picture, Life and Nothing More was another great one that was filmed up in the Tallahassee area, The Florida Project. So we'll put them maybe off to the side and come back to the independent film. But when you're asking about the benefits when a project comes, first of all, they hire locals. So there are more than 50,000 Floridians that work in our industry in all aspects. You talk about behind the camera, in front of the camera, you know, and, and all of those folks live in Florida and they own houses and they pay taxes and they go— their kids go to school and go to restaurants. So when a project comes to Florida, the main benefit is they hire locals. And a feature film or television series, again, if they're going to spend about $20 million in a local area, they're going to end up spend— they're going to end up hiring close to 2,000 Floridians. In that time. So the first benefit is, is the jobs. The second benefit is they do bring outside people from out of state, whether it be actors or the directors or whoever it may be. They do bring people. Well, those people need to stay somewhere, so they stay in hotels or they stay in Airbnbs. Then while they're here, they need to go out to— they go out to eat, so they go to restaurants or they stay at hotels and they they spend money there. Once a project is here, we build sets. So people are going to Home Depot and Lowe's and buying all the construction materials and, and, you know, plumbers and electricians and carpenters are all working on those things that normally might not necessarily be part of the industry, but we're bringing them in to work on those projects as well. And then once they've spent their $20 million and they've, you know, hired all the locals, then that project is going to go on film or television or, you know, a phone or on a device nowadays or all the streaming services. Well, when you take a good example of that was, is say Bloodline, which was a television series from Netflix that was down in the Keys. They found that after season 1, which spent about $30 million just in production in the South Florida Monroe County area in the Keys, After the first season, they saw an uptick in tourism of more than $65 million of people that just wanted to go to the Keys because they saw the series and thought, that looks like such a cool place, let's go there. You see a film like Dolphin Tale, what it has done for the Clearwater area and the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Clearwater Marine Aquarium just opened a massive expansion that was made possible because of the Dolphin Tale and Dolphin Tale 2 All these people want to go to Clearwater. They want to go see Winter and Hope the dolphins. And their, their attendance before the movies was around 75,000 people a year. Since the film— now this is almost 10 years later now— they are still consistently around 750,000 people a year going to the aquarium. So that's the type of impact you see. Now going back to the independent films, so The Florida Project didn't have nearly that budget. Their budget was in the, the 1 to 2 million range, if that. So they clearly didn't hire as many people, but they still did hire locals. There's, uh, one of the main actresses, one of the little girl, is a local. She's from Florida. Uh, the other little boy, we've actually met him and had him out at a function of ours. He's, he is, uh, here from Central Florida. A lot of the background actors and actresses were from Central Florida. A lot of the crew members is from Central Florida. So while they may not hire as many because it's a smaller budget, they're still hiring locals. And now, you know, Florida Project, as you said, was kind of a tough watch. You know, you watch it, that isn't necessarily like the, the best image of Central Florida that people want to see. But still, people come to Central Florida now and they want to go see the Magic Castle Hotel, that purple hotel. People want to go see that, so they are going to that area, which means they're spending money in that area. So Even a film that it was a little, you know, from an image standpoint wasn't the best thing for Florida or the Central Florida, it still has economic impacts. And those are kind of the great things. And then another, you know, we talked about Moonlight a little bit. It won the best actor, best film, the Academy Award. And again, it was a tough film to watch from the poverty standpoint of things. And, but it brought that to light and that's an important topic. And so sometimes film and television isn't always glitz and glamour. But it still is, is great storytelling. It's still hiring locals. It's still spending money in the local communities.
I, I love this. Is— let me ask my question. So I'm thinking to myself, what— so, okay, let me get— I gotta get this straight in my head, and it kind of just went out of my head weirdly. So you have a movie that is, first of all, like Why, why don't— why do places— why do they film in a place? Like, why do they show something in another, in another area and you think it's filmed, but then when you look it up, you're like, oh, it wasn't even filmed in Florida, but yet it's based in the area.
So there's kind of the, as we refer to it, the billion-dollar question. So, uh, it's money. It's, it's a lot of times it's economics. Uh, our industry is a business. And businesses will always go where they get the most for their dollar. And so right now, unfortunately, Florida is one of only 17 states in the country and the only one in the Southeast that does not have an incentive program to attract this business. So when you take a film like Bad Boys for Life, which was just released recently, uh, Bad Boys is an iconic movie series for the state of Florida. This most recent one though only filmed about 10 days down in South Florida, and then they spent 4 months up in the Atlanta area and spent $50 million there because Georgia has an incentive program. We're working closely with legislators to try and bring this program back. We believe we have a really great program that could be great for the state of Florida from a return on investment standpoint. As well as attract a lot of money and a lot of jobs, which we need right now. But ultimately it comes down to a dollar. If, if somebody can go to another state and get more value for that dollar, that's where they're going to go. And, and so that doesn't mean that we don't get any projects, but for example, um, you know, Georgia's governor just came out and said over the next 18 months they expect to have more than 75 major film and television projects up there. At the status quo level that we're at right now, if we don't take some action as a state, we're gonna be lucky to have 15 to 20 in that time frame. And so, you know, we, we've been tracking the lost business over the last couple of years. We know that we have lost more than a billion dollars worth of business that should have come to Florida, wanted to come to Florida, we just couldn't compete. They would have, you know, used more than 200,000 hotel room nights and hired more than 100,000 Floridians for cast and crew positions. But we— it's hard to compete. You know, I kind of equate it to being in an MMA match blindfolded. You know, we're out there throwing haymakers, and we have some great projects like The Right Stuff, which was filmed all across Central Florida, that's coming out on Disney+. We had David Makes Man, which was a great television series, finished season 1 from the Oprah Winfrey Network. We still get some of those, but by and large, we're getting pummeled because people go to other states because they get more value. And like I said, we're the only state in the Southeast So when we talk to content creators in Europe or Canada or California or South America, it's hard to convince them that they should spend their money and hire Floridians here when they can go right over the border, borders to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, all these states surrounding us. They're going to get a better value for their dollar. So we're trying to, you know, make some changes in that. We believe our industry can be really important to Florida's economic recovery right now. Slap down 5 television series that are gonna spend $20 million each all over the state. It's a brand new $100 million pumped into the economy. We believe we can be part of bringing Florida's economy back in these difficult times for everybody.
I love that. What is your relationship with Visit Florida?
We have a good relationship. We're members of Visit Florida. We love them. I believe they see the value of our industry enhancing tourism. We obviously have statistics behind that. They actually visit Florida. It was a couple years ago, back in 2013, did a study that showed more than 22.7% of domestic visitors to Florida came here, impacted, they were impacted by something they saw on film and television, and that drove them to investigate coming to Florida. And then broader, there was a study done worldwide that showed more than 20% of All visitors go places that they see on film and television, and they're attracted to that. So the term is film-induced tourism, and it's a fact, it exists. And so we have a good relationship with Visit Florida. They've had some challenges legislatively the last couple of years as well, but we're all on the same team right now. We're all trying to bring money and people here to Florida, whether it be to work on film and television whether it be as tourists. We're all on the same team trying to help Florida's economy.
I love this. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm going to post, if you don't mind, I'm going to post the link to, to all the different ways that people can get involved with Florida Film Florida.org so that they have that. And you know, I am a wannabe actress doing Candid Conversations. You know, I was told that I only had a face for radio, but you know what? I wonder if, I wonder, my last question, I wonder I wonder in the book of like, in all the different film actors and studios, if there was a page like a pandemic may come and this is what's gonna happen, like, or did this just take the industry by surprise, COVID-19?
It definitely took everybody by surprise. Our industry is no different than anyone else these days. Back in mid-March when everything shut down, we shut down as well. And so our industry has been heavily impacted. You know, the majority of those that work in our industry are independent contractors, so they don't qualify qualify for unemployment benefits typically. They did qualify for the pandemic unemployment through the federal government, but they still had to deal with the Florida unemployment system, which obviously everybody knows has been quite challenging. So it hit us really hard. You know, we actually came out right after the stay-at-home orders. We put out what we referred to as the Sunshine State Social Distance Watch Party, which was a volume of 4 pages of titles of all the film— not all of them, but a lot of film and television projects that were filmed in Florida that you could stream. So you could watch them all at home to, to, you know, further that, you know, support of those in the industry. And, and you had mentioned ways to get in touch with us. We're on all the, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. We have a podcast that's going to start season 3 in the fall. We're on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Store, Stitcher, iHeartRadio. So we do a lot of different things to try and market the, the organization and market the industry and attract as much business here to the state as possible.
I love it. Let me just remind you, so I am the Vice President for Volusia Flagler SCORE. I love SCORE, but so we're available for any of these local business owners that may need help from actually at any stage of their business life. And we offer free workshops and free mentoring and free programs. So if there is, if you talking to someone and they're like, oh, I, I'm having trouble marketing, as a business owner, tell them to call their local SCORE office, or we all do virtual mentoring now and it's free. So we want to make sure and help keep these businesses growing and thriving. Thank you, John. This was really exciting. I have to end it now, but I tell you, I could talk to you for like days because it's just so— and wait, where do— where's that link to all the movies that are made in Florida? Because you gave me a few, but How do I get that?
There is a map on our website. You know, when somebody says I need a list of all the movies, it's really hard to put that together because it is so, so vast. So we do have a map that has a sampling of it. And then if you go to the state film office website, the state film commission, which is filminflorida.com, they have a pretty extensive list on their website of projects that have been filmed here. But our website is filmflorida.org. You can go there and we have a map and a select amount of listing that we made for.
I love that. I'm going to make that my new like thing. Like I'm going to watch once a week like a Florida movie because I really— and I haven't seen Moonlight, so I got to watch that one.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. And this will turn into a YouTube video that I will share on LinkedIn. And it was nice seeing you. So thank Thank you. Have a great rest of the day. Everyone get involved with film. Who doesn't love film? It's the best. All right, thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
