Inside Texas’s bold takeover of the American film industry

When Dennis Quaid dropped out of the University of Houston to pursue his acting dreams, there was nowhere to go but Hollywood. Coming off a decade of its biggest hits and at the height of critical acclaim for the movies of the 1970s, California dominated the culture of the United States, and therefore the world. “It was a paradise,” Quaid says. “Creativity, community, the greatest films were made there, a vibrancy of the new wave, Bonnie and Clyde, The Conversation, The Right Stuff, it was an incredible place of palm trees and a real atmosphere of creativity and inspiration where we were making great films with great people we knew and loved… and now all that is gone.”

‘California really is insanely expensive. Rarely did we shoot anything there. I’d be going to Slovakia or Canada’

The degradation of Hollywood – Quaid blames decades of regulation, taxation, wokeism and more – is just one part of the incredible story of a state that took all its greatest industries for granted, losing them steadily by eating its own. On a recent episode of his podcast Literally! one-time Brat-Packer Rob Lowe expressed his frustration to fellow Parks and Recreation star Adam Scott: “There are no tax credits, so like, all those other places are offering 40 percent – 40 percent. And then on top of that, there’s other stuff that they do,” Lowe said. “And then, that’s not even talking about union stuff. It’s just tax, economics of it all, so it’s criminal what California and LA have let happen. It’s criminal. Everybody should be fired.”

When it comes to the production of Lowe’s current game show, he said: “It’s cheaper to bring 100 American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox past the sound stages and do it there.” “Do you think if we shot Parks right now, we’d be in Budapest?” Scott asked. “One hundred percent we would be,” Lowe said. “We’d be in Budapest.”

Film and TV production levels in Los Angeles are now hovering at historic lows, with production costs so steep and union requirements so burdensome that no one wants to shoot anything in the city that once shot everything.

In its place, Quaid and a cadre of his fellow Texans – Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Renée Zellweger and more – embarked this year on an audacious public campaign that just a few years ago would’ve seemed like madness: a Texas-sized heist to steal Hollywood. And they did it by getting a horde of Texas conservatives to do something against every fiscal instinct in their bodies: giving money to celebrities, of all people.

The inception point came in Louisiana in 2002, when the passage of a generous film tax credit dramatically boosted production in the state. Hits such as Tom Cruise’s Oblivion and series like HBO’s True Blood were shot there thanks to the new regime, which inspired other states to follow suit. Soon Georgia, Oklahoma, New Mexico and others were getting in on the venture, luring studios into their states with the promise of tax breaks and incentives that would justify moving these massive film and television productions to industry executives, who loved the Hollywood parties but just couldn’t stomach the cost of making anything there anymore.

“California really is insanely expensive. Rarely did we shoot anything there. I’d be going to Slovakia or Canada. I love Canadians, but please don’t make me go to Canada again,” Quaid says. “If I was a young actor starting out today, I would not go to Los Angeles. I would go to Georgia, because Georgia’s got the smaller parts that, starting out, you want to get, and they’re not casting those in LA and flying those people there. They’re casting them locally.”

Texas has long been a major player in the film scene, stretching back to the heydays of Richard Linklater and Peter Bogdanovich. But since the state has no income tax, its ability to give exemptions and financial incentives for film production was always limited. “You can’t forgive a production for a thing you’re not charging them to begin with,” an industry lobbyist says. “So it was always, ‘You should be in Texas because it’s Texas’s thing.’ Well, Louisiana looks like Texas, New Mexico looks like Texas, so folks went there instead.”

So even as Texas saw the influx from California of the tech industry and Silicon Valley, and the cultural coin of comedians who followed Joe Rogan from the Comedy Store to Austin, the justification for moving production just wasn’t as strong.

The award-winning 2016 Western crime drama Hell or High Water starring Jeff Bridges, for example, was set in Texas but actually filmed in New Mexico because of the state’s 30 percent tax rebate. Its screenwriter – at the time, a middling working actor on the series Sons of Anarchy – found this frustrating. A decade later, and Taylor Sheridan, creator of Yellowstone, is the reason Texas is taking a path no one thought it ever would.

‘Hollywood’s leftist, woke ideology is polluting the minds of Americans. It’s time to end it’

“The budget on [the TV series] 1883 was $169 million, 1923 was over $250 million. Landman was $150-something-million, and I think on Lioness it was almost $170 million,” Sheridan testified in a hearing last year before Texas legislators, which was aimed at boosting funding for film and television production in the state. “Someone asked which of those would still have filmed here had there not been an incentive. And the answer is none – not one of them.”

Sheridan is the biggest name in television at the moment – and the main reason anyone has a Paramount+ account. His Yellowstone universe of Western-themed elevated soap opera is the conversation-driving populist scripted drama Americans absolutely love, spawning merchandising tie-ins, Western-wear revivals – and a marked resurgence in cowboy-boot sales. Landman, the latest entry in his sprawling list of projects, is a hit vehicle for Billy Bob Thornton, who has strong links to Texas and chews his way through Michelob Ultras while making the strongest case for fossil fuels outside of an American Petroleum Institute office. Landman was made in Texas, thanks to the state’s (at the time) minor tax benefit.

“With an investment as big as we’ve made on Landman, for the show to not go for three or four [seasons] makes no sense from an investment standpoint for the network. They have to bet on this and they have to bet big,” Sheridan testified. “What becomes a real challenge for the network, from an accounting standpoint, is not knowing how much, if any, incentive is going to exist for that year.” All that changed after this year’s Texas legislative session. An expressed willingness to consider expanded tax credits by Governor Greg Abbott, backed by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (who multiple sources say was charmed by Sheridan’s success and the potential of stealing business from the Californians) led to Texas passing a dramatic expansion of financial benefits for production efforts – to the tune of $1.5 billion over the next decade.

The move came over the objections of many of the Republican politicians’ most conservative supporters. One state senator objected on the basis that many celebrities have been arrested recently, while a state representative generated a song – “Don’t Hollywood My Texas” – using artificial intelligence. On the floor of the House, State Representative David Lowe decried handing out funds to “the same industry that once hailed Harvey Weinstein as a hero and turned a blind eye to his abuse for years…   trashed us for supporting President Trump, mocked us for standing up for the unborn, vilified us for opposing gender transitions for children and ridiculed our Christian faith at every opportunity.” The package passed 114 to 26.

Despite conservative frustrations, the optimism around what this expanded program means for Texas is enormous, particularly at a time when California has shown a steadily degrading interest in altering its heavy regulatory burden or easing back on the policies that make life ridiculously expensive for below-the-line film workers. For industry veterans in Texas, the possibilities are significant.

Austin native C. Robert Cargill – screenwriter of Sinister, Doctor Strange and The Black Phone – describes the incentives as being the basis for an unprecedented uptick in film production. “When I originally wrote Sinister, I wanted to set it in Texas. And because of the shooting situation, we set it in Pennsylvania and shot it in New York because of the incentives. It was a low budget movie and you need those incentives to be able to stretch the dollar,” he says. “We have the infrastructure, we have the studio space we’ve got here in Austin. We’ve got great crews here. We’ve got a lot of really inventive, creative people here. So what this means is we can make a Blumhouse movie here in Texas now.”

Social conservatives have expressed concern that the potential influx of Hollywood personalities into Texas will fundamentally change the political make-up of the state. But there’s also the potential for Texas to become a greater influence on the cultural content that is still one of America’s greatest exports. For Governor Abbott, the potential cultural advantage is clear. “Hollywood’s leftist, woke ideology is polluting the minds of Americans,” he says. “It’s time to end it.” The incentives, he claims, are part of an intentional effort to “divert filmmaking from California and provide it through the lens of traditional American values.” But given Texas’s political make-up, it’s not as if they’re introducing a new species of voter – they already exist in every major Texas city. “Trump won over Biden by half a million votes,” Cargill says. “In Texas, there’s a lot of liberals here. All the big cities are liberal. One of the great things about living in Texas is you get to live in a liberal city run by conservatives in terms of economics.”

For actor Zachary Levi, the star of Shazam! and Chuck, the potential in this new pro-filmmaking regime goes further than just creating for the screen. “I went to Texas because of my whole life growing up in California, the writing’s been on the wall for a really long time. It’s not good for business when you’re overregulating, when you’re overtaxing, when your bureaucratic red tape is a mile thick,” he says. “I’ve felt this calling on my life literally since I was a kid, but certainly since I started working in Hollywood that my job on this planet was to go and try to build a better version of Hollywood. And unfortunately, you can’t really change it from the inside. It’s so broken. It’s never really valued the artist.”

His Wyldwood Studios project in the city of Bastrop is intended to be a new version of the factory towns of yore, with a community of creatives and massive studio spaces. “Back in the day the Hollywood community was all in Los Angeles, and everything was shot in LA. Originally, they were their own little kind of factory towns – Warner Brothers and Disney and all,” he says. “There they were, all these little islands that popped up in the middle of the desert, essentially, and it was some soundstages with no wall around them. And they had offices and they had a bunch of bungalows that were surrounding the stages and that’s where everybody lived. You could consistently work and you’d go from one project to another and you’d work with a lot of the same people, kind of in this creative troupe. And there’s something that’s really special about that.

“But unfortunately in Hollywood now, because all these jobs happen in all these different places, we as actors were constantly forced to live this oil-rig-platform life where we kiss our kids and our wife goodbye and say, ‘Hey, I’ll see you in a few months.’”

Now the Lone Star State is coming for the big, bright jewel of cultural capital

Levi envisions a production city that is a font of new creative work, breaking away from a Hollywood hierarchy he views as tired and stuck in its ways. “My dream scenario is multiple thousand-acre campuses all over the country – and all over the world – that are really full live, work, play intentional cities that are built for those who work in the arts and sciences of entertainment, in the lineage of United Artists. It’s creating a studio that takes the power back into the hands of the artists collectively.”

Already he and his team are looking at projects to produce, with a mind on building off the success of films that have appealed to red-state audiences. The need now is for the studios to build something equivalent to Pinewood Studios in England. Quaid cites the interest of the likes of Ross Perot, Jr. and others who want to invest, as well as money from the tech and oil industries, as a positive sign for future technological capabilities.

Quaid has designs on building a marine tank similar to the one in which parts of James Cameron’s Titanic were filmed, because a water set of that size doesn’t currently exist in the US. And as for movie-making generally, he thinks much of the investment is going to flow to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, rather than Austin.

“I’ve been reading a lot about the old oil guys back there in Texas, way back in the 1900s with Spindletop,” Quaid says. “Texans learned from that. The legislature made it a business friendly environment to make Texas the oil capital of the world. Then you fast forward to the tech industry, starting with Michael Dell back in the 1980s, who had a little start-up company for computers. And now Elon Musk has moved from California to Austin. And the same thing can happen with the film industry.

“I love the fact that America is still the cultural powerhouse of the world. I think America is going back to its values – its real values. We’ve always been a country that is willing to experiment. We have big hearts and try different things. We’re coming back to our values. And that’s a very great thing.”

The story of America in the 21st century is one of conservative states such as Texas eating liberal ones like California for lunch, even when it comes to the industries they hold most dear. Texas has devoured the tech industry, seized the cultural zeitgeist with comedy and become a haven for freedom lovers in the Covid era.

Now the Lone Star State is coming for the big, bright jewel of cultural capital – elevating cacti over palm trees, bone-in ribeyes over vegan foam – and the bright lights of Sixth Street over Hollywood and Vine.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2025 World edition.