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| Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan gets tour of Texas Senate from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in February 2023 |
Patrick Tags Film Incentives as Priority
as Actors Tout Texas as New Hollywood
Capitol Inside
January 30, 2025
A handful of Texans who are famous movie stars appear to have the state's most powerful Republican leaders in their corner for a high-dollar advertising campaign touting the transformation of Texas into the new mecca for television production and filmmaking.
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson have the lead roles in a new video that makes a pitch to Texas lawmakers for a substantial infusion of funds for incentives that would be a magnet for producers to shoot their films and movies in the Lone Star State.
Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton and Renee Zellweger all have supporting parts in the 4-minute commercial that revolves on a road trip that Harrelson and McConaughey are taking in an ostensible reprisal of the characters they played in the first season of the television series True Detective. Nic Pizzolatto - a Louisiana native who created the True Detective show - directed the ad that's seeking a boost in state outlays for the Texas incentive program.
"A small fraction of the Texas budget surplus could turn this state into the new Hollywood," Harrelson says in the video.
As McConaughey gave the effort a plug in a post on X on Wednesday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced that a bill that would establish Texas as "America's film capital" would be one of his leading priorities for the regular session that got under way two weeks ago in Austin. Governor Greg Abbott has backed film incentives but never made a concerted push to make the program here first-rate as an apparent result of its unpopularity on the far right.
The release of the ad that Pizzolatto helmed triggered an immediate outburst of criticism in Texas conservative ranks. "Please leave the woke, leftist crap in California," Austin-based activist Michael Quinn Sullivan declared on Thursday in an X post. "No one wants to see it, and Texans don't want to pay for it."
Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller took a shot at the film incentives push as well. "Hollywood is dying," Miller wrote on Thursday on X. "Productions can't get out of California fast enough. Texas will benefit without subsidizing the folks that brought us woke, anti-Christian bigotry, socialism, transgenderism, etc."
The conservative critics declined to mention Patrick in the scathing social media reviews. But the lieutenant governor could hold the key to the film and TV incentives revival after doing little or nothing for years to stop fellow conservatives in the Republican-controlled Legislature from scaling it back to protest liberals in Hollywood.
"Ain't all that money for big corporate welfare for Hollywood studios?" Harrelson in a devil's advocate line that he poses to McConaughey while the two are traveling in the front seat of a car that has Quaid riding in the back.
McConaughey disputes the claim - contending that the Texas economy would get four new dollars for every one that the Legislature invests in incentives.
"We've got deserts," Quaid says. "We got forests. We got oceans. We got rolling hills. Is there anything we don't have?"
While Texans have been watching the actors in the commercial on big and small screens since the 1980s, Central Texas product Taylor Sheridan may be the most valuable player in the Texas film industry campaign if its successful as a consequence of a friendship that he forged with Patrick nearly a year ago.
Sheridan created and an array of hit TV series including Yellowstone, Landman, Lioness, 1923, Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King. Sheridan, who was raised in Cranfills Gap and Fort Worth, directed several major films as well like Hell or High Water, Sicario and Wind River.
The Texas film industry was starting to thrive 20 years ago when movies like the eventual Oscar winner No Country for Old Men were being set and made here. But conservatives turned against it after the state pulled the plug on funding that it had promised San Antonio native Robert Rodriguez for the filming of the movie Machete Kills here in 2014. Thin-skinned Republicans were angry over the portrayal of a Texas senator as a killer who hunted migrants for sport at the border in the Rodriguez film that spawned the sequel.
But Patrick began to warm up to the incentives program after giving Sheridan a tour of the Texas Senate after the two had dinner together in February 2023. Patrick gushed with praise for Sheridan in statements on his web site and social media.
Sheridan "has incredible talent and an amazing success story. He’s the best screenwriter of our time and one of the best storytellers ever to make movies," the lieutenant governor said at the time. "Best yet, he’s a Texan and gets Texas. My goal is for Taylor to move all of his TV and movie production to Texas. Working together, I think we can get it done."
more to come ...
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