They have the lights. They have the cameras. Now, all that the crew at Silver State Production Services needs is some action.
A Las Vegas-based film production company, Silver State is positioning itself as a local resource for moviemakers, providing services ranging from booking hotel rooms and arranging catering to scouting locations and hiring local camera operators, make-up artists and sound technicians to staff shoots.
The company also is amassing cameras, lights and production trailers to provide technical infrastructure for film crews working across Nevada.
“We’re trying to be a knowledge base for anybody who comes to Nevada,” founder Chris Ramirez said. “There’s never been a central hub for crew that a client can call and say, ‘Who do you have for cameraman?' "
The company has been working around Las Vegas since the beginning of the year, but formally announced its presence this month by taking over a block of the Fremont Street East district and transforming it into a movie set.
Although the neon and casinos of Las Vegas have long been featured in movies, too often film crews only spend a few days in the city before leaving the state to finish the filming and production elsewhere, Ramirez said.
“They’ll come here just to get the lights and the stuff they don’t want to fake, then they’ll go back to New Mexico,” he said.
Silver State is run by Ramirez and Mark Balint, both film industry veterans, out of an office at Emergency Arts downtown, which they share with Ramirez’s dog Abby. The company employs two other full-time staff members and says it can assemble as many as 100 freelance crew members for shoots.
Ramirez and Balint are fierce advocates for bringing more of the film industry to Las Vegas. They say the city offers a versatile environment — including suburbs, mountains, desert and urban neighborhoods — in which to shoot movies, commercials or television series and that its proximity to Southern California gives it an advantage over other states trying to woo the film industry.
“Nevada has a surprising amount of looks between northern Nevada and Las Vegas,” Ramirez said. “You can fake a lot of different areas. For a movie we did years ago, I used Sunset Park for Connecticut.”
But luring more film production to Nevada likely will require the state to offer some sort of incentives, Balint said, similar to tax credits offered to the industry in 44 other states.
“If we were able to narrow that (incentive) gap, we’d get a lot more production here,” Balint, Silver State’s head of production, said.
A bill creating tax incentives introduced in the Assembly last year failed to pass, but the Governor’s Office of Economic Development and the Nevada Film Office are researching the effectiveness of different incentives before the 2013 session.
“Las Vegas is the ultimate movie set. It allows for great narratives; it’s got iconic national and international appeal,” said Dave Berns, spokesman for the economic development office. "We see ourselves as becoming a one-stop location for all aspects of film production.”
Silver State has already done commercial work for Nike and booked several upcoming productions, including a movie based on the novel, “The Delivery Man,” which is set in Las Vegas. The movie is scheduled to be filmed here later this year.
Ramirez and Balint also have ties to northern Nevada after providing production services for the “The Motel Diaries,” which stars actors Emile Hirsch and Dakota Fanning and has received early accolades at several film festivals.
“Northern Nevada doesn’t have much of an industry, and now after 'The Motel Life' … we probably have more experience there than anyone,” Ramirez said. “We did a train scene in Mound House, a bunch of work in Virginia City. We did a scene at Lake Tahoe and spent a month in Reno.”
Ramirez and Balint hope that Silver State can help catalyze the further development of the film industry in Nevada by providing work to local crews and drawing in projects that would normally go to other states.
“The potential here is unlimited,” Ramirez said. “There’s already a real sense of community around film here and we want to help”