CHALMETTE, La – On a Hollywood South sound stage, somewhere south of New Orleans, Jason Waggenspack rounds up the movies and TV productions scheduled to shoot.
Jason runs The Ranch Film Studios.
WGNO’s Bill Wood is on location.
The Ranch is one busy place.
Filming movies and TV productions and booking into the middle of next year.
That’s 2022.
The pandemic created an extraordinary appetite for movies and TV shows to watch while we’ve all been stuck at home.
Now, as movie theaters begin to open up, the need increases.
And The Ranch Film Studios is working to create the creativity.
At the Ranch, there’s a guy with the letter “R” on his shirt.
That’s Jason Waggenspack.
How did he come to call his studio, The Ranch?
He says, “I did a little research, homage to studios in California, all called ranches, because they’d film all the country westerns and they would build the sound stages in the middle of those areas.”
Hollywood found a home in Louisiana because movies can me made here for a fraction of what they’d cost just about anyplace else.
From Disney to Netflix to Lionsgate, all the big names mosey on in to The Ranch.
“We’ve got four sound stages and the biggest one in the state of Louisiana,” Jason says.
When WGNO’s Bill Wood asks, “why do movies matter so much in Louisiana?”
Jason says, “because they tell a story, stories are in every single one of us.”
As the head of his own movie studio, Jason Waggenspack gets to give himself his own title.
He calls himself, the Head of Possibilities.
Because in Hollywood, anything’s possible.
Especially when you make movies in Louisiana.