Kansas City was Hollywood’s new production sweetheart in the 1990s. Local producer Patti Broyles (né Watkins), who had moved to Los Angeles from Kansas City to work on feature films, got a call from then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver’s office to come home and set up a film commission office. It was 1994.
“I flew back and met with a bunch of people about that and did a budget for what I thought it would take,” Broyles says. “That was a time when film commissioners were really starting to get noticed for how much economic impact they could have.”
Broyles worked with both the Missouri Film Commission and Kansas Film Commission to develop incentives for film companies to shoot here, hit the road to pitch the city to Los Angeles and New York flimmakers, and talked director Ang Lee into coming to Kansas City instead of Texas to shoot Ride with the Devil.
Broyles aggressively marketed the city to the production communities in Los Angeles and New York, hawking filmmaking incentives created with the help of both the Kansas and Missouri film commissions and promoting the talent and crews available here.
Broyles and the new KC Film Commission were a major force, bringing moviemaking to KC throughout the 1990s. Broyles’ efforts reportedly brought in $80 million to the local economy during her time as commissioner.
Lawrence was attacked by cultish invaders. Martians blew up a small Kansas town. A veteran’s hospital near Liberty Memorial was burned to the ground. Gangsters and jazz greats prowled the bars and clubs along 18th and Vine. A serial killer was stalking victims in midtown as a psychic worked with police to stop him. All were real Hollywood filmmaking illusions created with the help of Kansas City cast and crews.
Rising stars, industry darlings and Academy Award winners walked the streets of Kansas City during that decade. Peter Boyle, Ellen Burstyn, Tobey Maguire, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Gary Sinise, Steve Buscemi, Mark Ruffalo, Jeffrey Wright, Ray Liotta, Forest Whitaker and Harry Belafonte were all working here. Hollywood had found a new welcoming backlot in and around Kansas City, complete with an available who’s who of local actors to draw from and an A-list pool of movie-making craftspeople eager to show off their skills.
Broyles resigned in 2002 when the city didn’t support the budget she wanted. The commission languished for a couple of years and closed in 2004. Local film production leaders such as talent company co-owner Heather Laird and local film and video production company leader Teri Rogers stepped in and tried to keep a semblance of it working for years afterwards.
Then, a 2011 report from then-mayor Sly James’ task force on the arts found filmmaking and media production could bring millions of dollars into the local economy. The city council set aside $50,000 in tourism tax dollars, matched by the KC Convention and Visitors Bureau, and hired a new director, Steph Scupham (né Shannon), who reopened the office in 2014, and a new production era was unleashed.
Scupham stepped down in early 2024 to take a producer job at KCPT and was replaced by Rachel Kephart, a former casting assistant working with Heather Laird who held a similar role in 2020 with Visit KC (the new name of the KC Convention and Visitors Bureau). Over the last few years, the commission reinstated dormant incentives and created new ones for filmmaking in the city and the state of Missouri that reportedly has Hollywood production companies taking renewed interest in KC filming. Although a few notable titles, such as Boris Is Dead starring Dane Cook and several Lifetime and Hallmark movies, have been filmed over the last couple years, only time will tell if KC once again turns into a filming hot spot.
Meet five locals who helped make movie magic right here in KC.
Mike Neu
television commercial producer
Worked on: Ride With the Devil in 1998, a feature about border skirmishes during the Civil War.
“I can’t tell you how cool it was to work on that film,” Neu says. “It was my first big feature, a Western by an auteur director (Ang Lee) in my hometown.”
Neu worked for the locations department, then got switched over to the transportation department, where he worked for six months as a cast and crew driver. “I was Tobey Maguire’s driver for a month or so, until they brought in Jewel,” Neu says. “I was terrified because Jewel was hot at that time, with songs in the charts and a reputation as a real diva.”
Neu met her in the location department when she arrived. “I opened the door of our office and bunk, I heard a thud,” he says. “I had hit somebody. I looked around and it was Jewel. I had just slammed the door straight into her. She was fine, but I was mortified.”
The production company built a set modeled after 1863 Lawrence, Kansas, in Pattonsburg, Missouri, ran 300 horses through it to simulate Quantrill’s Raid and then burned it down. All the cast and crew stayed in a hotel in town for about three weeks during the production of that scene. “We just descended on this town.” Neu says. “All the local bars were full every night. It was a constant party.”
Heather Laird
talent agent
Worked on: A Deadly Vision in 1997, a CBS Movie of the Week about a psychic who helps police find a serial killer.
Film producers had their lead actors already attached to the project—Peter Boyle, Ellen Burstyn, Kristin Davis, among others. Laird’s job was to book the remaining roles using her Kansas City connections.
“Director Bill Norton had asked us to get some kind of shady looking people to be in the background for a scene in a sketchy grocery store on Broadway,” Laird says. “So we found the tattoo-est and most pierced, scraggly looking people that we could possibly find in our files to be in that scene. I was told later that when they were actually on set, Bill was confused about who were the background actors and who were the actual patrons of the store.”
Peter Boyle did All Roads Lead Home in Kansas City in 2008, Laird says, which turned out to be his last film role before he died. “I was on the same set with him during filming of A Deadly Vision,” she says. “When he came back in 2008, right when they were wrapping him out on set, he came walking up to me and shook my hand and said it was a pleasure working with me. I was so touched that he made a point of coming over and saying something to me.”
Jeff Owens
special effects creator
Worked on: Article 99 in 1990, a feature about doctors and staff in a veteran’s hospital fighting bureaucracy.
Owens and his crew built a replica of a real veteran’s hospital just south of an actual hospital, which they then burned down as part of the film’s story. “That hospital build was a trip because it wasn’t part of the original budget of the film,” Owens says. “I had 20 great carpenters helping me, and then I had to ask each one of them to find somebody when we got that extra workload. It was the biggest crew I’ve ever had to use.”
The trickiest part was the military cemetery set near the hospital, Owens says. The crew installed 11,000 faux headstones, so no matter where you stood, there was a straight line of headstones stretching far into the distance. “That’s way harder than it looks,” Owens says. “We tried to do it just on our own, and it was impossible. So we hired a good friend of mine, a surveyor, and he went out and surveyed all the lines so that it would work out. After he laid it all out with little flags, we went in and started setting up the foam headstones.”
Owens had his run-ins with the Hollywood crowd working on this film and other feature films shot in Kansas City. “I had to go in and protect my crew and be a force to be dealt with until they realized that we could do anything that they could do in California,” he says.
Andy Wegst
cinematographer
Worked on: Mars Attacks! in 1996, a feature about invading Martians taking over the world.
Wegst was one of the rigging grips on the set where Martians destroyed a town, working under the tutelage of key grip Larry Aube, a Hollywood legend who later worked on Spider-Man, Fast and Furious, Terminator 3 and other blockbusters. “I learned a lot,” Wegst says.
Aube took Wegst and another grip to Hooters for lunch one day toward the end of production on the town set. “We sit down, and Larry ordered three pitchers of beer right off the bat, one for each of us. And we sat there for two hour and just got hammered. Then Larry got up and was like, ‘Okay, boys, I got to go back to L.A. Nice working with you.’ The Teamster driver drove us back to the set, and we spent the rest of the day hiding in the grip truck trying to stay off the set.”
Andrew Wegst.
Director Tim Burton was classic. “He would drive a golf cart around like he was a NASCAR driver,” Wegst says. “He would screech up to the set and pound the brakes and skid out. He was hilarious.”
Burton did the special effects the old-fashioned way—no CGI. “When the doughnut shop blew up, it went big,” Wegst says. “I think the special effects guys thought they overdid it. I would imagine nowadays, if you’re working on a Marvel movie or whatever, everything is on a soundstage and green screen. It was just fun to see how an old school Hollywood blockbuster film was made.” Wegst went on to work as a nature cinematographer, working with Peter Fonda and others. He won a national Emmy in 2017 for outstanding cinematography for a PBS episode of Nature about hummingbirds.
Steve Fracol
Steadicam operator and director of photography
Worked on: Kansas City in 1995, a feature about politics, power and jazz in Kansas City in the 1930s.
Fracol recently ended a stretch of working in Hollywood on such productions as Grey’s Anatomy and Sons of Anarchy. But his big Hollywood break came in Kansas City, working for Robert Altman on Kansas City.
Fracol’s job was shooting background driving plates for the car driving scenes. Altman had that footage projected behind Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson sitting in a car on a set to simulate them driving around Kansas City. “That was my entrance into the film.”
Fracol also shot all of the behind-the-scenes interviews with the jazz musicians starring in the movie. “It was a moment for me,” he says. “It was very, very cool.”
After that, Fracol focused on learning more about Steadicam operation, which led to work in Los Angeles in 2008. “I was literally the luckiest guy ever in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, and that just kept snowballing into more and more work,” he says.
Hollywood is all about who you know, Fracol says. “I don’t care how good a person is. If they don’t know a producer or somebody in there who is pulling for them, chances are you’re not going to get a job.” Fracol won 2015 Camera Operator of the Year award for his work on Scandal, a popular ABC political thriller.
