When Kelley Hiatt moved to St. Louis from Los Angeles two years ago, she just assumed that she’d have to fly back and forth to southern California to keep working in her field.
A location manager for film and television, Hiatt got her start helping TV producer extraordinaire Dick Wolf find locations in her native Chicago for Chicago Fire and Chicago PD. Eventually, she moved to LA, where she found filming locations for Shonda Rhimes’ Shondaland productions. She had 20 years of experience in the industry when it was paralyzed by both actors/writers strikes in 2023. That’s when Hiatt and her husband decided to move to his hometown, St. Louis, even if it had an impact on her career.
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But Hiatt needn’t have worried. Coincidentally, in 2023, Missouri lawmakers approved a new set of tax credits for film and TV productions, resurrecting a program that went dark in 2013. The state can now give up to $16 million in tax credits each year for films and episodic TV that meets certain criteria. Hiatt was soon brought on board as the film commissioner for the St. Louis Film Office.
As she explains it, the office was absorbed by Explore St. Louis after the film credits petered out more than a decade ago. If someone needed permits to film at City Hall or Busch Stadium, the office would help cut through the red tape. But when the tax credits returned, Explore St. Louis swiftly realized it should be all in on promoting the region for productions, doing everything it could to ensure St. Louis got its share (or more) of the statewide credits. And who better to hire to run the amped up version than someone who’d just moved to St. Louis from L.A.—and had deep connections in the industry?
Explains Hiatt, “I’m out selling St. Louis as a viable location for filming.” And when you know people in the business, that means proactively contacting production companies, not just waiting for inquiries. “I say, ‘Hey, listen, I know that you’ve got a script, and I know that you have something that you’re trying to get made, but let me tell you about St. Louis and the locations we have, because you have another script that’s going to get made, or it’s in your drawer that you’ve just been waiting to make, and we can do it here.’”
The results speak for themselves. As of Sept. 15, all but $1.5 million of Missouri’s tax credits for the year have been used up, with more already committed, and Hiatt is pleased to report a big chunk have gone to St. Louis. St. Louis native Jossalyn Smith premiered a film she shot in St. Louis, Ride or Die, at Tribeca Film Festival this June. This August, up-and-comers Iliza Shlesinger (Good on Paper, A Different Animal) and Lola Tung (The Summer I Turned Pretty) were in St. Louis filming a script by Shlesinger tentatively titled Summer, 2001.
Then, in October, another St. Louis native, J. Lee, known for The Orrville, is coming to shoot his movie, Jacob Beats Up Nate, which stars Justin Long and recent Emmy winner Lamorne Morris. That’ll be followed by a few days of filming in downtown St. Louis for A24’s The Chaperones, starring Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman).
Summer, 2001 is a great example of how St. Louis can stand in for Anywhere, U.S.A. (in a way that, ironically, is much harder for Los Angeles to do, Hiatt says). The script was based in Dallas, Hiatt says, but Missouri’s tax credits were attractive to the production. And once the producer came to town, Hiatt’s knowledge of location scouting proved critical. “I just drove around for two days, and I showed him everywhere that looked like Dallas,” she says. “They knew they needed a roller skating rink. So we looked at a bunch of roller skating rinks. And then within a week, they said, ‘OK, we’re coming to Missouri.’”
For Hiatt, the job begins by selling filmmakers on St. Louis as a great place to film, but it doesn’t end there. “I say that I’m kind of like the batphone,” she says. “So if a production needs to call me because they can’t get through a roadblock, I’ve got the batphone to certain people where I can work through it.”
Earlier this summer, a film production wanted to use Kiener Plaza for a day of shooting, only to realize outdoor yoga had been scheduled for the same site. “It’s an education thing for me,” she says. “Coming from the film office, I can call the city parks department and say, ‘Hey, I understand that you’ve got a yoga class going, and that’s awesome and amazing, and I don’t want to disrupt that, but there has to be a way we can all work together.’” She says, “We’re here to show how beautiful Kiener Plaza is, show the Arch, and have the world see how amazing St Louis is. And that doesn’t have a price tag.”
Indeed, Hiatt is glad to be within Explore St. Louis because she sees her work as tied closely to tourism. It’s not just the vague idea of promoting St. Louis as a good place to be, and potentially charming the Hollywood crowd, although there’s that. It’s also the idea of Hollywood-inspired tourism. Once a movie becomes a hit, people come to check out where the magic happened.
Sometimes that’s not even tied to the filming location. The Netflix hit Ozark may have been filmed in Atlanta, but it brought interest to the Lake of the Ozarks where it was set. “People are exposed to it through the show, and they think it’s cool and beautiful and amazing,” she says. “There are ways to capitalize on screen tourism, even if it isn’t necessarily filmed where it takes place.”
And Hiatt hopes a movie premiering this Thursday in St. Louis could have an even bigger bump on local tourism. Soul on Fire, the John O’Leary biopic starring John Corbett and William H. Macy, was a big reason Missouri restored its film tax credits—and it started filming in St. Louis in 2023, just one week after Hiatt started her job with the St. Louis Film Office. She can’t wait for the world to see the St. Louis story it tells.
“It really shows St. Louis in such a beautiful light,” she says. “And it’s the kind of thing where maybe you’ve got a kid watching with their parents, and they see Saint Louis University and they’re like, ‘Wait a second, I didn’t know there was a college like that in St. Louis. I want to go check that out.’ And it really is a love letter to St. Louis.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story provided the wrong date for when Missouri’s film credits expired. It was 2013, not 2011. We regret the error.
