The California Capital Film Office is opening a new theater for live performances, and planning an international film festival for Rancho Cordova this fall.
During the pandemic, the Cal Cap Film Office worked on building out its services and finishing construction of an 80-seat black box theater at its office in Rancho Cordova, said Charles Lago, director and co-founder of the film office. Its first show, an award-winning one-woman show about Billie Holiday called "Billie! Backstage with Lady Day," is set to open this Friday.
“I was in a hurry to open, really because I knew the minute people can go back and see live stuff, I think there may be a hunger for it,” Lago said.
“So far, people are interested; tickets are selling,” Lago said.
"Billie!" will be followed by a full lineup of traveling one-person shows and original plays by Sacramento-based playwright Richard Broadhurst that address current issues around the pandemic and quarantine and race and policing.
“The goal is to just really build the theater, and really good programming,” Lago said. “I’m very picky about what we bring in.”
Lago, a longtime Hollywood film producer and talent manager, said he is using his connections to bring acclaimed shows from Los Angeles to the theater.
“The theater is my big thing,” Lago said. “I really want to make the theater work, because I really believe it can.”
At the same time, the film office has started an improv group, which will perform at the theater regularly.
The office is also planning to hold a film festival in Rancho Cordova this October. The festival, called the California Capital International Documentary Film
Festival, already has 30 documentary films submitted from around the world. The festival will bring in filmmakers from Los Angeles and beyond, Lago said.
At the beginning of 2020, the film office moved into a larger space at the Old Mills Winery office park on Horn Road in Rancho Cordova. The new office included a 2,000-square-foot-space that Lago wanted to turn into a theater.
Lago used his connections in the film industry to line up a series of speakers, including actors Ed Asner and Doug Hutchinson and Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then Covid-19 hit and canceled many of those events.
The pandemic also brought the film industry to a halt. Lago said he had lined up two independent films to shoot in the Sacramento region, but the shoots were canceled due to the pandemic.
He is working on finding more that want to film here, but the pandemic has made that more difficult. During the pandemic, some film producers relocated shoots to states that had fewer Covid restrictions.
“Then when they got there, they figured out ‘hey, it’s much cheaper here than it is in California,’” Lago said. Some film crews have left California, and the tax incentives that some states offer to the film industry could make bringing them back a hard sell.
In the meantime, Lago has assembled a local film crew, and the office has begun producing video content for local companies. The film office produces many videos for the city of Rancho Cordova, including recruiting videos and public announcements, as well as social media content and advertisements for businesses.
This article was written by Emily Hamann for the Sacramento Business Journal.
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