Jennifer West, a former television production manager for New Line Cinema, is the first manager of the new Sacramento Film Office.
The city has launched the office after studying the idea for nearly a year with an eye toward expanding, Sacramento’s role for commercial film and media production.
The idea for the office was fostered by the attention Sacramento received from being the location and setting for the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” which earned five Academy Award nominations.
West started this week, and she is currently assessing what is available locally in terms of crew, production facilities and talent.
She said Sacramento has a chameleon ability to portray most cities in the country, and it has great backdrops of rivers, bridges, the historic district and other filming locations.
“It can be any city in America,” West said, adding that the city needs to reintroduce itself to the rest of the country. “The Sacramento of today isn’t the same Sacramento it was 10, five or even two years ago.”
The film office for Sacramento previously had been an office of the nonprofit Visit Sacramento, the region’s visitors and convention bureau.
Lucy Steffins, the previous Sacramento County film commissioner, retired at the end of September, but Steffens is helping transition the Visit Sacramento film commissioner's office to the new city office.
Under the visitors bureau, the role of the film commission was to attract as large of a crew as possible to film locally so that they would all stay in local hotels. Under the city, the t
op priority will be to support local crews and talent, West said.
At this point, the office doesn’t have any budget to offer incentives to filmmakers, but West said she is interested in creating incentives to subsidize the use of local crews on film locations. The city will also issue film permits with no fee, she said.
West grew up in Lodi, but moved to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. She started doing freelance production finance and then moved to production accounting. She worked on films including “Batman Forever,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” before moving on to work on television animated features for New Line Cinema.
She moved to Sacramento to raise her family and help launch her husband’s chiropractic practice. She also served in the office of City Councilmember Jeff Harris.
This story was reported by Mark Anderson of the Sacramento Business Journal.
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