Episode Details

Oh Cala Wood.
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Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor 
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue
Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or 
212-433-2525 

If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere.
Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write.
Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes.
There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press.
For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percen