Lunch on Fridays: Greater Cleveland Film Commission

Greater Cleveland Film Commission President Bill Garvey and Production Coordinator Mike Wendt will discuss what makes filming in Northeast Ohio great during Lunch on Fridays at 12:15pm Friday, October 7 in CIA’s Peter B. Lewis Theater.

Why does Hollywood love to film in Northeast Ohio? Locations, locations, locations! From skyscrapers to small towns, beachfront to backwoods, Ohio has the unique ability to transform itself into almost any location filmmakers need it to be. Garvey and Wendt will take LOF attendees behind the scenes of some of Hollywood’s favorite movie locations that are right in our backyard.

Bill Garvey, President of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, is a former motion picture and television location manager and scout with 26 years of experience. He recently won the Location Managers Guild International Award for best period location management for his work on the academy award winning Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros, starring Daniel Kaluuya). His credits include White Noise (Netflix, starring Adam Driver), Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close), Fast & Furious 8: Fate of the Furious (Universal Pictures, starring Vin Diesel and The Rock), Captain America: Winter Soldier (Marvel Studios, starring Chris Evans), The Avengers (Marvel Studios, starring Robert Downey Jr.), and more than 30 other feature films, over a dozen TV shows and dozens of national and local TV commercials.

Mike Wendt is an award-winning director, producer and location manager/scout. He currently is the Production Coordinator for the GCFC. He has worked on films such as Captain America: Winter Soldier, Fate of the Furious, My Friend Dahmer and White Boy Rick. His first feature-length documentary, The End Of The World As We Knew It, was a selection of the 33rd Cleveland International Film Festival and his short film Goodbye, Ohio played numerous film festivals.

The Greater Cleveland Film Commission is the only 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to driving economic development and job creation by cultivating a robust film and television industry in Northeast Ohio. Since 2009, media projects in Ohio have generated over $1.2 billion in economic impact and created 6,192 full-time equivalent jobs. More than 70 percent of Ohio’s film tax incentive spending occurs in Greater Cleveland, thanks to GCFC’s work.