Celtic Studios teeters on the edge of TV deal

Celtic Studios Director of Studio Operations Aaron Bayham is crossing his fingers. He’s expecting to hear in the next few days whether a new TV production will come to Baton Rouge and use Celtic’s largely vacant sound stages to film its episodes.
Though hopeful, he’s realistic. It’s been exactly one year since changes to the state’s movie tax credit program went into effect—changes intended to make the program competitive again and also to incentive production in markets outside of New Orleans.
But while the state overall is reporting an uptick in activity, most of the new work is still going to the Crescent City.
“New Orleans has gotten really busy and from what we’re hearing in talking to our counterparts down there, there’s no stage space available,” Bayham says. “That usually means we’ll fill up next. We’re hoping that’s going to be the case but it hasn’t happened yet.”
One key exception was the filming in March of “Greyhound,” a World War II drama written by and starring Tom Hanks. The mega-star spent several weeks in Baton Rouge filming at the U.S.S. Kidd and also at Celtic, where movie sets were built to simulate the interior of the battleship. Since local production on the film wrapped, however, it’s been quiet.
“About a month ago it seemed like something was going to land because we had five or six different projects looking at Baton Rouge that we were talking to,” Bayham says. “But most of them have gone one way or the other.”
After a tax incentive-based program in the early 2000s grew Louisiana’s movie industry to one of the busiest in the country, the Legislature in 2015 drastically scaled back the program, which critics say was costing the state more than it was generating in entertainment industry activity. As a result, new movie and TV production came to a virtual standstill. In 2017, state lawmakers again tweaked the program in an effort to undo some of the damage caused by the 2015 reforms.
Baton Rouge Film Commission Director Katie Pryor says summer is historically a slow time in the industry so the lack of activity at the moment doesn’t worry her. She believes as more producers return to the state—even if they initially go to New Orleans—they’ll become familiar with the program and eventually return to Baton Rouge.
“It took us a minute to build the industry last time,” she says. “I think it will take us a minute again to build it back up.”
In the meantime, Bayham is keeping open the sound stages at Celtic. Although the cavernous facility has been used periodically over the past couple of years to house everything from flood victims to mattress sales, nothing is on the books at the moment.
“We’re sort of in a holding pattern,” he says.