Cincinnati Films

Cincinnati and the tri-state region have recently become a hotbed for film production. This began with the Academy Award-nominated film Carol, shot here in the spring of 2014, followed closely by Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic, Miles Ahead, and what was originally shot as The Blunderers but will be released as A Kind of Murder starring Jessica Biel and Patrick Wilson. More recently, a Sikh boxing picture (yes that is a real genre) titled Tiger and starring Mickey Rourke was shot north of Cincinnati in Hamilton along with the James Franco-produced Goat, which was a modest hit at Sundance and was picked up for distribution.

To get an idea of what all this production means for local actors, we emailed three local actors who worked on at least one of the recent films to get their take on Cincinnati’s role as the Hollywood of the Midwest.

Ken Strunk, who has worked on 20 films in his career, thinks part of the reason that so many productions are coming in is because “It’s easy to make parts of Cincy look like New York of old, Ohio tax breaks and the biggest of all is the fact that it is so much less expensive to shoot here verses L.A. or New York. We have plenty of capable crew.” But, he adds, “The trend to shoot here comes and goes. Sometimes we’re hot and sometimes we’re not.”

Ken’s wife, Ann Reskin, who earned her SAG card shooting an Indiana Kroger commercial back in the late ’80s, played Cate Blanchett’s housekeeper in Carol. 

She told me that “Sandy Powell, three-time Oscar winner and costume designer on Carol, decided that everyone (perhaps the leads were excluded — I don’t know) needed to wear authentic period undergarments. I suppose she had her reasons, but I also think that she had never spent any length of time in said garments. Otherwise, I don’t think she would have thought it important enough to torture her actors. Authentic period undergarments meant a full-length, chest to mid-thigh, very tight contraption that quite frankly made it near to impossible to … well … suffice to say, once I realized how difficult it was going to be, after the first day on set, I tried not to drink anything all day. And some of those days were 10-11 hours. It was, shall we say, an ‘interesting’ experience. Gave me all kinds of new appreciation for what the women of that era went through to look good and be fashionable.”

Finally, there was Pepper Sweeny. Pepper had roles in Goat, Act of Contrition and Tiger. “I am fortunate to say I have been a [union] actor for over 25 years. After 20 years in L.A., I moved back to my roots here in the Cincinnati area. It is a great feeling to work on professional films in my hometown,” he said.

Pepper echoed the sentiments of the other actors in citing the Greater Cincinnati Film Commission, state tax incentives and a great talent pool of local actors and technicians as the reason for the increase in activity.

Finally, Pepper told a great story about working on Goat. “Director Andrew Neel allowed the actors to improvise most of our scenes. In one particular scene with fellow local actor Denise Del Vera and lead actor Ben Schnetzer, there was an undercurrent of tension, and the more we improvised, the fewer words we needed in the scene. By the last take, we hardly said anything. When given the chance to improvise, sometimes we, as actors, want to fill every second with dialogue. It took trust and restraint for the actors to just be in the scene.”

This item was originally featured in the June 2015 local newsletter.