The road to a finished feature film may start with the script, but it’s also potholed with location scouting, permits to close streets or simply set up, and the daily requirements for food and drink, accommodations, and unexpected equipment or crewmember needs. For the host city or county, that can all amount to a lot of income, a stream Santa Barbara County supervisors considered tapping into on Tuesday through the creation of a new film commissioner position.
The idea isn’t entirely new to the area. The tourism-oriented nonprofit Visit Santa Barbara fielded a film commissioner for about three decades until 2019, whose work encompassed much of what the county envisions: help with locations, permits, local trades, and services. It helped make possible feature films, like 2004’s Sideways starring Paul Giamatti and Santa Ynez Valley’s vineyards and restaurants, as well as a variety of reality television shows and commercials.
“The county looks great on screen,” said Daisy Weber, a staffer with Supervisor Roy Lee’s office, who presented the idea with Lee’s chief of staff, Wade Cowper. As well as the county’s diversity of land- and city-scapes, production companies would appreciate a “one-stop service” for productions, whose costs can’t afford delays, they said.
And the demand exists. County Planning Director Lisa Plowman said her staff received about one film permit or location inquiry per week, about half of which they were able to help and about half of which they never heard from again. The fees they charged were limited to staff time, which amounted to about $59,000 in 2025, Plowman said.
On the overall income side, a case in point is Big Little Lies, which was shot in Monterey County and starred Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. The production netted $3.6 million in spending in Monterey County on hotels, location and permit fees, purchases, and rentals during the second season. The show employed 1,040 extras, paying them more than $200,000 in wages over the course of 34 days of shooting. If this had been in Santa Barbara County, Cowper noted, hotel bed taxes might have been as much as $240,000.
The Oscar-winning film Sideways had economic benefits to the county and to pinot noir almost overnight, Weber recalled. Largely filmed in Santa Ynez Valley, the movie took Paul Giamatti through wineries and wines, serving to increase visitation by 20 percent in one year, she said, while pinot noir sales worldwide rose 16 percent. Wineries, which numbered 60 in the county in 2004, rose to more than 300 today and remain a major source of tourism.
The county’s filmmaking history is the stuff of legend, from the 1,000 silents produced by the Flying “A” Studios in the 1910s to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in the Guadalupe dunes to more recent phenomena like Love Island at the historic Dos Pueblos Ranch and the Oscar-capturing One Battle After Another, which filmed key scenes at La Purisima Mission State Historic Park in Lompoc. Cowper called attention to the last film, saying that a county film commissioner could have coordinated with the state’s film commission to promote hotels or other services based in Santa Barbara County for the shoot.
The supervisors were unanimous in their support for the economic opportunities a film commissioner would bring, though Supervisor Joan Hartmann said funding the position amid the deficits the county faced might be problematic. Lee commented, “It takes money to make money,” while Supervisor Bob Nelson proved to be a film buff, recalling that The Spirit of St. Louis and The Rocketeer were filmed at the Santa Maria Airport, a couple of facts he hoped to see when the item came back before budget reviews.
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