The Texas Round-Up

Film San Antonio turned 40 with 586 permits in 2025. Who runs it, who helps filmmakers, and how to start with permits, SAFI and crew calls.

Robert Benton shot all of Places in the Heart in Waxahachie, where he grew up, in the fall of 1983. A hotel became the bank, and a cotton gin came back to life.

Houston First launched a five-year film plan on October 7, run through the Houston Film Commission. Who runs it, who helps filmmakers, and what’s next.

Selena was shot in San Antonio and Corpus Christi in 1996. The Alamodome played the Astrodome, Poteet played Monterrey, and a college played the Grammys.

Former UT film students made it near Round Rock in the summer of 1973 for about $140,000, on 16mm stock rated ISO 25 and a very small lighting package.

Blank Check is set in Indiana and was shot in central Texas: an Austin castle, a San Antonio bank hall and theme park, and a Dallas fountain.

The Royal's exterior is in Archer City. Its interior is a different theater 30 miles away in Olney. Eight Oscar nominations, no stages, two lights.

Rodriguez took eight credits on one studio picture and made it at his own stages in a decommissioned Austin airport. The locations and the cost model.

The University of North Texas supplied the fictional Texas State. Fouts Field supplied the football. 17,000 locals showed up because the radio asked.

Shot in Texas: the 50 ranks every feature with more than half its principal photography in Texas by worldwide gross, counting down from 50 to 1 through August 2027.

Fifty-one acres and seventy structures near Dripping Springs, a January to June 2003 shoot, and what the record actually says about why the picture did not find its audience.

Planet Terror and Death Proof were shot back to back at Troublemaker Studios in 2006. The locations, the dates, and the one sequence that had to leave Texas.

Altman put nine of the film's ten weeks in Dallas: the Arboretum's Women's Garden, the NorthPark fountain, and a screenwriter from a Panhandle cotton town who had spent fifteen years as a script supervisor.

Plainview played Rustwater, Kansas for eleven shooting days in 1992, after two months of preparation, and the water tower kept the fictional name until 2016.

Every city owns the how-to-apply page. Nobody says how long it takes. Here are the published lead times for eight Texas jurisdictions, side by side, from their own pages, and the one clock that isn't the city's.

Man of the House shot on the University of Texas campus in late 2003, using the actual UT name, stadium, band and cheerleaders. The locations, the access it took, and what a live game day costs a schedule.

The same $3M show in three states, at base rates, with the rules that actually change the answer: transferability, caps, residency and crew travel. Including the cases where Texas loses.

One state office runs the grant. Eleven regional commissions run the ground. 220 certified communities, on the Commission’s map in November 2026, have a local liaison. Who does what, and who to call.

The Davis Mountains for the Rockies, the Hill Country for Provence, Palo Duro for the Outback, Caddo Lake for the Amazon, and four European villages that shouldn't exist here. With the honest limits.