Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."

Lousiana had been angling to attract film business for some twenty years now, in reaction to the loss of oil revenue that affected the whole state. This was in the period when New Orleans, in particular, redefined itself as dependent on the tourist dollar and started playing up its image as an exotic locale, sort of like a Disneyland where you could get a lap dance. Towards this end, Carr notes, "The state offers a 25 percent tax credit for in-state spending, which bumps to 35 percent when the money goes to Louisiana production crews." Once upon a time, the immediate result of this was a whole spate of movies (Tightrope, The Big Easy, Blaze, etc.) full of crooked politicians in white suits and cops in ill-fitting clothes wiping the sweat off their foreheads with hankies while trudging through the French Quarter during Mardi Gras to see if Madame LeCree the hoodoo priestess could throw the monkey bones and tell them where that serial killer might be hiding. But then Hurricane Katrina killed off whatever appeal N'Orleans still might have had for big production companies that hadn't already been wiped out by overreaching local grafters. After Katrina forced "many productions working with state tax credits in New Orleans had to scramble for both higher ground and a place to finish their films", they landed in Shreveport, and in the process noticed that the economic bust had left behind a city "with a substantial infrastructure, with varied architecture and numerous highways, nice characteristics if you’re making a movie." While New Orleans tended to star as in itself in any movie made there, Shreveport can easily pass for Anywhere, U.S.A., sort of like Toronto with humidity. " And," writes Carr, "though there are no direct flights to Shreveport from Los Angeles and New York, city officials try to overcome what would seem to be a deal-breaker by doubling down on the hospitality." Oliver Stone, for one, has no complaints. “I made four movies in Dallas. And where we are right now,” he says of Shreveport, "is Bush country, so it feels right.” The gap-toothed wonder added, “You get something working with extras from here. Look, these people are gamblers and roughnecks. They know all about boom and bust. This is a second-chance town. I just read that there may be a huge reserve of gas right under the city that was not discovered until very recently.” Of course, it could be said that any town that Oliver Stone rolls into automatically acquires a previously undetected huge reserve of gas...