Filming in Happy Valley? Choosing Oscar qualifiers? Local movie scene undergoing transformation
Imagine a future in Happy Valley where a two-time Oscar-winning actor films on location, a Star Wars director casually stops in town for dinner, and a local festival honors an international film months before it becomes an Oscar nominee.
Well, it’s time to catch up — because those feats have already been accomplished over the past 12 months. And local filmmakers and officials here are dreaming even bigger.
The annual Centre Film Festival, which kicks off Monday and runs through Sunday, is aiming to become an Academy-qualifying festival, meaning it could one day play a formal role in deciding what films deserve Oscar consideration. It has already attracted filmmakers from across the country — and beyond — while quickly earning a reputation as a promising up-and-comer. But organizers don’t want to stop there.
Happy Valley Adventure Bureau (HVAB), a nonprofit tourism bureau, recently began publicly embracing film production while taking direction from the Association of Film Commissioners International (AFCI). And passionate residents, such as businessman Pat Romano, who runs the We Are Inn, have already created movie sets and begun shooting with stars such as Kevin Spacey.
“We’re gathering momentum,” HVAB President/CEO Fritz Smith said about the local film industry. “It started slow, but I feel as if we’re picking up steam pretty fast right now. We’re in a good place; we’re in an exciting place.”
Centre Film Festival & Future
Smith credited the 6-year-old Centre Film Festival as the catalyst for Happy Valley’s burgeoning movie scene. And it’s not difficult to see why.
It’s shown films like “Black Barbie” and “Frybread Face and Me” before they were available on Netflix. It’s showcased future Oscar nominees like “Letter to a Pig,” which was up for Best Animated Short Film. And it’s celebrated actors such as the Oscar-nominated Lily Gladstone, who called the film shown at Centre Film Festival — “Fancy Dance” — the “best work I’ve ever done.” (She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”)
And that was all just last year.
“This year, there are some incredible films they got as well,” said Billy Luther, a decorated Native American filmmaker based in Los Angeles who attended the festival last year. “Kudos to their team and selectors. It’s a top-notch festival, and I think the community and students should understand they’re top films — and they need to go and attend.”
The origins of the film festival are humble enough. Penn State professor/filmmaker Pearl Gluck and the late Curt Chandler, who was also a faculty member, first discussed creating a film festival over drinks on Philipsburg’s Front Street about six years ago. “Maybe we had too much to drink,” Gluck joked.
She took the idea to both Penn State and HVAB, which were immediately on board. What started off as a small weekend fest then quickly turned into a weeklong festival that now welcomes hundreds of quality submissions. More than three dozen films will be screened between this Monday and Sunday, at six theaters around the county — from The State Theatre and a few on Penn State’s campus to Philipsburg’s Rowland Theatre and College Township’s UEC Theatres 12.
Admission varies from pay-what-you-can to $12 for adults (and $60 for weeklong all-access), and dozens more films are available for streaming — but only until Nov. 24.
“Every year, I’m told to bring it down and there’s too many choices,” the energetic Gluck said with a smile. “And every year I take those two comments as compliments.”
Gluck isn’t satisfied. Ever since that conversation over drinks six years ago, her goal has been to eventually become an Academy-qualifying festival. (To qualify for an Oscar, filmmakers typically first need to win a specific category at such a festival.)
To the uninformed, that might seem like a long shot for a relatively small festival smack-dab in the middle of Pennsylvania — but Centre Film Festival already meets just about all the requirements for certain film categories. And a few current Academy-qualifying festivals already occur in smaller communities — such as the long-established Athens (Ohio) International Film and Video Festival near Ohio University, which can qualify films in the short narrative and short animation categories.
Meeting the festival requirements doesn’t guarantee acceptance. But it does mean Centre Film Festival will at least have a shot; one of its final requirements is to have hosted at least seven festivals. So Gluck and Co. can qualify as early as 2026.
Becoming an Academy-qualifying festival would increase prestige while also potentially attracting a significantly larger number of submissions.
“That would be huge,” said Princess Hairston, a NYC-based filmmaker who screened “Breaking the News” at last year’s Centre Film Festival. “For one, it’s in Pennsylvania and it seems like a lot of the Academy-qualifying ones are kind of centered around New York or California or Sundance or festivals that have been there for a long time. I think having that within a university setting, to have that be a qualifying festival, that would be great.
“I really had a great time with folks there. I thought the theaters were great, so that would be amazing because that is the type of festival you’d want to have your film in.”
For others inside and outside the local film industry, it’s not just the festival that has them excited.
Film production in Happy Valley?
Hairston, who owns her own production company in New York City, still remembers staring out the windows of her rental car when she left the Centre Film Festival last year.
Gazing at Happy Valley’s pastoral scenes and local neighborhoods for the first time, her mind immediately wandered back to filmmaking.
“That’s all I could actually think about — all the genre of films you could film there,” she told the CDT. “You have a lot of open fields. You have a town that looks like it could be great for different period pieces. ... You could do horror; you could do period pieces; you could do college setups. So I thought it was a great location for filmmaking in general.”
Fritz Smith, the president/CEO of HVAB, organized a breakfast at Titan Hollow during last year’s festival to pick the brains of those filmmakers. He wanted to know how Centre County could attract them to film here, and he was curious what they thought about different parts of Happy Valley.
“We took them on a 2-hour tour of the county, and we really started to get a lot of that positive feedback,” Smith said. “Things like, ‘You guys are sort of a hidden secret,’ and ‘I can’t wait to come back and film here.’ So the feedback you got from one filmmaker, we got from about a dozen — and that’s what really got us excited.”
Because the “secret” was starting to get out organically, Smith acknowledged a flurry of fall filmmaking activity caught HVAB slightly off-guard. Business owner Pat Romano, who teamed up with Gluck earlier this year for a new film, also served as the executive producer for “Deadlock,” a movie filmed in Philipsburg and set during the Revolutionary War with Kevin Spacey starring.
Romano, who has a few acting credits to his name, didn’t work in tandem with HVAB. But the longtime community member was already well aware of the Happy Valley “secret.”
“The area has a lot of great resources, especially if you’re doing things that are period pieces or rural and you don’t need a city, you’re just trying to get footage — great scenery, a lot of community support — because it’s good for that,” Romano said.
Happy Valley could become an attractive film destination, others said, because the costs are lower compared to metropolitan areas and there’s less red tape. Gov. Josh Shapiro has also placed an added emphasis on growing the commonwealth’s film industry, offering tax credits for certain productions that spend at least 60% of their budgets in Pennsylvania. (Paramount+’s “The Mayor of Kingstown” received $27 million for filming its second season in Pittsburgh, for example.)
Pennsylvania has its own film office, as do Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. State College and the surrounding area might not be large enough for their own — so HVAB tried to get the next-best thing. The organization recently had its film production manager, Pablo Lopez, a Penn State grad who learned under Gluck, undergo training to become an AFCI-certified film commissioner.
That essentially makes him Happy Valley’s official concierge to filmmakers, meaning he and the organization can better provide support when it comes to release forms, caterers, local workers, locations and any related issues that might pop up.
“We’re also in the process right now of devising a kind of incentive program for people to come here and make films,” Smith added. “We’re trying to see if we can do something on a smaller scale (to Shapiro’s tax credits) and incentivize them.”
Building together
Maybe, even without the Centre Film Festival, filmmakers might’ve eventually realized Happy Valley could serve as a production destination. But it’s clear the festival has contributed significantly to getting the word out.
After all, many filmmakers appeared to leave the Happy Valley festival with positive impressions.
Àlex Lora, a Spanish filmmaker who earlier this year won the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize, still can’t forget last year’s Centre Film Festival. Sure, he’s earned three official Sundance selections and a plethora of awards during his career. But he was struck last year by the sense of community at the Centre Film Festival — the support from colleagues, the welcoming feel of Happy Valley. But he was also surprised by some of the star power.
Last year’s festival honored Penn State alum Gerry Abrams, who produced more than 70 films and TV specials over his career. His son is storied filmmaker J.J. Abrams, who co-produced, co-wrote and directed “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” And J.J. Abrams stunned filmmakers such as Lora by showing up at a dinner last year.
“He was very approachable. I was talking with him and then he was hanging out with us,” Lora recalled. “That never happened to me before, that you have a superstar there who’s super approachable, as if he was one of the other students. ... It was a very unexpected but special experience.”
Lora plans to return to the festival again this week, armed with his Sundance-winning film “The Masterpiece.” It will screen 6:30 p.m. Monday at The State Theatre.
Lora wasn’t asked about Happy Valley’s potential as a filmmaking destination. But he was asked about the prospect of Centre Film Festival becoming an Academy-qualifying festival.
He acknowledged that’s more important to some filmmakers than others. But he said he’s been to countless festivals, and he felt the treatment and the screenings here already beat out some of the qualifying fests he’s attended.
“I think the Centre Film Festival has nothing to envy. It has nothing to envy,” Lora repeated.
The festival’s first screening starts noon Monday at Penn State’s Foster Auditorium, and it concludes Sunday with a 6 p.m. awards ceremony at The State Theatre.
CDT reporter Jacob Michael contributed to this report
