When thinking about where most major movies are made, chances are Memphis doesn’t come to mind.

But through the ‘90s and into the early 2000s, a string of studio features boasting big names were shot in the Bluff City.

Stars like Tom Cruise, Matt Damon and Reese Witherspoon came to town, so did Oscar-winning directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Sydney Pollack and Miloš Forman.

Productions injected millions of dollars into the local economy.

“Back in the ‘90s, we were the center of activity,” said Linn Sitler, the longtime film commissioner at the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission. “Our phone was ringing constantly.”

But the last big studio feature shot in Memphis was the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line,” which was released in 2005.

Since then, the city has had its share of victories in the entertainment world — think TV shows like “Sun Records,” “Bluff City Law” and “Young Rock” — but it hasn’t landed the kind of big budget movie productions it used to.

So, what happened? Why hasn’t Memphis landed the kind of projects it did a few decades ago?

The short answer is that it comes down to money. In the early 2000s, other states started to offer significant financial incentives that stiffened competition and attracted studios.

Sitler offers a more nuanced answer about how Memphis landed productions in the ‘90s, the positive effects — and limits of — the incentives Tennessee has implemented, and the recent move by the state legislature that gives her hope for the future.

How did Memphis score movies in the ‘90s?

Here are some of the big studio features shot in Memphis:

Great Balls of Fire (1989)

• Directed by: Jim McBride
• Starring: Dennis Quaid, Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin

The Firm (1993)

• Directed by: Sydney Pollack
• Starring: Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter

The Client (1994)

• Directed by: Joel Schumacher
• Starring: Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones

The People vs Larry Flynt (1996)

• Directed by: Miloš Forman
• Starring: Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton

The Rainmaker (1997)

• Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
• Starring: Matt Damon, Claire Danes, Jon Voight, Danny DeVito

Walk the Line (2005)

• Directed by: James Mangold
• Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon

That’s a lot of Hollywood icons on one list and doesn’t include Craig Brewer’s surprise 2005 hit “Hustle & Flow,” which started as an indie project and had a comparatively small budget.

The list gets even more impressive considering how Memphis landed the projects.

Sitler said it didn’t have anything to do with state incentives, which Tennessee didn’t offer at the time. These productions came to Memphis, she said, because of the hard work of her and her team at the Commission, local leaders and the wider community.

Memphis seems like a shoo-in for some of movies that were shot here. Afterall, “The Firm,” “The Client” and “The Rainmaker” were all based on John Grisham novels that were set in Memphis. Where else would you make them?

But plenty of films are set in one place and shot in another. All having the setting guarantees, Sitler said, is that you’ll be scouted.

Take “The Firm.”

“People say, ‘That was a gimme, wasn’t it, Linn?’” she said. “We almost lost ‘The Firm’ to Chicago.”

Why? Because the director, Pollack, didn’t think Memphis would have the right on-screen look for the kind of insidious, closed-door crime taking place in the movie.

“It wasn’t that he didn’t want to shoot here. It was that he did not feel that visually we had the right look for such a crime,” Sitler said. “He thought it would happen in a bigger city.”

It was the film’s unit production manager, Michael Hausman, who wanted it shot in Memphis; and Sitler and a mayoral aide, Alonzo Woods, took him around Downtown, so he could take effective photos of high-rises that would win over the director.

And that’s just a taste of the work that was done to attract big productions in the nineties and early 2000s.

Former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton had a “whatever it takes” attitude and offered up soft incentives like real estate and city services.

Ned McWherter, Tennessee governor from 1987 to 1995, flew to Los Angeles with Sitler to preside over events and help bring back productions.

Prominent Memphians like Rudi Scheidt, Knox Philips and Phil Trenary funded welcome parties for casts and crews.

Malco leader Jimmy Tashie provided movie theaters for screenings.

FedEx founder Fred Smith offered shipping discounts on packages, personally tracked them and called the production office to give updates.

Richard Ranta, former dean of the University of Memphis College of Communication and Fine Arts, gave Francis Ford Coppola the run of the campus when it came time to shoot “The Rainmaker,” and got up early to meet production trucks.

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who was then the executive director of the Tennessee Film, Entertainment and Music Commission, secured a bloodhound for “The People vs. Larry Flynt” director Miloš Forman, because he wanted one as a pet.

“I don’t know of any community that had the support that we did in recruiting these films,” Sitler said.

‘Everybody wants incentives’

The community isn’t any less committed to scoring projects now. Mayors elected after Herenton have continued to try and make Memphis enticing for the entertainment industry, and Richard Smith has even carried on his father’s work of tracking shipments for significant productions.

But the landscape has changed.

“It’s no longer about how charming the film commissioner or the mayor is and what the locations are,” Sitler said. “Everybody wants incentives.”

During its movie boom in the ‘90s, Tennessee didn’t have to worry about other states enticing productions with significant financial benefits.

Louisiana had become the first one to create tax incentives for film and TV productions in 1992, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but it was the only one, and it didn’t lead to a significant increase in productions.

In the early 2000s, however, Louisiana made its incentive program more generous and alluring, and other states started putting together their own similar packages to compete.

When the time came to shoot “Walk the Line,” incentives were common in other states, and Memphis nearly lost the production to Louisiana, where the studio wanted to shoot it.

The city ultimately still won the project, thanks to a series of phone calls from Sitler, $500,000 in soft incentives from Herenton and the desires of the producers and director, who preferred to shoot in Memphis.

But the victory came with an ominous prediction: Until Tennessee added a significant incentive program, the studio told Sitler, it would be the last big movie Memphis got.

That was 2005. In 2006, the state introduced its first incentives, through a grant fund designated specifically for film and TV productions.

But at the time, only $2 million was guaranteed to recur annually, which meant the overall amount of the fund in any given year was contingent on what the state injected into it — and there wasn’t always enough to win big projects.

For example, the Memphis area lost “The Blind Side” to Atlanta over incentives as well as the remake of “Footloose.”

The competition has also gotten stiffer over time. Memphis and Tennessee aren’t just competing with other states anymore. They’re competing with Eastern Europe — which, Sitler said, “everybody” is losing productions to, because of big incentives and low shooting costs.

In Eastern Europe, Sitler said, filming is “cheap, cheap, cheap.”

Take “The Gray House,” a Prime Video series set in Virginia during the Civil War. You’d think it would have been shot in Virginia, or maybe another part of the South. But where was it ultimately filmed? Romania.

New shows, new incentives

That’s not to say Memphis hasn’t scored any big projects since “Walk the Line” — or that Tennessee incentives haven’t helped.

The city scored the 2017 CMT series “Sun Records,” thanks in part to the $4 million in incentives the production received from the state’s grant fund.

The show only lasted one season, but it was followed in 2019 by the NBC series “Bluff City Law,” which Memphis secured with a $1.4 million tax break from the Economic Development Growth Engine for Memphis and Shelby County (EDGE), $350,000 from Memphis Tourism, and $2.5 million from the state.

Tennessee’s production incentives have also improved over time.

In recent years, the annual recurring amount in the grant fund has grown from $2 million to $8 million.

And in 2021, the state passed a new film and TV incentive, the F&E (franchise and excise) tax credit. Separate from the grant fund — projects can only use one or the other — it benefits parent companies of studios that already have large presences in Tennessee by providing job tax credits for productions.

This helped Memphis secure the third season of the series “Young Rock,” about the early life of movie star and wrestler Dwayne Johnson.

The show was an NBC-Universal production, and thanks to the new incentive, it earned a 40% credit against payroll and wages incurred in the state, a benefit that was then passed onto its parent company, Comcast — which has a significant presence and tax liability in Tennessee.

But the F&E credit has its limits. It’s enticing for studios that have parent companies with operations in the state; the big ones, besides NBC-Universal, are Amazon Studios, WarnerDiscovery, Apple Studios and Paramount.

But it isn’t likely to attract other studios.

For example, it wouldn’t have benefited the 2022 ABC series “Women of the Movement,” a historical drama miniseries about the mother of Emmett Till.

The show was close to doing most of its filming in the Memphis area, Sitler said. It was set to use Graceland’s soundstages, and its cast was going to stay at the Peabody Hotel. Sitler had even sent flowers to the owner of a local mansion that was going to be used for filming.

But then Mississippi offered significantly more incentives than Tennessee, Sitler said. Memphis did still score a week of filming, but this was a far cry from what it was expected to initially receive.

Is Memphis getting its fair share?

There’s also the question of whether Memphis is getting its fair share of state incentive money for film and TV productions. Some people say state incentives aren’t equally distributed, and that a disproportionate amount goes to Nashville.

“Memphis has not gotten anywhere near an equal share of the incentive money,” Sitler said.

She also acknowledges, however, that it’s a “big, complicated situation.”

It isn’t just about Tennessee funneling money into Nashville.

Incentives don’t matter if productions aren’t also interested in the location, and a lot of them are already interested in the state’s capital, thanks, in part, to the success of the TV series “Nashville” — which ran for six seasons, built out the city’s filming infrastructure and gave it a deep crew base.

“It had everything to do with it,” Sitler said. “If you if you have a project, it generates infrastructure and it generates more interest from other possible projects, and then it keeps building and building and building.”

Reasons for hope

By that logic, a hit movie or TV show could do a lot for Memphis’s production prospects.

And there are reasons, Sitler said, to be hopeful about the future.

The state recently passed its fiscal year 2027 budget, which will inject $25 million into the grant fund, the biggest annual appropriation it’s ever received.

The timing is good. Thanks to its participation in the latest studio summit from Film Commissioners International, the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission is poised to receive a list of contacts of studio executives looking for new shooting locations.

And the larger-than-ever grant fund is one more thing Sitler and her team can dangle in front of productions interested in Memphis — provided the $25 million doesn’t dry up quickly.

“We’re going to get to work,” Sitler said. “And believe me, if we recruit something and there’s not any incentive money left, you’re going to hear me howl from here to Nashville.”