N.M. may get its own film, TV hall of fame
Nonprofit behind project will seek nominations to be announced at February gala
The roster of those who’ve made movies in New Mexico is long and lousy with household-name actors and directors from across the decades, many in the years since the state began offering tax incentives to film productions, drawing hundreds of millions in spending from rebate-savvy Hollywood outfits.
A new group wants to put those names and faces in one place, what they’re calling the New Mexico Film and Television Hall of Fame. Also receiving recognition would be those who have made a significant off-screen impact on the state’s bustling movie business throughout its century-plus history.
The new nonprofit driving the hall of fame project will seek nominations for the first crop of inductees, to be announced at an awards gala in February in Santa Fe.
And the project’s organizers, which include the marketing group Shoot New Mexico, hope to one day have a brickand-mortar installation — in a city to be determined later — where visitors can walk through and touch the state’s film past, something like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., but with Breaking Bad meth-making gear.
“We’re going to celebrate the people who aren’t always celebrated,” said Brian Espinosa, a producer and talent manager who sits on the film hall of fame executive committee. “We’re going to recognize the people who have made significant contributions to film and television here in all the various aspects — whether it’s someone who’s been Oscar-nominated for hair and makeup,
or the crew members we don’t often think of. We want a really good mix.”
That means, for instance, that Bryan Cranston, the Emmywinning star of Breaking Bad, the celebrated Albuquerque-set drama, would fit into the hall of fame alongside the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, or anyone else whose contributions to that landmark series changed the New Mexico film business, Espinosa said. It’s an all-of-the-above approach, he said.
And that, of course, includes New Mexican artists. But New Mexico residency won’t be a prerequisite for what organizers hope will become annual inductions, said Espinosa, 33, a Santa Fe native who now works in Los Angeles.
“They might not be people who are necessarily from New Mexico but people who have specifically contributed in some significant manner to the industry in our state,” he said.
Kate Noble, a Santa Fe Public Schools board member who previously worked in the city economic development division, said the hall of fame project is intended to tie together the state’s film industry history with its present and promote New Mexico’s lengthy film résumé to the outside world.
Noble, the hall of fame project launch coordinator, mentioned Thomas Edison, who played a role in the 1897 production of what is generally considered the state’s first “film,” a short, blackand-white clip called Indian Day School shot on the Pueblo of Isleta. Could Edison, long dead, earn a call to the New Mexico hall?
“The point is to own and tell the history of our place in the history of moving pictures, and to really provide a unifying, celebratory force for the existing film industry,” said Noble.
Organizers said the decision about where to locate the eventual physical hall of fame — a “‘dream-big’ plan,” Noble called it, that would require private sponsorships — could take into account the imbalance of the state’s film and television production, which heavily favors the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor.
An emphasis on the film potential of the southern parts of the state, Noble said, is part of the project’s drive to unite the oftendisparate pieces of the state’s moviemaking past and present. Las Vegas, N.M., alongside Las Cruces; Better Call Saul crossed with Tom Mix.
“Our whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and if we come together, we can magnify for the outside world what that whole of our film industry is,” Noble said. “We can tell that story better through some sort of unification and magnifying of our story.”