Champion of Texas movie industry had decadeslong impact From theater to film and TV, then teaching
Tom Copeland, who for decades nurtured the Texas movie industry as a film agency leader and an educator, died Sunday after complications from an illness. He was 74.
Copeland served on the Texas Film Commission for 22 years and was appointed its director in 1995. In that post, he helped fashion the subsidies that lured moviemakers to the state, smoothed the way for scores of productions here, and created a bank of technical support that continues to undergird the industry in Texas.
“I first started to get to know him when I was just coming out of film school at the University of Texas in the 1990s,” said moviemaker Bryan Poyser, who is perhaps best known for “Dear Pillow,” “Love & Air Sex” and “Lovers of Hate.” “I took advantage of the commission’s location services, which were set up for tiny, little student films and big studio features.”
After leaving the agency, Copeland returned to his alma mater at Texas State University in San Marcos “to put all this ‘stuff’ I learned to work helping others crack open that door,” he wrote in 2018. “Little did I know – or was I intending – to create a full curriculum, but here we are.”
“He started out with a film business class,” said Poyser, who began teaching in the Texas State program alongside Copeland in 2011. “But he really wanted to build a major film program. He kept hiring people and hiring people.”
Recently, that growing program, part of the university’s College of Fine Arts and Communications, moved into a new building to serve 130 film students, along with hundreds of others who take individual classes.
Copeland retired from Texas State in 2018.
Born in 1950, Copeland attended tiny Meadow High School southwest of Lubbock in West Texas and got involved with the Texas Tech University theater program while still in high school.
“We’ve grown so much on the foundation that Tom built.”
Johnny McAllister Film program head at Texas State
Copeland arrived in San Marcos as a theater major in 1969, when Texas State was known as Southwest Texas State University. While there, he participated in as many as 25 shows.
“I lived and breathed in that department,” Copeland told Jordan Gass-Pooré of the Slackerwood website in 2012. “I didn’t do a lot of social things in school because I didn’t have a lot of time. It was all about the play or whatever we were working on.”
Copeland had hoped to act professionally, but he was drawn instead behind the scenes of television shows and movies, in part because the 1972 Hollywood movie “The Getaway” was filmed in San Marcos.
“I owe this university a lot,” Copeland wrote, “as it was what I learned here as a theater major that got my foot in the door at UT Communications Center and KLRN-TV back in 1974. A few weeks after taking the job, I became the makeup artist on a little pilot that they were doing called ‘Austin City Limits,’ and that, my friends, changed my life forever.”
This week, after learning of Copeland’s death, members of the Texas film community expressed grief.
“Such sad news!” posted filmmaker Michael Cain. “Tom was always a friendly, inspirational mentor to me in my early days back in Dallas. Rest in peace Tom.”
“In the film community, Tom Copeland is a big deal – both in Austin and statewide,” said journalist Joe O’Connell. “His big story is that of encouraging crew people and filmmakers both at the TFC and at Texas State.”
“The more you got to know him, the more lives you saw he impacted, going back decades,” said Johnny McAllister, current film program head at Texas State. “All the students that he inspired to get into the film business, including theater students who were curious about getting into film, which for many of them became a fulfilling life.
“We’ve grown so much on the foundation that Tom built.”