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No shortage of challenges face Lauren Grimshaw Sloan, the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media‘s new commissioner.
As demonstrated by CO150, an ongoing statewide film festival marking the state’s sesquicentennial, Colorado has served as the location or setting for an incredibly diverse and impressive canon of movies. But in recent years, the state’s film branch has struggled to lure productions, high-profile or otherwise, due in large part to an incentive system that’s downright puny in comparison with more aggressive programs in places such as New Mexico and Georgia, not to mention numerous foreign countries. The repercussions have been significant, as indicated by a new Giggster study that found Colorado lost the seventh most film-industry jobs of any state from 2024 to 2025.
The relocation of the Sundance Film Festival from Utah to Boulder offers a hefty reason for optimism. But film-office drama continues to play out behind the scenes. Note that Donald Zuckerman, Sloan’s predecessor as Colorado film commissioner, as well as arguably the key player in the Sundance coup, was abruptly fired in September 2025, mere months after the festival’s move was announced. In February, Zuckerman filed a notice of claim “against the State of Colorado and employees of same,” alleging age discrimination, unlawful retaliation and wrongful discharge, among other claims. The document was followed in June by a lawsuit that makes similar assertions.
Sloan, who served as Colorado’s deputy film commissioner from 2012 to 2016 and took over the top job in January, declines to wade into the controversy, noting that “we’re definitely looking to the future.” But Zuckerman has only praise for Sloan. “I recruited her early on when I started as film commissioner,” he told Westword earlier this year. “She worked for me for four years and was the first person who had the title of deputy film commissioner. I trained her — and she’s terrific.”
She’s also resolutely upbeat despite the obstacles she faces. “I’m really confident in the team we have and the community support,” Sloan says. “I see nothing but bright skies and am looking forward to what we can build together.”
In discussing her background, she references a personal pop-culture touchstone. She notes that “I’m originally from the suburbs of Chicago — Winnetka, where ‘Home Alone’ was filmed. I guess there’s an inherent movie tradition there.”
She went on to attend Penn State University, “which is not necessarily known as a film school,” she concedes. “I had a really great film experience there before I started working in Chicago. But I really cut my teeth in New York with Red Crown Productions, where I learned about independent filmmaking, from finding properties to putting financing together to package and overseeing production to post, and hopefully going to a film festival and selling it to a distributor.” Her production credits on the Internet Movie Database include 2012’s “Goats,” starring David Duchovny and Vera Farmiga, and “What Maisie Knew,” led by Julianne Moore and Alexander Skarsgård.
Following her 2012-2016 stint as Colorado’s deputy film commissioner, Sloan moved on to SeriesFest, which describes itself as “a nonprofit celebrating artists in episodic storytelling.” She points out that “I oversaw the women’s directing mentorship in connection with Shondaland,” (“Grey’s Anatomy” mogul Shonda Rhimes’s production operation), in addition to supervising professional development efforts for writers and producing the festival as a whole.
When returning to the state film office, Sloan understood full well how difficult it would be to convince producers to film here. In the past, Colorado offered filmmakers cash rebates, but the amounts were minuscule by major studio standards. “One year it might be a million dollars, the next it might be $500,000,” she allows. “And we had to go back to the legislature every year to ask for more money, which created instability. There was no way we could get a TV show to set up shop here, not knowing if we would have cash the next year.”
The situation improved in 2024, when Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill setting aside up to $5 million in refundable tax credits per annum for film-and-TV developers over the next half-decade — and the legislation also upped the cap on incentives from 20% of local spending to 22%. In all, the package authorized production tax credits up to $50 million through 2029.
However, these amounts are dwarfed by the moola offered to film companies by many other states. New Mexico currently has an annual tax-incentives spending cap of $140 million, or 28 times larger than Colorado’s, and Georgia eschews a cap entirely. Film-related spending in Georgia hit a remarkable $4.4 billion in 2022, although that amount has since declined owing largely to competition from other players, be they foreign or domestic, who have gotten into the game.
“Italy has an incredible production incentive,” Sloan divulges, “and so does Australia and even Bulgaria. There’s a lot of competition not only within North America, but abroad as well.”
Still, Sloan remains a believer in tax incentives, having seen them work for a member of her family. “My mom is from Louisiana, and my aunt was a costume designer there in the ’90s — and Louisiana was the first state I was aware of that passed a film incentive program. So I saw the dawn of these programs, and at the end of the day, they really made an imprint on me. Filmmakers started coming in droves. They were making Christmas movies in August and doing whatever made the most financial sense for their project.”
Granted, some production work is happening in Colorado: Sloan cites “The Let Go,” a low-budget showcase for Samira Wiley, known for her work in “Orange Is the New Black” and “The Handmaid’s Tale;” filming in Boulder wrapped in July, and the producers have talked about trying to get the flick into the lineup for the inaugural Sundance Film Festival in Boulder, scheduled for January 2027. “But will it be on the same level as neighboring states with more competitive incentives?” she asks rhetorically. Her answer: “It’s a really difficult task for us to compete with those programs. That is a focus of mine.”
Technically, Sloan isn’t allowed to lobby the General Assembly to designate more resources for the film industry. Instead, her office uses the term “champion” — and she’s enthusiastic about doing just that.
“We’re in between sessions now,” she allows, “but we have a lot of new legislators coming, and we’ll have a new governor. And with Sundance coming in January, it feels like this is an opportunity for us to seize the momentum we have with film in Colorado. Even with our modest incentives, IndieWire named Denver one of the best cities for independent filmmaking. So we’re an emerging market and the spotlight is on us. We think that’s going to be able to propel us, with the support of the film office and our partners, to a better financial position in the future.”
Zuckerman and other Colorado film commissioners have consistently argued that tax incentives are fiscal accelerators that benefit a wide array of businesses, not mere payoffs to Los Angeles fat cats. Sloan agrees, and she sees Sundance as a way to generate data that will prove it. “We’ll be able to track it and say this many people came to the festival, this many were international visitors, this number of people from Colorado attended. We’ll be able to see the economic impact in Boulder. It’s not just giving a handout to Hollywood. It’s people staying in hotels, shopping in stores, going to restaurants and pouring their funds into the local economy.”
According to her figures, “we have an 18-to-1 ROI [return on investment] on funds distributed through our tax credit program. We could see the same ROI on the production side as well while putting a spotlight on all of Colorado’s creative industries.”
In the meantime, Sloan is focusing on smaller goals. “We want to bring in films that are in the $2-5 million range — projects that get exposure and get our local crews working on local productions.” She admits that under present circumstances, “we can’t afford a Marvel movie. If we have $5 million a year and the budget of a Marvel film is $200 million, we don’t have enough funds in the bank to support a project like that. It makes more sense to do smaller projects and bring various opportunities for crews to get employment.”
She doesn’t dispute the findings of the Giggster analysis that found significant job losses among professional film crews in Colorado, but suggests that the information reflects the scenario before the implementation of the 2024 tax-incentive legislation. In an effort to prevent more declines in the future, the state film office regularly sponsors workshops for folks interested in getting into filmmaking and supports all of Colorado’s many film festivals, not just Sundance.
“This is a really exciting moment for us in Colorado,” she stresses. “I think we’re getting more attention now than we ever have, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.”
