Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, billionaire Ross Perot Jr. team up on Texas film studio

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Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan is joining with Ross Perot Jr. to build a film-production campus in Texas as the state takes on Hollywood with US$1.5 billion in incentives for movies and television shows.

Sheridan’s SGS Studios has begun filming at the Fort Worth facility in AllianceTexas, a sprawling expanse of homes, offices and industrial properties developed by Perot’s Hillwood. SGS will operate the studio, which already has space for four simultaneous productions, as it expands to at least 10 stages, said company co-founder David Glasser.

“It will be something that hasn’t been done in Texas before,” said Glasser, who’s also the chief executive officer of 101 Studios, which produces many of Sheridan’s shows.

Sheridan and Perot are betting on stepped-up demand for filming in Texas after the state legislature approved a bigger pot of financial incentives for productions. The AllianceTexas campus currently includes two buildings and totals 450,000 square feet (41,800 square meters). Sheridan has already filmed scenes for his show Landman at the studio, and is expected to work on additional projects there before the end of the year.

While the new Texas incentive package is less generous than its counterparts in states such as Georgia, it’s still poised to boost the local film industry and add to the competition facing Los Angeles. In another sign of their plans for the Fort Worth area, SGS and 101 Studios are also working with a local community college to train students for technical film jobs.

Hillwood converted two speculative industrial buildings into the new studio space. The project cost an estimated $65 million.

Sheridan has filmed some scenes of Yellowstone on location in Texas, plus portions of his show Lioness at Hillwood’s Circle T Ranch.

“They could only do so much with location shooting,” said Hillwood President Mike Berry. “They needed infrastructure that didn’t exist.”