After struggling to get off the ground, the city\u2019s Office of Entertainment could shutter under the mayor\u2019s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. The effort suffered from slow and uneven progress since being formalized in 2023 as the mayor, the Metro Council and the office\u2019s 15-member volunteer board \u2014 the Nashville Entertainment Commission \u2014 struggled to see eye to eye.<\/p>\n
Councilmembers Joy Styles and Jeff Syracuse fought over the creation<\/a> of a Metro coordinating entity for venues, songwriters, musicians and the city\u2019s burgeoning film industry as early as 2022. At the time, both were ambitious councilmembers with backgrounds in the music business \u2014 Styles as an artist and Syracuse in BMI\u2019s local office. In 2023, the city passed legislation<\/a> for a 15-member entertainment commission only to tweak certain procedural rules at the behest of new Mayor Freddie O\u2019Connell in what became an extended power struggle over hiring control and Metro authority.<\/p>\n The film industry has expanded in recent decades, with cities like New Orleans and Atlanta benefiting tremendously from coordinated efforts to attract production. Recently, feature films including\u00a0Holland<\/em>\u00a0as well as TV series like\u00a09-1-1: Nashville<\/em> and Scarpetta<\/em>\u00a0have shot and continue to shoot locally. Advocates hoped the office could help organize and foster the various entertainment industries, like film and music, that thrive in Nashville.<\/p>\n From Altman\u2019s \u2018Nashville\u2019 to Khouri\u2019s \u2018Nashville,\u2019 \u20189-1-1: Nashville\u2019 to \u2018Scarpetta,\u2019 does our town have the infrastructure to become Movie City?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA film commission serves multiple purposes,\u201d says Peter Kurland, a film audio engineer and commission member who also represents film and stage crews as part of industry union IATSE. \u201cThe number one purpose, in my view, is to market the community to employers who want to come to Nashville to shoot projects and to get them to hire local people. An equivalent issue is to assist people making movies in Nashville in getting permits, getting contacts they need, and also finding crew and locations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kurland, who also owns and operates Darkhorse Theater with his wife Shannon Wood, says he has dedicated hundreds of hours over the past few years trying to get the commission up and running. The commission codified bylaws<\/a> in 2024 and focused on the first step in January 2025 of hiring an executive director.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite receiving hundreds of applications, a job description error from Metro HR forced the city to restart the hiring process last summer, aided by an influx of $250,000 in last year\u2019s budget. After narrowing down the pool to two candidates, the commission passed the short list to O\u2019Connell in February for final interviews. The mayor\u2019s office went quiet until May 20, when it notified the commission that all funding would be cut in O\u2019Connell\u2019s new budget<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHistorically, [jobs like these] have become political favors for campaign supporters,” Kurland says. “A number of us have been working for the last 10 years trying to get that position to be a professional film commissioner. We invested three years that were all wasted. Even if we get this back on track, I\u2019m not sure if we\u2019ll get the top candidates again after we\u2019ve gone through this process twice and no one was hired. No one wants to do that, probably including me.\u201d<\/p>\n Kurland also learned that mayor\u2019s office employees Jamari Brown and Gordon Reed had represented the city to film producers visiting Nashville in the interim.<\/p>\n Styles is now in her second term and campaigning for mayor<\/a> while a term-limited Syracuse rolled off the Metro Council in 2023. He later joined the commission at the mayor\u2019s request and was one of the applicants to be the Office of Entertainment\u2019s executive director. Styles, who did not endorse O\u2019Connell\u2019s run for mayor and is now challenging him for the office, casts the debacle as incompetence from O\u2019Connell tainted by political retribution toward her. She alludes to O’Connell’s campaign promises<\/a> about prioritizing arts funding.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis city makes money on the backs of artists every day, and we have got to fund this office, a money-generating office, to market and promote Nashville to support our creative community,\u201d Styles tells the Scene<\/em> as she prepares for the council\u2019s budget work sessions, where she will have the chance to push change in the mayor\u2019s proposed budget. \u201cI\u2019m going to get the money back in that office. I\u2019m not playing that game anymore. It is pathetic for a man to abuse his power to mess with one councilmember at the expense of his constituency.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Connell\u2019s explanation: The entire budget had to be tightened due to certain revenue cuts, like the grocery tax relief he announced earlier this year, and state and federal funding the office describes as both declining and unpredictable.<\/p>\n “During the hiring process for the executive director, fiscal constraints emerged that forced some difficult decisions,” reads a statement provided to the\u00a0Scene<\/em> by Mayor O’Connell’s office.\u00a0“We believe an office of one, without adequate administrative and operational support, creates undue pressure on any candidate hired for this position. We want to engage in discussions with the commission on how this administrative and operational load can and should be supported. In the meantime, we have supported the filming of Scarpetta<\/em> Seasons 1 and 2 as well as 9-1-1: Nashville<\/em> through the Mayor\u2019s Office of Film and Special Events, and we will continue to support similar projects through that existing infrastructure.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nashvillescene.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After struggling to get off the ground, the city\u2019s Office of Entertainment could shutter under the mayor\u2019s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. The effort suffered from slow and uneven progress since being formalized in 2023 as the mayor, the Metro Council and the office\u2019s 15-member volunteer board \u2014 the Nashville Entertainment Commission \u2014 struggled to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2428864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[349773,476325,476326,476328,389598,452418,476324,476327],"class_list":["post-2428863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-film-production","tag-jeff-syracuse","tag-joy-styles","tag-mayor-freddie-o","tag-metro-council","tag-nashville-entertainment-commission","tag-office-of-entertainment","tag-peter-kurland"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Entertainment-Commission-Scrapped-in-Mayors-Proposed-Budget-Pith-in.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2428863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2428865,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428863\/revisions\/2428865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2428864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2428863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2428863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2428863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}