THE RANCH
St. Bernard Parish’s First Movie Studio
Waggesnspack describes how the idea for The Ranch germinated. “For eight years [I worked as a location manager] and would shoot locations within the 60-mile radius that the union allows us to use in New Orleans, and Chalmette is perfectly situated in this zone, but it’s the only place that [in the New Orleans area] has that country feel. I would shoot the Creedmore Plantation and other sites in St. Bernard Parish and kept coming back.” Waggenspack graduated from UNO’s film school shortly after Katrina with the intention of becoming an actor, but he was quickly drawn to work behind the camera. Clearly producing was his gift... and his entre into the film industry. He remembers the exact day he walked, unscheduled, into the law office of Sydney D. Torres, III—the owner of the unfortunate property that would ultimately become The Ranch and its subsidiaries. “I was shooting a film next door to this abandoned, blighted property, and walked into Mr. Torres’s office. I told him that I had a bunch of cars that I needed to park and wanted to rent his space. We negotiated a price, and Mr. Torres said, ‘One more thing…how do I keep you?’” Waggenspack’s idea for a complete transformation of the enormous, unused space had Mr. Torres’s attention. A real estate developer himself, Mr. Torres presumably knew a good idea when he Jason Waggenspack heard one. “I explained my job and said that part of what I do is to find locations like the one you have here and turn them into stages. He said, ‘Send me a proposal,’ and three months later, we were in business together. One month after that, we landed Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg, one of the biggest movies to ever hit Louisiana.” The crumbling property that stood abandoned for years metamorphosed into a gleaming new property that produces several movies per year, employs hundreds of local artisans and craftsmen, and pours thousands of dollars of revenue back into the community of St. Bernard Parish. But don’t call Waggenspack a businessman. This would be like calling Henry Ford a mechanic. In fact, don’t even refer to him as CEO. His official title (it’s on his business card) is Head of Possibilities and his Chief Marketing Officer, Jimmy Hornbeak, is the Director of Amazement—also on the business card. The titles are an extension of how they see themselves: as storytellers, as an uber-creative force of idea people who have all worked in the film industry for years and created a company that could midwife huge ideas to completion if there was a good enough story to be told…and sold. Selling The Ranch and its creations is what Jimmy Hornbeak does best. As the chief of marketing, or, in “Ranch Speak,” Director of Amazement, Jimmy Hornbeak breathes life into Waggenspack’s ideas, turning them into saleable commodities. Formerly the brand marketing manager and creative director at Levi Strauss, Jimmy Hornbeak is the creative visionary behind The Ranch. He also partners with Waggenspack in The Arsonist, a film marketing company “whose mission is to help greenlight
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Best of the Big Easy | Where Y'at Magazine
COURTESY RANCH STUDIOS
By Jason Hutter
