It is not just people fleeing crime, high taxes, and sanctuary cities in California, but business is following suit, too, and actor/director Dennis Quaid tells Newsmax that Texas can be bigger and better as a "film capital of the world."
"I actually moved a couple of years ago, because California is not the same — and I moved there in the 70s: It was really a great place to live and work," Quaid told Friday's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE."
"I'm doing well, but it's really difficult for a lot of people now to make a living in that there."
Texas has lured Elon Musk away from California as Silicon Valley's monopoly on tech is collapsing along with the economics and safety in the state, and now Quaid is leading a group of high-profile Texas stars to help Texas film thrive.
Quaid and his fellow Texas A-list actors produced a campaign ad for the upcoming legislation in the state: #GoodforTexas.
"Texas did a pretty good job of taking its chunk of the tech industry away from California down in Austin," Quaid, who was born and raised in Houston, told host Carl Higbie. "That's been going on for several years, and I think the same thing can happen with film.
"We want to be the film capital of the world."
California is broken and failing, Quaid lamented.
"Basically, you can't make movies in California anymore, because there's so many regulations, it costs way too much," he said.
Texas is closing in on passing new legislation to lure Hollywood to the state — the most populous red state in the U.S. — after having lost momentum years ago, according to Quaid.
"We used to have a great incentive program to make it a more business friendly to shoot in Texas and about eight years ago that left to places like Louisiana, Mexico, Oklahoma," he said. "We'd like to bring the crew that left with that back to Texas with this incentive program and basically money gets spent in the state.
"People thought it was for high-priced actors and producers, but it really goes to pay crew people like carpenters and painters, site constructors, hotels, restaurants."
As much as Hollywood elites are not necessarily a Texas priority, Quaid continued, it really is about the jobs for everyday Texans.
"I think that the messaging on the incentive was kind of spun the wrong way, I think, and I don't blame people for, if I was a rancher, farmer out in West Texas, it would be hard for me to see how it was going to benefit to my community, you know, but it really does," Quaid said. "All the money gets spent locally and it's good for Texas."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.