For MovieMaker’s Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker 2020 list, we made a dramatic decision: We left off Los Angeles and New York City. It’s not that they aren’t great places to live and work as a moviemaker—everyone knows that they are, and that’s exactly the problem. We’d rather tell you about an undiscovered cinematic mecca you haven’t considered before.
So we’re sending New York City and Los Angeles to the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker Hall of Fame, to make room for some well-deserving new additions to our list.
One of them is a short train ride away from New York City. But that’s just one of the stories we want to tell with our annual list, which is again split into Big Cities and Smaller Cities and Towns. We also want you to know about the massive boom in Canadian soundstages, the Southern city that roared back from tragedy, the Pacific Northwest town with a gloriously outsized movie culture, and the Southwestern powerhouses an hour’s drive apart from one another.
We compiled this list through extensive questionnaires, our own research, and visits to almost every location you see below. We factored in film culture, tax breaks, standard of living, and the films shot in each locale, among other factors. We’ve done our best to honestly answer the question: Would we want to live and work in a given city or town?
And would we leave New York or L.A. to do it?
Click through below to see our complete list.