Mississippi is again becoming an important area for filmmakers, the director of the state’s film office told Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation members Friday.

Speaking at the foundation’s annual meeting in the Southern Cultural Heritage Center’s auditorium — the site of one of the final scenes in the 2000 movie “O Brother, Where art Thou?” — Mississippi Film Office Director Ward Emling discussed his department and Mississippi’s popularity as a film location.

He said every city in the state “knows what it can do and have been strong supporters (of the film industry). That’s a strong selling point, and over the years filmmakers have realized the strong support of the community and the warmth of the people.”

The state’s film office was formed in 1973, Emling said, but movie-making in Mississippi goes back even further. The first movie filmed in the state, he said, was the “The Crisis,” made at Cedar Grove in Vicksburg in 1916.

“The extras got a $1 a day and National Guardsmen were used as extras,” he said.

Emling said the competition to get filmmakers to make movies in Mississippi is stiff, adding there are 350 film offices across the world. Two of the most successful film offices in the United States, he said, are Louisiana and Georgia.

Movies, he said, “create jobs and put money into all areas of a community’s economy.”

He said the movie adaptation of John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” brought in $6 million in revenue to Canton, where it was filmed.

There also is the tourism impact, he said.

Emling said the biggest tourist attraction in Iowa is the baseball field “built in the middle of nowhere” for the movie “Field of Dreams” in Dyersville, Iowa.

“People go look at covered bridges because of ‘The Bridges of Madison County,’” he said.

The success of the movie “The Help,” filmed in Greenwood and Jackson, draws tourists to the state.

Emling said Mississippi was in competition with Shreveport, La., as the location for “The Help,” adding that Louisiana, like Georgia, offers tax incentives to companies to make movies in the state. Louisiana, he said, offers a 5 percent tax credit to companies filming there.

“It was tough going,” he said. “We had to improve our incentive to match theirs.”

He said the state was able to provide an attractive package to the movie’s producers to get them to film the movie in Greenwood. He said the producers told him Shreveport would never have been the proper setting.

“They told me, ‘we don’t make the movie you see if it wasn’t in Mississippi,’” he said.

Emling said the state’s incentive package provides rebates to companies filming in Mississippi of up to 25 percent of the money a company spends at local businesses, 25 percent of the payroll of the non-resident cast and crew, and up to 30 percent of the payroll for local cast and crew.

“It’s the clearest one (incentive package) to understand,” he said.

“We’re getting scripts every week and scouting locations,” Emling said. “I don’t think that we have any films that will start this year, but we will have some next year, possibly in the spring. We’ve shot a lot of locations.

“You’re going to see a lot of movies shot in the state. I can’t promise you (another film like) ‘The Help.’ But you may get a vampire movie.”

In other matters at the meeting:

• SCHC director Annette Kirklin said the center’s auditorium stabilization project is complete. The $188,000 project was funded by a $150,000 Mississippi Department of Archives and History grant with a $38,000 match from the foundation. She said the foundation has raised $18,967 of the match.

She said the second phase of the auditorium project involving work on the auditorium’s second floor was starting. That project is funded by a $195,000 U.S. Housing and Urban Development Special Initiatives Grant.

• Re-elected board members Robert Crear, Don Jarratt, Joy Brabston, Landy Teller, Mike Curtis and Minor Ferris.