Bill Garvey is a former motion picture location manager & scout with 26 years of experience working on 47 movies, 14 TV shows, & countless TV commercials throughout the country. In October 2021, he assumed the role of president at the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, whose mission is to drive economic investment & generate local jobs via the growing the motion picture industry in Northeast Ohio. GCFC cultivates relationships with studios to attract projects to the region, advocates for a competitive motion picture production credit that brings out of state investment, & educates to grow a local industry workforce. He is a member of Leadership Cleveland Class of 2023, was named to the Crain’s Cleveland ‘Power 150’ in 2022 & 2024, & to Cleveland Magazine’s ‘Cleveland 500’ in 2024 & 2025. Bill leverages relationships he built over his career with producers & studios to proactively pitch NE Ohio as a filming destination to the more than 4,000 projects in development at any one time, to convince producers that Ohio is the best choice in which to tell stories that, more often than not, aren’t written about Ohio. In the 2024-2025 cycle, he pitched and booked $130.9 Million in total production budget to choose NE Ohio, including finally bringing “Superman” back home to the place of his birth, re-establishing Cleveland as Metropolis. 3,761 Full Time Equivalent crew, 2,570 background actors, & 406 vendors were employed in NE Ohio in 2024-2025. Since he arrived at GCFC, Bill has enhanced GCFC’s workforce training programming to reach a more diverse and larger NE Ohio community, to better equip NE Ohioans with the skills to build lucrative careers in a motion picture industry that has more than doubled it’s spending on production in the last decade, to an alltime global high of $247 billion in 2024. The more qualified locals who have the skills to fill the roles on a production, 80% of which offer starting salaries of $37.76 per hour + pension and health insurance, the more attractive NE Ohio is to producers as a filming destination. Bill’s credits include “Fast & Furious 8: Fate of the Furious” (Universal Pictures, starring Vin Diesel & The Rock), “Captain America: Winter Soldier” (Marvel Studios, starring Chris Evans), “The Avengers” (Marvel Studios, starring Robert Downey Jr), “Shutter Island” (Paramount Pictures, starring Leonardo DiCaprio), “Spiderman 2” (Columbia Pictures, starring Tobey Maguire), “National Treasure” (Walt Disney Pictures, starring Nicholas Cage), “The Manchurian Candidate” (Paramount Pictures, starring Denzel Washington), & over 30 other feature films, as well as 4 seasons of “The Sopranos” (HBO, starring James Gandofini), 4 seasons of “Law & Order“ (NBC, starring Sam Waterson & Jerry Orbach), & a dozen other TV Shows. In October 2021, he competed against location managers of all theatrical motion picture releases worldwide to win the Location Managers Guild International Award for best period location management (the motion picture industry’s highest honor for location scouting & management) for his work on the academy award winning “Judas & the Black Messiah” (Warner Bros, starring Daniel Kaluuya). Warner Bros spent $26.35 million during the production in NE Ohio, hired 118 local crew, hired over 1,000 extras, sourced from over 60 local businesses, and booked 1,000s of hotel room nights. “Judas" was nominated in the Outstanding Locations on a Period Feature Category against 4 other features: “The Trial of the Chicago 7” – Netflix, “Mank” – Netflix, “Dreamland” – Paramount, “Enola Holmes” – Netflix. Bill’s last location manager credit before assuming the president’s role at GCFC was Netflix’s “White Noise,” which filmed in NE Ohio for 5 ½ months & prepped for over a year, spending approximately $106.6 million in NE Ohio, working with 256 vendors, hiring 921 crew & 3,000 extras. That 1 movie alone tallied 36,000 local hotel room nights. The NBA All Star Game yielded 47,014 hotel room nights in 2022. 1 movie can drive almost as much economic impact by itself because of the length of time the crew works in Ohio. Bill explored dozens of abandoned insane asylums in Massachusetts for The Martin Scorsese film “Shutter Island.” He waded through swamps of the meadowlands in New Jersey for places to dump bodies on 4 seasons of HBO's “The Sopranos.” He spelunked through miles of tunnels in abandoned mines in Pennsylvania for Marvel’s “The Avengers.” And he has scaled to the top of skyscrapers in Manhattan for “Spiderman 2.” Bill was born and raised in New York City and has a BBA in Marketing with a minor in Film from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Rocky River, OH with his wife Carol and daughter Sara.