In the 1930s, Academy Award-winning film director John Ford, famous for shooting on location, traveled through Monument Valley in southeastern Utah searching for a rugged backdrop against which to film his Western classic “Stagecoach.”

“The locals noticed that these guys would come in and spend a lot of money, and they thought, ‘Well, let’s encourage that sort of thing,’” former Missouri and Kansas film commissioner Jerry Jones told the Charlotte County Commission during a presentation in April. “They formed the first film commission in 1949 in Moab, Utah ... By 1985 every state had formed a film commission.”