The Next American Dream : Kansas City : A Documentary Film

May 4, 2006 | Kansas City Star

KC toots its own horn in rebirth
By Kevin Collison

The scene was the Screenland Theatre in downtown Kansas City and the audience at the offbeat venue was decidedly upscale — corporate chieftains, the mayor and 150 other civic leaders.

After sampling hors d’oeuvres, sipping cocktails and schmoozing in the lobby, the suit-and-tie crowd brought their popcorn inside for a double-feature preview of an aggressive marketing offensive aimed at promoting a dynamic national identity for Kansas City.

The coming attractions: footage from a $500,000 documentary film chronicling the rebirth of downtown that backers believe has a good shot at being televised nationally, and a 24-page advertising spread about the Kansas City region being published in the May 16 issue of Fortune magazine.

Officials at the Kansas City Area Development Council, the organization behind the campaign, estimate there is $7.5 billion in fresh development occurring across the region, $4.5 billion of it devoted to rebuilding downtown.

That hefty investment, they believe, is a story worth telling to the rest of the country. You can’t just build it and hope they come — you have to sell it.

“We see ourselves at a once-in-a-generation moment,” Martin Mini, senior vice president for marketing at the development council, said Wednesday.

“We believe we have such a transformation taking place that we have to be ambitious about telling people that a whole new Kansas City is coming together.”

The organization has raised much of the money for the film “Mending the Heart of an American City” by Inland Sea, an award-winning local film company, and has coordinated an estimated $500,000 advertisement buy in Fortune that it believes will reach 3.7 million readers nationwide — many of them influential corporate executives.

The bulk of the cost of both initiatives is being picked up by local corporations, several of which purchased full-page advertisements in the Fortune spread. H&R Block Inc. led the way in funding what will be a one-hour documentary film by contributing $100,000 to the effort early last year.

“They are two very big, very aggressive ideas that are part of this heightened national marketing effort,” Mini said. “Both are bold initiatives for markets our size.”

The 24-page Fortune spread is believed to be the largest any city has arranged to purchase in the business magazine, although a couple of states have had slightly larger spreads. The key was persuading Kansas City corporations to purchase 12 pages of ads. In return, a freelance writer hired by the magazine did a 6,300-word article that, along with 25 photos, occupies the other 12 pages.

Corporations purchasing full-page ads at anywhere from $65,000 to $87,000 each were Sprint Nextel Corp., YRC Worldwide Inc., Garmin International, American Century Investments and the Bayer HealthCare Animal Health Division.

Nonprofits buying full-page ads were the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; the Kansas City Convention and Visitors Bureau along with 360 Architecture; the Kansas City SmartPort in association with several other companies and organizations; and the area development council. The magazine’s list price for nonprofit ads is $56,485.

The article describes the construction boom occurring downtown and near Kansas Speedway. Other topics it explores include the local life science industry, both human and animal; efforts to capitalize on the shipping and distribution opportunities presented by NAFTA; sports and cultural amenities; and the comparatively low cost of living here.

“The writer was taken by the strong entrepreneurial spirit he found across the board in the region,” Mini said.

Work on the documentary film began in early 2005. A crew from Inland Sea recorded the demolition of buildings in the South Loop redevelopment area and is now filming the construction replacing what had been a tired, tawdry corner of downtown. Those projects include the new H&R Block headquarters, the Power & Light District, the Sprint Center and the renovated President Hotel.

About 23 hours of footage has been shot so far. and the film makers expect to shoot about 40 hours before cutting it down to a one-hour documentary. One of the scenes the Screenland audience saw earlier this week was the nine-month construction of the H&R Block headquarters telescoped to 45 seconds of time-lapse film.

Each day, a camera placed atop a nearby building took two images of the construction. The rapid-fire result wowed the crowd. Similar time-lapse films will be done of the construction of the Sprint Center and Power & Light District.

Interspersed with the construction images were interviews with some of the key players so far in the downtown revival such as Mayor Kay Barnes and Mark Ernst, CEO of H&R Block, as well as young people moving into downtown condos and entrepreneurs setting up shop in the Crossroads.

“You can feel the people filling the gaps of these buildings being created,” said Aimee Larrabee, who along with John Altman co-founded Inland Sea. “The fun part will be coming in the months to come. Now that demolition is taken care of, we can watch the buildings coming up.”

To add intellectual depth to the documentary, and to sell national cable stations about the wider appeal of Kansas City’s rebuilt downtown, Inland Sea has enlisted a board of national experts led by Chris Leinberger, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, to participate in the film.

Larrabee said that “when we started, we certainly hoped Kansas City would have enough activity and vitality with its rebirth to merit national interest.”

She added, “A pivotal time was Chris Leinberger agreeing to chair our academic advisory panel. He confirmed this is a story of merit and Kansas City is a great case study.”

What’s more, although other American cities have engaged in similar downtown revitalization efforts, none apparently has taken the time to document the work. Larrabee said PBS, and national cable stations including the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Arts & Entertainment and Bravo have expressed interest in the film.

“The response has been ‘wow,’ we didn’t realize this story has not been done yet,” she said.

The film is to be completed by late 2007, and a premiere is planned to coincide with its hoped-for national television debut.

That means, at some point, the filmmakers must cut off their chronicling. Larrabee said some limited filming will be done of the Metropolitan Performing Arts Center project, but that $326 million endeavor is not scheduled to be completed until 2009.

“We realized there would be no perfect stopping point,” she said. “The film is about the process and one thing leading to another.”

While the completion of the film is still more than a year away, raw footage is being made available to corporate sponsors and other investors to use for advertisements, public service announcements and other purposes.

Ernst was at the Screenland event to present a short film that will be shown to H&R Block employees about their new downtown home. The film uses the time-lapse sequence of the headquarters going up as well as shots of downtown restaurants, lofts and other amenities. H&R Block is to begin moving into its new quarters in July.

He said there was pride and excitement in his company about being a catalyst for the current downtown revival. He noted that H&R Block decided to make the move because it believes the new environment will help the firm attract and keep talented employees.

Bob Marcusse, president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said the Fortune advertisement section and the downtown documentary are intended to let bright people around the country know that Kansas City would be a good place to live.

“We have to understand the key to our future is talent, and finding and attracting talent is a very important goal for the community and important for the individual companies that make up Kansas City,” Marcusse said.

“Kansas City competes in the image market and image is reality for a lot of people in this country. We have to continually work to upgrade, renew and reset the image of Kansas City.”