CHAPTER NINE

The Honky Tonk on Screen

Film, Television, and Music Video as a PR and Revenue Channel

Picture this: a stranger calls your venue on a Friday night while you’re working the front door, and asks if they can film a music video in your place. It sounds like a prank, or a hassle, or both. What you may not realize in that moment is that you’re being handed one of the most powerful pieces of public relations a honky tonk can ever receive — a chance to put your room in front of an audience of millions, with a credibility and a reach that no ad budget on earth could buy. This chapter is about that opportunity: how Texas honky tonks and dance halls end up on screen, why it’s such extraordinary PR, and how to make it happen and make the most of it when it does.

There’s a reason filmmakers and music-video directors keep coming to rooms like yours. The authentic Texas honky tonk is one of the most visually iconic settings in American culture — the neon, the worn wood floor, the dancers, the stage, the whole feeling of the place. You cannot build that on a soundstage; it has to be real, and the real ones are exactly the venues this book is written for. Hollywood and Nashville both know it, which is why everything from major films to chart-topping music videos gets shot in actual Texas dance halls. Your authenticity — the thing this entire book keeps returning to — is, among everything else it is, a film asset.

And when your room appears on screen, the PR value is enormous and unusually durable. A venue featured in a hit movie or a viral music video gets seen by millions, earns an “as seen in” credential it can trade on forever, and becomes a destination for fans who want to stand where it was filmed. This is earned media of the highest order, and it can land in your lap from a single phone call. Let’s make sure you’re ready to say yes — and ready to turn that yes into lasting reputation.

Two quick notes on scope before we dig in. First, the timing has rarely been better: we’re in the middle of a genuine “Western renaissance” in popular culture — hit shows, films, and a broad fashion-and-music embrace of the cowboy and country aesthetic — and that wave has productions actively hunting for authentic Texas locations right now. The door is open. Second, this chapter is about other people putting your room on a screen — their films, their shows, their videos. There is a second, equally important way your honky tonk ends up on screens in front of millions: the content you make yourself, the dance-floor clip that goes viral, the video shot on your own phone. That self-made screen content is the subject of the social media chapter later in the book, and it’s arguably the more common road to a screen for most venues. The two reinforce each other — the same iconic room that draws a film crew also makes for a scroll-stopping Reel — but in this chapter we focus on the productions that come to you.

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9.1 Why Your Authenticity Is a Film Asset

Start with why this opportunity exists at all, because understanding it helps you pursue it. Productions — films, television, commercials, and especially music videos — need authentic locations, and the genuine Texas honky tonk is near the top of the list of settings they cannot fake. A real dance hall has a patina that set designers spend fortunes trying and failing to imitate: the decades of wear, the real neon, the genuine vintage decor, the way the light falls in a hundred-year-old room. When a production wants the audience to feel the true Texas, they come to a true Texas room.

This reframes your venue’s character in a way worth sitting with. Everything that makes your place authentic to your regulars — the old bar, the worn floor, the iconic signage, the unchanged feel — is precisely what makes it valuable to a camera. The very things you might be tempted to “modernize” are the things a location scout is hunting for. This is one more reason, on top of all the others in this book, to protect the authentic character of your room: it isn’t just your brand and your heritage, it’s a genuine asset that productions will pay to use and that puts your name on screens around the world.

It also means the smaller and more genuine venues are not at a disadvantage here — often the opposite. A scout looking for an intimate, real honky tonk doesn’t want a giant modern club; they want the room that looks like the song sounds. Your fifty-year-old dance hall with the neon out front may be exactly what a major artist is looking for, and the call can come to anyone. Which raises the practical question: how do productions actually find venues, and how do you get on their radar?

9.2 The Many Ways a Honky Tonk Ends Up on Screen

“On screen” is a bigger category than most owners picture, and each form carries its own kind of PR value, so it’s worth knowing the full range before a call ever comes — because the more of these you recognize as opportunities, the more of them you’ll say yes to.

Narrative film and television put your room inside a story — a feature film, a streaming series, an episode of a show set in Texas. These reach huge audiences and carry the strongest “as seen in” prestige, and in the current Western-heavy moment, authentic honky tonks are in real demand as settings. The credit lasts as long as the film does.

Music videos are, for a honky tonk, often the most natural fit of all — the genre, the setting, and the audience all align, and a hit country video can put your room in front of millions of exactly the right people, as our case study will show in vivid detail.

Commercials and brand shoots are the quietly lucrative category owners overlook: truck and beer ads, tourism spots, Western-wear and boot brands, anything selling an authentic-Texas feeling. These often pay the best location fees of all, precisely because there’s an advertising budget behind them, even if the PR credit is softer than a film’s.

Reality, travel, and food television put your real venue — not a fictional one — on screen as itself, which is its own powerful thing. A spot on a Texas travel show, a “best honky tonks” segment, a food-show feature on your famous burger, or a reality show that drops by: each tells viewers your actual place is worth visiting, by name, which converts to tourism in a way a fictional appearance sometimes doesn’t.

Documentaries are the form where your venue can be the subject rather than the backdrop — a film about the Texas dance-hall tradition, about your scene, or about your venue itself. Being the story, not just the set, is the deepest screen credit there is, and it ties directly to the preservation and heritage themes we’ll develop later in the book.

Local television is the most attainable screen opportunity of all, and the one venues most often forget: the morning-show segment broadcast live from your dance floor, the evening-news feature on your anniversary or your charity night, the local lifestyle program shooting a two-step lesson at your place. You will likely never have to wait for a stranger to call for this one — you can pitch it yourself, as we’ll cover in the press chapter — and it reaches your actual local market, the people most likely to walk in this weekend.

Photo shoots and album covers round out the list — the screen’s still-image cousin. Fashion and editorial shoots, brand photography, and album covers all seek the same authentic backdrop, and the credit can be iconic: George Strait’s very first album cover, as we saw earlier, was shot at Gruene Hall, and that single image has done the venue’s PR for decades. A great photograph of your room in the right place lasts as long as any film.

You may field calls for several of these over the years, or just one, or none until you start pursuing them. The point of the map is recognition: when any of these opportunities appears, know it for the gift it is — and know that the most attainable ones, local TV and your own content most of all, don’t require waiting for anyone to call.

9.3 Getting on the Radar: The Texas Film Commission and Location Scouts

Texas actively works to bring film and music-video production to the state, and there’s real infrastructure built to connect productions with locations — infrastructure you can plug into for free. The single most important piece is the Texas Film Commission, the state office (housed in the Office of the Governor) that promotes Texas as a production destination and helps productions find what they need.

The Film Commission maintains a Location Library — a database of Texas locations that productions search when they’re scouting, and you can submit your venue to be listed in it. This is one of the most concrete, do-it-today pieces of advice in this whole book: if you have a distinctive room, get it into the Texas Film Commission’s Location Library, so that when a scout is searching for “Texas honky tonk” or “historic dance hall,” your venue is one of the options that comes up. There are also regional and city film commissions — the Fort Worth Film Commission, for instance, actively supports productions in its area — and getting on their radar too multiplies your chances. Listing costs you nothing and the upside is a production calling you.

Beyond the official channels, location scouts and music-video producers also find venues the way everyone finds everything now: online and by reputation. A venue with a strong visual presence — good photos of the room on its website and social media, a reputation as an iconic spot — is easier to discover and more appealing to a scout flipping through options. Some of the same things that make you findable by customers make you findable by productions. And word of mouth operates here too: a venue that handled one shoot professionally gets recommended for the next.

It’s worth knowing the broader context, which we’ll develop in the chapter on heritage and the music economy: Texas has worked to make itself film-friendly and music-friendly through state programs and incentives, because production brings money and attention to the state. Your venue hosting a shoot is a small part of that larger Texas machine — and that machine includes people whose actual job is to help productions find rooms like yours. Use them.

9.4 Hosting a Shoot: Logistics, Money, and Protecting the Room

Say the call comes and a production wants your room. Now it’s a business decision and an operational one, and handling it well is its own small art. A few practical realities to go in with.

There’s usually money in it, and it’s worth understanding the deal. Productions typically pay a location fee to use your space, which can be meaningful — a day or two of filming might pay like a very good night, sometimes better, and it often happens on a day you’d otherwise be closed or slow. But the money is genuinely the smaller part of the value; the PR and the “as seen in” credential are the real prize, which is why some venues will host a shoot on favorable terms for the exposure alone. Know your room’s worth, but weigh the promotional value heavily in the deal.

It will disrupt your operation, so plan for it. A shoot means a crew taking over your space for hours or days — lights, cameras, cables, a lot of people, a lot of waiting. You may need to close or alter normal business during filming. Get the terms clear up front: what days and hours, what they need from you, what they’ll restore afterward, who’s liable for any damage, and how your staff and any regulars-as-extras fit in. The professionalism you bring to this — the same organized, clear approach from the booking chapter — determines whether you’re the venue they recommend to the next production.

Protect the room and cover yourself. Before you sign anything, treat it like the contract it is: a written location agreement covering the fee, the schedule, liability and insurance for any damage to your property, and — critically — your rights to use the footage and the association afterward. You want it spelled out that you can say your venue appeared in the production and use that fact in your own promotion. Have your attorney and your insurance carrier look at the agreement, because a film shoot is exactly the kind of unusual, high-value, high-disruption event where getting the paperwork right matters. As with everything legal in this book: this is a PR guide, not legal advice, so get a professional to paper the deal.

Try to get your venue identified — because an unnamed room earns you nothing. Here is the catch that quietly costs venues their whole payoff: the PR value of appearing on screen depends entirely on people knowing it’s your place. A music video might shoot in your room and never name it; a film might dress it up as somewhere else entirely. Where you can, build recognition into the deal — ask whether the venue can be credited, whether identifying features (your sign, your name) can stay visible, whether the production will name the location in its press materials. You won’t always get it; a film usually needs the room to be the fictional place, not yours. But even then you can claim the association yourself afterward, loudly and often — which is the whole subject of turning the shoot into lasting PR, coming up next. The goal is simple: don’t let your room be famous while staying anonymous.

Decide how it fits your brand. Not every production is right for every room — the same identity questions from the booking chapter apply. A music video by an artist in your genre is a natural fit that reinforces who you are; a production whose content clashes with your values or your community might be worth passing on even for a good fee. Usually the fit is obvious and positive. But ask the brand question, because your room on screen is your brand on screen.

9.5 Turning a Shoot into Lasting PR

Here’s where many venues leave most of the value on the table: they host the shoot, take the fee, and then treat the screen appearance as a nice thing that happened rather than the PR engine it can be. The appearance itself is just the raw material. What you do with it is what turns one day of filming into years of reputation.

Build the moment into an event. When the film or video is released, that’s an occasion — use it. Host a premiere watch party at your venue, the way savvy halls do: gather your community to watch the thing that was filmed in their bar, on the very floor they’re standing on. If the artist is willing, a live performance or appearance turns it into a genuine happening that draws press of its own. The release is a second bite at the publicity apple, often bigger than the filming itself, and a watch party converts the screen appearance into a live, local, shareable event.

Claim the credential and keep it forever. “As seen in [film]” or “where [hit song]’s video was filmed” is a permanent piece of your story — put it on your website, your social profiles, your wall, your press kit. It joins the credibility bank we discussed in the entertainment chapter, right alongside the famous artists who’ve played your stage, and it never expires. Years later, fans of that film or that song will still seek out the place where it was made. A screen credit is one of the most durable PR assets a venue can own, so display it proudly and permanently.

Become a destination for the fans. A featured venue becomes a pilgrimage site. Fans of the movie or the music video will come specifically to stand where it was filmed, take their photo on the spot, and feel connected to something they love. Lean into it — mark the spot, tell the story, make those visitors welcome — because they arrive as fans and leave as customers who tell everyone they went to the place from the video. We’ll talk more about heritage tourism and pilgrimage in a later chapter, but a screen appearance is one of the fastest ways to manufacture exactly that kind of destination draw.

Ride the release’s wave of earned media. When a notable production featuring your venue comes out, that’s news, and local (sometimes national) media will cover it. Be ready: have your venue’s story and good photos prepared, make yourself available for the interview, and make sure every piece of coverage connects the production to your venue by name. The press chapter ahead covers how to capitalize on a news moment in full — but a screen appearance is a gift-wrapped one, and you should squeeze every drop of coverage out of it.

PART FOUR · THE ACTIVITIES