TAMPA, Fla. — This October, a crowd of around 60 gathered on a normally deserted brick street on Ybor City’s industrial edge. Among the warehouses and barbed wire, they set up roadblocks and a hydraulic catapult.

They’d come to flip a car.

On this independent film with a tight budget, the stunt had to work that night.

In the crowd stood Tyler Martinolich, big, bearded, 43 years old, with an expressive face that moves like an actor’s when he talks about this stuff. He dresses business casual, with cowboy boots. As Hillsborough County Film Commissioner, he’s played a behind-the-scenes role in every show, movie or commercial filmed locally for almost a decade.

Ten years after Florida seemingly took itself out of the movie game by defunding production incentives, Martinolich remains the fixer who makes things happen in Tampa Bay. He has not given up on a Florida film renaissance.

So — you want to flip a car in the middle of a Tampa intersection for your movie?

That will require the cooperation of seven governmental departments, agencies and utilities, plus Martinolich’s help.

To close the street, you’ll need city traffic engineers to design a detour that the most hopeless tourist could follow. You’ll want the streets to shine under the moonlight, which means wetting them with a hose, which means getting the city to crack open a hydrant, requiring installation of a special meter to track how much you owe.

You’ll want those ugly stop signs moved by the city’s signage department, and you’ll need stormwater people to figure out if bolting that catapult to the street will collapse the sewer below. Someone must check if a flying car is going to hit the power lines. You’ll need so many firefighters and cops that some will have to be borrowed from another municipality.

Diplomacy is key. Everybody nearby must sign off. That will mean figuring out who owns the defunct strip club on the corner so they can be convinced to allow lighting on their property. Members of the block’s thriving urban pickleball club must be directed to park elsewhere. And you’ll have to ensure the disabled man in the 100-year-old bungalow across the street can get in and out of his house.

But you are a director, an artist, someone who must focus on a creative vision. That is where Martinolich and his small team at Film Tampa Bay come in, knocking on doors, calling the right officials.

“In a way,” Martinolich said, “the job is to translate filmmaker to government.”

A request to flip a car is relatively tame compared to the producer who once outlined a scene with a Native American woman galloping bareback down Ashley Street while firing flaming arrows toward the I-275 on-ramp.

When “America’s Got Talent” wanted venomous snakes at Cotanchobee Park, Martinolich had to get Tampa General Hospital to stock exotic antivenoms and ensure there were enough snake wranglers if a cobra got loose.

He and his team have to figure out how to break down outlandish creative visions — a Viking funeral on the Hillsborough River, for instance — into something a fire marshal or parks supervisor can actually approve.

Martinolich recalled getting on the phone with director Tim Burton to explain — a day before the massive Gasparilla parade — why he could not close part of Bayshore Boulevard to film “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.”

“Tim Burton was perfectly nice about it,” Martinolich said. “But none of his people, who I’d been telling about Gasparilla for weeks, wanted to be the one to tell him no.”

On the night of the shoot in Ybor, for a psychological thriller titled “Avalon,” one car sped after another down the block. When the catapult launched the car in pursuit, it flew sideways and crashed all wrong. They’d need another take. But the only car they had to wreck was now too wrecked.

After some head cradling came the reality, Martinolich said. “We need to make this work.”

The crew performed impromptu body work, hammering out enough dents to try once more. Around 2 a.m., the car flipped with a great crash. They got the shot.

Marketing Tampa to the movies

Fueled by no less than two pots of coffee per day and aided by a willingness to pick up the phone no matter the hour, Martinolich seems to be willing Tampa into a decent place for production, even if it’s not that affordable yet.

For years, Florida trailed California and New York as a filming destination. But when the state Legislature scrapped Florida’s film incentives program a decade ago amid shifting economic philosophies, an exodus began.

Hillsborough County stepped in with its own program to fund productions that would spend locally and show off the region. For years, it couldn’t even give all of the money away. It was too lucrative to shoot in Georgia or North Carolina.

For the past two years, however, so many are taking advantage that the entire $1 million pool was depleted, even after the county increased the budget by $250,000.

Creative folks credit Film Tampa Bay, particularly Martinolich.

He was drawn to Tampa in 2008 to teach at the University of Tampa’s fledgling film program after spending years as a freelance production manager. He’s worked for Film Tampa Bay since 2013, leading the office since 2018.

He learned to be Tampa’s film fixer simply by doing it, cold-calling confused officials and knocking on doors until he had the contacts.

It helps to know every nook of the region. When “Avalon” was looking for somewhere rural to shoot, Martinolich told the director, “Let me just show you Ybor City.” That side stop sold them on the location.

It also helps that he’s gregarious — a big laugher exuding an infectious love for moviemaking. If local movie fans know him, it’s for hosting big-energy Q&As at events like the Gasparilla International Film Festival.

Now, his 60-plus-hour workweeks have coincided with an uptick in local production.

On a recent morning, his Outlook calendar — “a Brutalist version of Tetris,” he said — foretold days of scouting tours, set visits, a business development call about a new streaming platform for Florida filmmakers, a presentation on a renovation at Tampa Theatre, a film festival board meeting and a screening of “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

He’d just been to Toronto and then Gotham Film Week in New York, and he’d soon be heading to London. He travels almost 100 days a year to conferences and festivals, talking to filmmakers about Florida.

“I don’t think I’ve been to a film at a film festival in 10 years,” he said when asked what he’d seen at Cannes.

A handful of productions now film here regularly, like “90 Day Fiance” and movies for Hallmark. The past year saw approximately 13 movies shot in the county, plus about a dozen TV shows and hundreds of commercials.

Producers were recently scouting a soccer field in Tampa for a Fox Sports ad. “That sounds simple,” Martinolich said, “but now we have to track down all these youth soccer coaches to find out when they have practice there.” A major automaker was scouting for an ad spot. The Fort Brooke Garage roof and the Selmon Expressway have become car commercial hot spots.

Meanwhile, producers for a major reality competition series are circling Tampa Bay, as are producers of a comedy for a major streamer about the founding of an iconic Florida restaurant.

Film Tampa Bay’s services and support are offered free of charge, including the permits.

“There’s this energy now in Tampa,” said Emily Zercher, a producer on “The Last Time,” a horror movie by Shane Brady filming in Tampa. It stars Chandler Riggs, known for his work as Carl on “The Walking Dead,” and Casper Van Dien of “Starship Troopers.”

Zercher and Brady, who are married, recently moved from Austin, Texas, to make movies here.

“We kept getting drawn back to Tampa, in part because of Tyler,” Zercher said. “The one thing we’ve told everybody is like, in Tampa, making movies is magic, and everywhere else, there’s a lot of red tape.”

To address a shortfall of local production assistants, Film Tampa Bay launched a training program for college students.

One of Tampa’s advantages is that it can stand in for lots of places, said Joanne Harris, a locations manager who recently came back to Florida from Los Angeles as opportunities dried up in Hollywood.

When Hallmark was scrambling to find somewhere to shoot “Hats Off to Love” in the spring, they turned Tampa Bay Downs into the Kentucky Derby. When “The Infiltrator” with Bryan Cranston was filming, Tampa played itself but also filled in for Colombia in scenes shot at the former Cephas’ Hot Shop on E. 4th Avenue.

Martinolich has a story, it seems, from anything filmed here in the past 12 years. Recently, he posted knowingly about how fake money from “Spring Breakers,” starring James Franco, was still circulating in the area.

When a celebrity slips into Tampa to scout locations, he’s the one accompanying that A-lister, perhaps one who portrayed an iconic superhero, and keeping it quiet, even years later.

Martinolich has also been there when productions have kicked the tires on Tampa but ultimately went elsewhere.

This month, “Not Without Hope” premiered. The adaptation of a real-life boating tragedy beginning in Clearwater was filmed in Malta. “It should have shot here,” he said.

A recent visit to the Film Tampa Bay offices at One Tampa City Center found Martinolich at his desk beneath a framed copy of the ballroom party photo from “The Shining,” into which he’d been photoshopped. He was wrapping up a call with a director from Jamaica, pitching her on why she should film her next movie, possibly starring Taye Diggs, in Tampa. It wasn’t clear if she was convinced.

Florida’s film unicorn

Earlier this month, Martinolich spent three days hustling through the Capitol, meeting nearly every House member and senator for committee week. He hasn’t given up on a renewed statewide incentive, sometimes making his case to lawmakers who’ve told him outright they don’t support film.

He was accompanied by another believer. Tampa-based writer-director Todd Wiseman is making “A Land Remembered,” the first project in a decade to receive direct state support — a $500,000 appropriation that Wiseman called a lifeline and a signal. “It means something’s shifting,” he told me. “There’s a feeling that Florida wants this industry back.”

It’s no secret conservative lawmakers aren’t inclined to directly fund creative endeavors. But “A Land Remembered,” which will film in Hillsborough and is courting a major star, may hold a certain cultural appeal with its cracker tale of ranchers surviving the unspoiled Florida wilderness.

Under a Republican president who has threatened tariffs to bring productions that have fled overseas back to the U.S., the project’s supporters hope the climate is right for a Florida film resurgence.

For Martinolich and Wiseman, that historic state money, which they lobbied for together, proves the door is cracking open. This year, they’re asking for another half-million.

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