Molly Morgan, a costume designer from North Carolina, moved to Louisville in January 2023 after working with director Rachel Helson on a Lifetime Channel movie. During our conversation, Morgan told LEO Weekly about Louisville’s growing film industry, driven by tax incentives and a supportive local community.
You can find Morgan’s Instagram where she posts her costumes online here.
In this week’s LEO Limelight, we sat down with Morgan to understand how Louisville has grown, and has even more room to grow, within the entertainment and film industry.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
LEO: Who are you?
Molly: My name is Molly Morgan, and I am a costume designer, and just sort of a costume professional overall.
LEO: How do you stay connected with other creatives in Louisville, and how do you find those collaboration opportunities here in the city?
Molly: I should probably start by saying that I’m not from here. I’m from North Carolina, and I started working in the film industry around 2021 and I had gotten connected with a costume designer up in Connecticut, actually, and I was assisting him on a Lifetime Channel movie in Spring 2022 and the director of the movie was a woman named Rachel Helson, who is from Louisville. And I just kind of hit it off with her, and she became a friend. I had told her if she ever was looking to hire a costume designer, if she ever did any work in Kentucky, that I would be interested in working with her again.
Later that summer, she filmed a movie here called The Engagement Dress, which is now on Tubi, and she needed a costume designer. So she reached out to me and asked me to come design that movie for her. So my first time in Louisville was Summer 2022, and I came here and just loved it, and thought Louisville was a really neat city. I had heard from people that I worked with on that set about how much the film industry here was growing and how Kentucky has really great tax incentives in place right now for film production, and a lot of people seem to think that it was really on the rise.
So I had kind of started to think, I had never thought of Louisville as sort of like a hub for film, but at the time, I was looking to move somewhere and kind of relocate. I started getting a few more movies here that fall. And by the end of the fall, I had already decided that I wanted to move here, just because, like I said, I loved the city. I loved all the things that the city had to offer. And I was getting so much work here that I thought it would be worth it to relocate.
I officially moved here January ’23, and I think the thing that keeps getting me work is my connections. So what brought me here was my connection to Rachel, and, in the film industry, a really common saying is “work begets work.” So once you get a job, you meet more people, and they go and do something else. It might be that the production is saying, “Oh, we really need a costume designer, or we have a costume designer, and we need an assistant costume designer.” And then people just sort of say, “Oh, I’ve worked with Molly before. You should reach out to her.” That’s sort of how it works.
But I think the second part of your question was how Louisville or Kentucky is different from other places, and in that regard, I think, having worked in other areas, I think Louisville is at the beginning of its of its film journey, like the market here is still relatively small compared to places like Atlanta or Chicago or even like New Orleans, which are bigger third market areas.
Something that’s great about the community here is that it is small, and everyone is so excited, and there are so many people here that are really talented too while having worked in like those bigger market areas. Everyone is just so encouraging, and they want to to see other people succeed. I think that there’s something to be said about just the goodwill that Louisville film people have for each other. Everyone wants film to stay here. They want film productions to keep coming through. What benefits us is building up a really strong local crew base and bringing new people in, and training them on how to do the jobs really well.
It really behooves us to expand the film network here and to keep bringing people in, and training them and building that big crew base here, because that’s what attracts productions. One of the things that attracts productions to come film here is having a really strong, knowledgeable and talented local crew.
Something that sets us apart here is that everyone is just so enthusiastic, friendly and open. There’s not really a lot of gatekeeping that goes on.
LEO Weekly: What is one of your favorite productions you’ve worked on in Louisville, and how did the local community influence any of your designs on that production?
Molly: I think definitely one of the top things that I’ve done since I’ve moved to Louisville is I got to design a movie called Amber Alert, which just came out a few weeks ago on Amazon, and it stars Hayden Panettiere and Tyler James Williams. The company that brought it here hired me as the costume designer, and that was just a great experience, because I hadn’t worked with actors on that level before.
My main job is sourcing all the costumes. A lot of times I have to rely on my local connections to gather specialty things. For example in Amber Alert, we had police officers. So I had to source police uniforms. I did a lot of calling around, and ended up sourcing them from Kentucky Uniforms down in Lexington. They were super helpful. They even gave me a discount, and they let us come. They pulled out some some dead stock things for us, and they were just so helpful and so enthusiastic too about helping out for a movie.
A big thing for me is trying to support the local businesses in any way that I can. A lot of the work that I do, I need vintage items, or I’m looking for things that I can’t necessarily find in big box department stores, and so a lot of the local vintage stores have been so good to me in helping me source things that I’m looking for.
LEO Weekly: What are your main sources of inspiration when creating costumes for a specific time period or theme?
Molly: Whenever I’m designing costumes, I’ll read the script and I’ll talk with the director about what the vibe sort of is, including the color palette, the characters and what their daily lives are like. Then I make decisions about what they would wear based on that. And a lot of times I start by putting together a research board or a mood board of just images that I find online.
I pull a lot of my images from Pinterest. Getty Images is a great resource that I use, and just archives of old photos from specific areas. One time I found a photo archive of farmers from this very specific area in Pennsylvania. Right now, I’m working on designing costumes for Night of the Living Dead at Stage One Family Theatre, and that opens next week. It’s set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s, so one thing that I did when designing this play was I actually looked up yearbooks from just small towns in Pennsylvania.
So I really like to get as specific as I can whenever I’m pulling research. That’s really helpful whenever I do go, for example, for Night of the Living Dead. I went to Craft Union Vintage over in Deer Park and showed them images of what I was looking for, and told them some specific things that I needed. They were able to pull a bunch of things that they had on their floor, and some things that they went into their storage for and pulled for me. I guess all that is to say I get a lot of my research from online and just try to get really specific with what I’m looking for.
This article appears in LEO Weekly presents Readers’ Choice 2024.
