Rantoul: "Not your typical Hollywood"
- The Flight Crew
- Jan 24
- 4 min read
From Office PA to a frequent face at Flyover Film Studio, Alex Fako opens up with a heartfelt blog about what working in film has meant to him. Take it away, Alex!
A Letter from Alex Fako
“In Rantoul?” Every friend or family member asks when I tell them I work at a film studio in central Illinois. “Yes,” I reply, “Yes, really. In Rantoul.”
In May 2025, the team at Flyover Studios took a chance on me. They had a feature film project coming up, and I had been emailing them back and forth about job opportunities. I was in my second semester at the University of Illinois in Champaign, and while I had made many short films in high school and have always wanted to work on movies, I had no professional experience. When I was hired as an Office PA, I didn’t know what to expect. I, too, was thinking: “In Rantoul?” I discovered Flyover through a flyer advertising internship opportunities sent to the Illini Film & Video Club. I figured it was a small studio and I had been hired for a small-budget, low-key production. I will never forget their first email reply back to me, where they said they’d put me in their “rolodex” for the next year — which I promptly had to Google. I was, of course, excited for the experience, but had no idea what was to come.
I fell in love with movies in the living room of my childhood home. In 6th grade, my parents started showing me Alfred Hitchcock movies. I never looked back. I have been writing screenplays and making short films and dreaming up wild ideas for eight years and counting. I applied and was accepted to some film schools, but the logistics and financials just didn’t work out. When I found myself at the University of Illinois as an English major, I felt somewhat lost, like I had broken the promise to myself and others I made so many years back to be a filmmaker. I wasn’t whistling on ocean piers like Ryan Gosling in La La Land; I was surrounded by windmills instead of palm trees. I figured it was fate — maybe I wasn’t meant to be a filmmaker.
And it was exactly that: fate. Little did I know, 14 floors above the earth at my dorm building on the corner of 5th and Chalmers St. in Champaign, I was a 27-minute straight shot north on Route 45 away from Flyover Studios in Rantoul. Or, as I like to call it, the “Village of Stars.” Flyover is anything but a small studio. It has an expansive production office (where I worked) along with 100,000 sq. ft of studio space at the decommissioned Chanute Air Force Base. My grandma would later tell me that my late great-uncle Stanley was stationed at the base during World War II. As I said, fate.
But the real stars in Rantoul aren’t just in the clear country sky. The team at Flyover — including Kristi, Brett, Iman, Sarah, Dustin and Rob — is not your typical Hollywood production crew. I went into this first job totally “green.” I didn’t know what a call sheet was and I didn’t know what the 2nd AD’s job was and I certainly didn’t know that making professional movies is even more fun than I thought it would be. The team at Flyover was incredibly welcoming, helpful and fun to work with. They showed me the ropes, but they also proved you can teach someone skills with a positive and trusting attitude. They continue to show their commitment to helping the next generation of filmmakers with workshops and events, as well. It is so inspiring to see a team of filmmakers who care about helping outsiders break into the business. I could not have asked for a better place and better people to start my career with, and I still would not rather be anywhere else.
Not only have I had a great and valuable experience working at Flyover, they have continued to help me grow as an individual as well as a filmmaker. They will ask my opinion on important decisions, ask about my interests beyond the production office and beyond film and ask about the classes I’m taking in school. The people at Flyover care about me. Working with them has helped improve skills ranging from communication to financial budgeting to assembling bed frames from Walmart. It is cliche to say, but being at Flyover has truly made me a better person. As a growing hub for filmmaking, I see Flyover becoming one of the major names on the map of film studios not only in the nation, but in the world. I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them, and hope to continue to help build Rantoul into the “Village of Stars.” Flyover is a film studio where the people care about what they’re doing and who they’re working with; a fantasy land in the middle of farmfields; movie-making magic in the Midwest; a dream come true. As they say in La La Land, “Here’s to the fools who dream …”
