Local Voices Urge Filmmakers To Capture True Rural Life

A few years back, there was a television show that focused on a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota. The main characters got into the silo through a door set in the side of a mountain. In North Dakota. The mountain.

Growing up in missile country, I knew that was wrong. Then, underground, they went through empty warehouses and long halls looking for the suspect. Nope, still wrong. The warehouses are at the ready stations a few miles away, not in the silo launch control.

I remember thinking at the time that there are abandoned nuclear missile silo museums all over. None of them look like the television set. I remember thinking if I worked for North Dakota Tourism, I’d make a phone call and invite the director and cast out to the site on a working vacation.

I probably should have capitalized on that idea.

Just in time for the Sundance Film Festival, Land O’ Lakes has put together a toolkit to help filmmakers more accurately portray rural America.

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Land O’ Lakes has teamed with Brain Grazer, the producer of films like Dr. Suess’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Imagine Entertainment, lead by producer/director Ron Howard, to put together stories from farm families, pictures, and other examples of life in 2026’s rural America.

Ron Howard is the co-founder of Imagine Entertainment, the company behind films like Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code.

I had an early impression of how welcoming, interesting, and layered rural life was, even in the 60s, when I was a kid visiting the small towns and farms where my parents grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas. There has long been a tendency to oversimplify rural America, and I look forward to storytellers using the context and practical guidance in this new resource to portray these communities with the depth, energy, and authenticity they deserve.

A news release explains the purpose of the kit is to better represent the richness of rural America. In addition to this research, there are direct recommendations provided in the toolkit, such as:

• Showcase innovation and entrepreneurship as inherent and critical qualities.
• Emphasize themes of community involvement and helping neighbors. Include more teenagers and members of Gen Z, represent people of color, and show working women.
• Visually, show more types of people and places, expand employment seen on-screen, move beyond lifestyle clichés.

The toolkit builds on work done by the Modern Rural Collective. The group has been working to update Hollywood’s picture of rural America through picture galleries and personal narratives of farm families.