Rural Texas Hospital Goes Hollywood

When Hollywood – and one of TV’s preeminent creators of this decade – came to Faith Community Hospital in Jacksboro, the facility pulled off a notable feat: switching between medical setting and television filming location with little warning.

Over a handful of days last February and May, Taylor Sheridan – the creator and showrunner for the massive TV hit “Yellowstone” and its successful prequels, “1883” and “1923” – brought his crew to Jacksboro to use Faith Community as a set for “Landman,” his new series set to debut this November on Paramount+.

The show, with stars including Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, Ali Larter and Demi Moore, is billed as “A modern-day tale of fortune-seeking in the world of West Texas oil rigs.” It will be set in Midland, but used Faith Community – located northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro – as the setting for the fictitious Midland General Hospital.

Frank Beaman, CEO of Faith Community, told The Scope that Sheridan and his production company, Bosque Ranch Productions, are “without a doubt, one of the most professional organizations that I’ve ever seen” and were respectful of the hospital’s real-life mission.

“They understood that we were a hospital first [with an] emergency room, and that at any point in time, if an ambulance came in, a helicopter came in, whatever happened, we would need to stop,” Beaman said. “And interestingly, that actually happened a couple of times, which ended up inadvertently being a very positive thing for them.”

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The hospital’s Hollywood turn was seeded a couple of years ago, Beaman said, when a producer for Bosque Ranch had been traveling around the area and called Faith Community staff about the possibility of using it as part of the show. Plans progressed further, then came to a halt with the Writers Guild of America strike that lasted between May and September 2023.

During that time, the project fell off the hospital’s radar until “probably four weeks or so before they actually showed up on site for the very first episode that they were filming,” Beaman said. “It was a fire drill all the way through. Within a short period of time, we negotiated everything, got the contract signed, had all the details, knew what we were doing.”

Several days before shooting began, crew members for the show transformed Faith Community into Midland General, removing everything off the wall that had the Faith Community Health System names or logos and replacing it with the appropriate decor. The crew installed the light bulbs they needed for the shoot and new artwork fitting with the vision of Midland General.

Billy Bob Thornton on the set of Landman

Faith Community Hospital on the set of Landman

The local high school near the hospital was the staging area for the full crew of about 250, Beaman said, with workers being shuttled back and forth. He estimates about half the crew was in the emergency department area when shooting was going on.

But there’s no shutting down of a hospital like the one in Jacksboro, a rural community of less than 5,000 residents, for TV filming or anything else. So when someone came into the emergency department, hospital personnel, cast and crew all had to be ready to move accordingly.

“Our whole team was ready to work, [and we told them], ‘We’ve got an ambulance coming in.’ Because they had the whole ambulance entrance, which is kind of behind the public area where people park and everything,” Beaman said. “And they just stopped. Everyone moved aside. And when that ambulance pulled in, there were no restrictions, no nothing.”

When a patient – a real one – needed to be airlifted out of the hospital, that proved to be a fortuitous moment for the “Landman” team, which captured the moment for potential use in the show.

“This happened to be one of the [days] that Taylor Sheridan himself was here,” Beaman said. “I [had gotten] to see the script and the scenes and everything like that ahead of time to make plans, contingencies [for patient care]. So I went to him and said … ‘If you want to move your cameras and everything, we got a helicopter coming in, in about 20 minutes.’ And they lit up and said, ‘Wow, this is fantastic!’ So we did that. We had the releases [and] everything signed. That ended up being a fantastic video [opportunity] for them. Now, whether they used it or not, I don’t know, but that was pretty cool.”

The hospital contractually received separate compensation rates for advance setup, filming days and cleanup. Funds it received from the shoot went to the Faith Community Charitable Foundation. Beaman said Sheridan was “very humble, very appreciative” of what the hospital does, and Bosque Ranch has asked Faith Community “to be their go-to” for anything health care-related in its shows moving forward, which the hospital said it would look at doing on a case-by-case basis.

Beaman said he’s been asked why Faith Community agreed to be part of the show. The positive publicity was one reason; it stoked excitement in the community, where the “Landman” operation made its presence felt over a period of several months, filming around the area.

“And one of the things, too, is that the employees get a little bit of a boost out of that,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re that important? Taylor Sheridan came here?’ There’s a sense of pride in that, ‘Wow, they came out and put a full-fledged Hollywood production company right here at our facility.’ So yeah, there’s a lot of things that go with that.

“I just think it was a positive experience. We absolutely would do it again and probably will do it again.”