It’s easy to get lost in one of the editing rooms at the Aurora offices of High Noon Entertainment.
In an unassuming office park off Parker Road, the company’s Colorado headquarters is only one of three. The film and television company that creates cable programs including “Cake Boss” and “Tough Love” also has offices in New York and Los Angeles, but its roots are local. The company launched in Denver in 1997 and moved to its 30,000-square-foot headquarters in Aurora a little more than a year ago.
The space is sprawling. Wandering through High Noon’s networks of cubicles and rows of identical offices is disorienting. But standing in the cramped confines of one of the company’s main editing room is even more overwhelming. Watching multiple images beam across a massive screen, hearing the hum of a 64-terabyte server in the background and watching the blinking lights of a full wall of tape machines and editing equipment is downright surreal.
“With the building that we used to be in, we were kind of restricted by what the structure already was,” said Rusty Corbit, a High Noon media supervisor. “For this building, we got to plan a year in advance and plan the schematics for how we wanted our setup made. This entire room was designed by me and a few others to be exactly what we wanted for our workflow.”
Corbit’s workspace has impressed many visitors, including local legislators who supported the film incentive bill that Gov. John Hickenlooper signed at High Noon’s Aurora offices in May. The legislation ramps up the tax incentives Colorado offers production companies to shoot in the state from 10 percent to 20 percent. It also aims to make it easier for film and television companies to secure loans. The legislation is part of a push to support the local industry, even as it’s a bid to bring in filmmakers, producers and directors from elsewhere in the U.S.
It has taken several attempts to get the incentives legislation passed, and the founders of High Noon say it took input from local filmmakers to make the effort successful. Walking local lawmakers through High Noon’s editing and sound rooms gave the push more weight, said High Noon chief operating officer Duke Hartman.
“The governor supported it, and he put money in his budget for it. He knew film financing well. It was the overall push of the industry; it wasn’t us alone. But I think our involvement helped,” Hartman said. “In these hour-and-a-half, two-hour tours — they were all fascinated to see how a show like ‘Cake Boss’ was put together.”
In 1997, Hartman founded High Noon with fellow local media veterans Jim Berger and Sonny Hutchison. The trio had roots in the Denver television news business, and after contributing to documentary programming for the Discovery Channel, they created their own company with a specific mission in mind.
“It’s evolved over the years, for sure, but television programming is what we do. We create it, we develop it, we pitch it, we sell it, then we turn around and produce it as well,” Hartman said. “Our mission and what we do is non-scripted TV that runs the gamut from pure documentary to some of the house reality shows that we produce.”
