Based on a true story, BOOMTOWN is a powerful Feature Docudrama about the rebirth of an American downtown.

In the 1970s, in Frederick Maryland, a small group of rebels challenged the old guard using ART and civic activism to rescue their community from the brink of collapse. Their efforts would spark a cultural revolution that would reshape the town’s future.

Fifty years later, a multiracial college student and podcaster, would uncover her late father’s newspaper archives and the forgotten story behind that transformation. As the past comes into focus, she realizes the forces that once united the town may be the only thing capable of saving her future now. Because saving the town wasn’t enough. Now she must protect what it stands for.

Director Biography - Salyer McLaughlin

Salyer Writer/ Director

Salyer McLaughlin is a filmmaker drawn to stories of consequence—where community, conscience, and culture intersect. He began his career with Warren Miller Ski Films before directing national television campaigns in Los Angeles and founding Big Blue Foundation, where he pioneered early large-scale public service films that reached audiences nationwide theatrically and featured voices such as Paul Newman and James Earl Jones.

Relocating to Maryland in 1996, McLaughlin founded Big Picture Media and became a founding producer of the 72 Film Fest, helping cultivate a regional filmmaking movement that endures today.

His narrative work includes the climate-fiction screenplay Arcadia (2020). In 2026, he completed his debut feature as writer-director, BOOMTOWN: The Story of Downtown Frederick, a cinematic exploration of civic reinvention and creative revival.

For more than three decades, McLaughlin’s work has centered on impact-driven storytelling—films rooted in place, purpose, and possibility.

Director Statement

BOOMTOWN

I didn’t set out to make a film about a town. I set out to make a film about possibility.

BOOMTOWN began as an exploration of how creative risk reshapes communities. I have long been drawn to stories of consequence—where individual imagination collides with civic space. Frederick, Maryland became my canvas, not because it is unique, but because it is specific. And specificity, I believe, is where universality lives.

Downtown Frederick was once considered dormant. What unfolded over decades was not a miracle, but a slow choreography of visionaries, artists, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens who refused to accept decline as destiny. I was interested not in nostalgia, but in momentum. Not in architecture, but in agency.

This film is structured as a cinematic conversation between past and present. Historical recreations are interwoven with contemporary voices, allowing the city itself to function as a character—resilient, imperfect, evolving. I wanted to resist the traditional documentary approach that explains from a distance. Instead, I chose immersion: letting music, image, and rhythm carry emotional truth as much as dialogue.

At its core, BOOMTOWN asks a simple but urgent question: How and why does a community decide to believe in itself?

We are living in a moment where civic trust feels fragile. Polarization is loud. Institutions are questioned. Yet across the country, small cities are quietly rewriting their futures through art, entrepreneurship, and collaborative leadership. Frederick is one example—but it stands in for something larger which might explain why Reader’s Digest recently named it the best small town in America.

My background in cause-driven filmmaking shaped this project. For more than three decades, I have explored storytelling as a form of civic engagement. With BOOMTOWN, I wanted to move beyond advocacy into authorship—creating a film that feels cinematic rather than instructional, experiential rather than explanatory.

Ultimately, BOOMTOWN is a film about renewal. As public funding for the arts declines and communities face deepening

division, Boomtown offers a hopeful, grounded model of how creativity and inclusion

can lead to tangible, lasting change.

— Salyer