A group that wants to change the way the entertainment industry is nurtured, courted and served in Pittsburgh is talking about reinventing the Pittsburgh Film Office rather than starting an alternative agency.

However, leaders of the newly named Pittsburgh Film and Media Alliance insist the director must be based in Pittsburgh rather than Los Angeles, and they want an updated, expanded mission and a board that includes more government, labor and industry representatives.

They will make that case Sept. 7 at a meeting called by Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato to thrash out the direction of the 16-year-old office.

"The Pittsburgh Film and Media Alliance is proposing that the Pittsburgh Film Office must be reconfigured from the ground up," spokeswoman and "The Bread, My Sweet" producer Adrienne Wehr said yesterday.

"It is not about its executive director, it is not about disputed facts and figures, it is about the very charter of the initiative itself. Whether or not a brand-new film office would be formed or just the current one would be reconfigured, that remains to be seen. But we are asking and proposing change."

While the film office's mission worked for much of the 1990s, bringing Hollywood production here and keeping people employed, it doesn't any longer, Wehr suggested. "We are proposing that a new model is warranted, and the time for change is now," she said.

She and Christopher Lacey, assistant executive director of Pittsburgh's AFTRA chapter, met with the Post-Gazette's editorial board to talk about better serving everyone from first-time directors to Hollywood veterans. While they still want to see the big fish land here, they want more attention paid to the little projects no less dear to their cast and crew.

"What we're looking toward is a broader umbrella, something more inclusive," Lacey said.

"This region needs more: more diversity, more inclusion, more hard work. And the best part about that is, it's being done, but it's being done piecemeal. Adrienne does a movie; when someone else wants to do a 'Bread, My Sweet,' they have to reinvent the wheel, rather than having a knowledge base or a resource base to foster production."

They pointed to the Greater Philadelphia Film Office as a model, although it's an older, bigger and better-funded operation that enjoys free office space courtesy of the city. Now a nonprofit corporation, the Philadelphia office employs nine people instead of three, as in Pittsburgh.

Philadelphia gets the lion's share of applications for the $10 million in grant money the state offers TV and film producers. Wehr, Lacey and others would like to see the total tripled, with Pittsburgh dipping deeper into that pool.

"This is not so much a grant as an investment in the economy of the state," Lacey said, along with an effort to tap into the trillion-dollar entertainment business that stretches around the world.

The alliance is also talking to the Allegheny Conference and state Sen. Jim Ferlo, D.-Highland Park, about supporting a study, possibly with a total of $50,000, on an entertainment incubator and how to better present what Pittsburgh can offer the industry.