the industry yearbook
DESCRIPTION
“The Industry Yearbook” is the first book ever to cover the history of Georgia's film & television production industry. More than 100 film industry veterans tell the story of how Georgia became the top movie production state it is today.TRANSCRIPT
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-2013
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40 YEARS
Published by Oz Publishing, Inc.
Cover and book design by Rositsa Germanova
ISBN: 978-0-9749791-2-0
Copyright 2013
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from
the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
The Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936606
by Nichole Bazemore
Oz Publishing, Inc.Atlanta
The Industry Yearbook 1973-2013
Foreword Hal Needham ................................................................... 1
Introduction ................................................................................ 3
The 1970s The Beginning .................................................................. 4
1973 - 1982 Upperclassmen .................................................. 26
The 1980s “It was like the wild, wild West.” .................................. 30
1983 - 1992 Juniors .................................................................. 44
The 1990s Show Me the Money: Tax Incentives Take Center Stage ............................................................................... 48
1993 - 2002 Sophomores ........................................................ 64
The 2000s The Chickens Come Home to Roost ............................ 68
2003 - 2013 Freshmen ............................................................. 85
Drama Class: Talent Department ......................................... 90
In Memoriam ............................................................................ 95
Recess ..................................................................................... 105
The Principals: Film Commissioners .................................. 129
Film Class: Filmology ............................................................ 136
Clubs and Associations ........................................................ 145
Extra-Curricular Activities: Film Festivals ........................... 151
Milestones: Companies ........................................................ 157
Shout-Outs! ............................................................................. 170
Community Support .............................................................. 173
Administrative Support ......................................................... 189
End Notes .......................................................................... 190
Selected Bibliography ..................................................... 192
Masthead ........................................................................... 194
Acknowledgements .......................................................... 195
Photo Credits ..................................................................... 196
About the Author ............................................................... 198
Index ....................................................................................... 199
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Here’s the shot: five miles of interstate
highway shut down to accommodate a
20-truck convoy aiding and abetting the
Bandit to outrun Smokey.
When we began scouting locations
for Smokey and the Bandit, I visited a state
(that shall remain nameless) and was told
there was no way they could shut down
the interstate. I returned to the airport
where I immediately called Georgia Film
Commissioner, Ed Spivia.
I’d met Spivia when I was 2nd Unit
Director on The Longest Yard and Stunt
Coordinator on Gator. Smokey was going be
my directorial debut. Over the phone I told
him the shots I needed. He said, “No problem.
Come on down to Georgia.” Of course Spivia
(I always call him Spivia, never Ed) was at the
airport when we arrived.
With all the help and cooperation
Georgia supplied, Smokey was shot on
schedule and on budget. So when we were
prepping to shoot Smokey 2, guess where we
went? Yep. Georgia.
For Smokey 2, we scouted locations
over two days. I got an invitation from Governor
Busbee to have breakfast at the governor’s
mansion. I had eight crew members with me
and the governor invited us all.
He asked if Spivia was taking good
care of us. I said, “Great!” But the one shot
I still needed was a town where I could land
a plane in the middle of Main Street and
take off again. Busbee said, “Ed, what about
Covington? They close all the stores every
Wednesday afternoon.” Spivia made it happen.
When we shot the scene, the stores
may have been closed but people from miles
around showed up to watch. It was the biggest
turnout Covington ever had.
The kindness and support we received
from Georgia greatly contributed to the
success of the movies I made there. When
you’re ready to shoot your next movie or TV
show, go to Georgia.
Hal Needham
2013
Foreword
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Introduction
Y’all Make Movies in Georgia?!
In 1996, when I moved here, that was a
valid question, especially from someone who
was new to the state. That’s because, after
a heyday in the 1970s, when an estimated
twenty films and TV shows – including
Deliverance, The Dukes of Hazzard, Smokey
and the Bandit, Sharky’s Machine, and
more – were shot in the state, movie and TV
production had come to a screeching halt.
Productions “ran away,” lured to other states,
and even Canada, by financial incentives
like tax breaks. For a while, especially in the
decade between the mid-1990s and the mid-
2000s, it seemed as if Georgia was a bastard
stepchild of the film and TV industry.
Fast-forward to 2013, and anyone
who’s surprised that we make movies in
Georgia will get the side-eye. Heck yes,
we make movies in Georgia; lots of them,
in fact. Since 1973, when then-Governor
Jimmy Carter formed the state’s first film
commission, we’ve made over 700 feature
films, TV movies, TV series, single episodes,
pilots, and commercials. We completed 333
productions in 2012 alone. Georgia is one of
the top five movie-making states in the nation,
behind New York and California, and in fiscal
year 2012, the industry’s impact on the state’s
revenue was $3.4 billion.
But anyone who’s ever achieved
anything knows “overnight success”
never really happens overnight. Georgia’s
“overnight success” was actually forty
years in the making. Dozens of dedicated
men and women – talent agents, casting
agents, gaffers, grips, production assistants,
assistant directors, locations scouts, caterers
and talent, just to name a few – were in the
trenches from the beginning, building the
crew base and infrastructure and laying the
groundwork for the financial incentives that
created the overflow we see today. They’re
the pioneers, the “old timers,” the people who
made it happen. They’re the ones who set the
stage, literally and figuratively, for Georgia to
earn the nickname “Hollywood of the South.”
Over the past year, I, along with my
colleagues at Oz Publishing, Inc., and Magick
Lantern Studios, had the chance to sit down
and talk to some of these folks about their
journey – to learn about the way things were
“way back when.” Through face-to-face
interviews and extensive research, I’ve woven
together the largely untold forty-year history of
the film and TV industry in Georgia.
Yes, we make movies in Georgia, and
didn’t you know? We always have. It is my
privilege and honor to share with you just how
we got from there to here.
Nichole Bazemore
Atlanta, 2013
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Ed Spivia
The 1970sThe Beginning
(Or, when a raging river, an eerie-looking banjo player, and four
little words put Georgia on Hollywood’s mind.)
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Ed Spivia (pronounced SPY-vee) was a handsome, charismatic young man with long hair that swooped just to the
corner of his eye. He had dimples and a soft, Southern drawl that was as smooth and fluid as blackstrap molasses. The North Carolina native also had a healthy sense of curiosity and a keen sense for news, a carryover from his days as a reporter at WGST Radio in Atlanta.
But Spivia’s radio days were long behind him. He had traded in his tape recorder and microphone for a job with the Georgia Department of Industry and Trade, an entity whose mission was to bring new business and tourism into the state. As the department’s director of public relations, Spivia was responsible for churning out an in-house publication about things happening around Georgia. The magazine was called Georgia Progress, and one hot summer day in 1971, Spivia walked out of his comfortable, air-conditioned office in Atlanta, got into his car, and headed north on Georgia Interstate 85 to a little town that’s nestled in a nook near the Georgia–South Carolina border. There, he would stumble upon the biggest story of his life.
**Rabun County, Georgia, is located
at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its unspoiled landscape is marked by lush, thick forests, crystal-clear streams, and waterfalls. It was the picture-perfect backdrop for a Hollywood movie – which is exactly why a production crew from Warner Brothers Pictures had gathered there that summer. They were making a film called Deliverance, which was based on the novel by native
Atlantan James Dickey. It told the story of four
OVERLEAF: Ed Spivia, a man with big plans for Georgia.TOP: Ed Spivia at WGST Radio.BOTTOM: Martins Creek Falls, Rabun County.
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Atlanta businessmen who take a rafting trip
in the mountains – a trip that goes horribly
wrong. The movie starred Jon Voight; Ned
Beatty; Ronny Cox; and a young, handsome,
emerging actor named Burt Reynolds.
During the drive to the North Georgia
Mountains, Spivia reasoned that a film being
made in the state was as big a story as any.
But it wasn’t until he arrived in the small
town of Clayton that he realized just how big
a story it was. When Spivia arrived on the
banks of the Chattooga River, where much
of the movie was shot, the light bulb went on.
What he saw – dozens of out-of-town crew
members needing food, lodging, props, and
costumes, and dozens of local folks being
cast in the film as extras – got him to thinking.
“I noticed that it required a lot of input from
the local community,” Spivia says. “Movie
companies needed hotel rooms at a discount
rate because they’d be there for an extended
period of time, and they needed to rent cars
and buy lumber … I thought this should be
Deliverance was the first film to put Georgia on the map, but it was not the first film to be made here. In fact, movie making in the state dates back to the early 1900s. One of the earliest movies, The Plunderer, was filmed in Dahlonega in 1915..1
Neither was Deliverance the first film to be shot in Georgia in the 1970s. Together for Days, starring Clifton Davis, Lois Chiles, and a young Samuel L. Jackson (then a student at Morehouse College) in his acting debut, was shot in Atlanta in 1971.2
BELOW, L-R: Ned Beatty, John Voight, Ronny Cox and Burt Reynolds, Deliverance (1972).
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something that we should pursue to help
everybody
When he got back to Atlanta, Spivia
shared his ideas with Lieutenant General
Louis W. Truman, a former commanding
general in the U.S. Army, cousin to former
President Harry S. Truman, commissioner
of the Georgia Department of Industry
and Trade, and Governor Jimmy Carter’s
right-hand man. Truman agreed that film
production could be a viable, profitable
industry in the state, and the two men
put together a proposal and sent it to the
governor. In 1973, one year after Deliverance
was released, Carter signed an executive
order establishing the first Georgia film office.
He asked Spivia to head it. Spivia’s task:
to lure productions from New York and Los
Angeles to the Peach State.
Georgia wasn’t the first state in
the nation to have a film commission, but
Georgia’s commission was perhaps the
most assertive. While agencies in other
states mostly directed and assisted film
crews once they arrived to start production,
Spivia launched an active recruitment effort,
advertising in “The Hollywood Reporter” and
“Variety” magazines and actually setting up
“economic development tours” to personally
meet representatives from all the major film
companies in LA and Chicago.
To help with their promotional efforts,
Carter and Spivia called in Beverly Anderson,
founder of Atlanta’s premier talent agency,
Atlanta Models & Talent. Since founding
AM&T in 1962, Anderson had enjoyed great
success in booking talent with agencies in
Deliverance was nominated for five Golden Globes and three Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. It also brought in $46 million at the box office. But many people were put off by the film, arguing that it portrayed the people of North Georgia as backward, inbred hillbillies. One of the film’s most vocal opponents was future Georgia Governor Zell Miller, who would write in his autobiography that he placed Deliverance on his list of most-hated books.4
Rabun County resident Billy Redden (below), who played the banjo player in Deliverance, was a high school student sitting in class the day California film producers cast him for the film. For the movie, Redden’s makeup was applied in such a way as to make him appear to be a mentally challenged albino.
After Deliverance, tourism in Rabun County quickly became the area’s biggest moneymaking industry. By 2012, forty years after the film’s release, tourism would bring in an estimated $42 million in revenue for the county.
SIDEBAR: Billy Redden, a/k/a “Banjo Boy.”
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New York and Chicago. Spivia hoped she
could bring some of that success to the newly
formed film office. Anderson signed on as a
consultant and became the state’s first film
representative. Then she got to work, selling
the benefits of all things Georgia to producers
and key decision makers, just as she’d done
when building AM&T. “The sales concept was
simple,” Anderson says. “I’d say, ‘When winter
sets in, you need to go on location down
South. Why go to Florida, where there is a
palm tree on every corner? Take a look at the
diversity of Georgia, the talent pool, and the
emerging technical businesses here.’”
Spivia and his team combined their
cold calling and face-to-face meetings with
a massive advertising campaign to lure
film producers to Georgia. Some of those
Georgia was the third state to create a film commission. Colorado was the first, in 1969, followed by Mississippi in 1973, and then Georgia, later the same year.
BELOW, L-R: Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman, Governor Jimmy Carter, Beverly Anderson and Ed Spivia.
Contrary to popular belief, Gone with the Wind was not filmed in Georgia, but in Culver City, California, primarily at Culver Studios (at that time it was called Selznick International Studios). No one knows for sure where author Margaret Mitchell got her inspiration for Tara Plantation, but some historians believe it may have been Stately Oaks Plantation, which was originally located on Tara Boulevard in Jonesboro, Georgia.3
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ads featured Governor Carter sitting in a
director’s chair. Before long, the group’s
efforts paid off. Movie producers began
heading to Georgia to see what all the talk
was about. Once crews arrived, Spivia and
his five-person staff would actually go out to
help scout locations. Sometimes producers
came to the state with the singular goal of
finding the perfect location for their next
film; other times, they were simply here on
other business – in which case Spivia and his
team had to be a bit more creative in putting
Georgia on the producers’ minds.
Case in point: John Wayne. In 1973,
the veteran actor came to Georgia for a
Cattleman’s Association meeting. When
Spivia found out about it, he arranged a
meeting to convince Wayne to make a movie
in the state. Spivia says, “An aide came
in with a bottle of bourbon and poured a
glass. John Wayne drank it down and said,
‘Let’s get down to business.’ So, I played a
tape in the VCR.” The video showcased the
diversity of the Georgia landscape – coastline,
mountains, and forests. Even though Wayne
had previously filmed a movie in the state
– The Green Berets in 1968 – he didn’t
seem convinced that the varied topography
showcased on the TV screen was, in fact, in
the state of Georgia.
“About thirty seconds in, he started
banging his hand on the table,” Spivia says.
“He said, ‘You can’t tell me this is Georgia.
Georgia is just hot and flat and dry.’”
“And I said, ‘If you’ll give me just
a few minutes to finish my presentation, I
do believe I’ll change your mind.’” Wayne
In 1974, North Carolina native Annette Stillwell moved to Atlanta and, one year later, founded what would become a very successful cast and crew payroll company. By 1980, Stilwell would become an Emmy award-winning producer and one of the premier casting directors in the Southeast.
Harold Morris, an inmate at Reidsville Prison, also worked as an extra in The Longest Yard. Originally sentenced to two life terms, Morris was later pardoned. When he was released, he wrote a screenplay about his life. Filmed as Unshackled, it was directed by Bart Patton and released in 2000.
SIDEBAR, TOP: Annette Stilwell, producer, Jayan Films.SIDEBAR, BOTTOM, L-R: Director Bart Patton and director of photography Paul Varrieur on the set of Unshackled (2000).
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watched the video and did change his mind.
Over the next few years, Wayne would return
to Georgia many times to scout locations for
future films. Other film companies followed
suit, and before long, the film office had so
many prospects, it was hard to keep up. Some
producers and actors kept coming back. One
of them was Burt Reynolds.
In 1974, Reynolds, who had starred
in Deliverance just two years previously,
returned to Georgia to film
The Longest Yard. The
movie was about a football
player–turned–convict
who organizes a team of
inmates to play against
a team of prison guards.
It was scheduled to film
at a prison in McAllister,
Oklahoma, but three days
before the shoot, prisoners
burned it to the ground.
Reynolds called Spivia for
help finding an alternate
location. Spivia recalls,
“He said, ‘Can you get us
a prison that looks like
this, real quick? If you can,
you’ve got the film.’”
The film commissioner
came through and
arranged for production
to begin at the Georgia
State Prison in Reidsville
shortly after. The Longest
Yard would go on to net more than $43
million in domestic gross sales.5 It would
SIDEBAR, TOP: The early days: Tatum O’Neal on the set of Little Darlings with a Lightnin’ Production Rentals’ truck (1980).SIDEBAR, BOTTOM: Lightnin’ Production Rentals in 2013.
In 1975, The Lewis Family founded Lightnin’ Production Rentals, Inc., in Atlanta. The company began renting production trucks to the motion picture industry in 1979 – everything from star trailers and honey wagons to camera trucks. Lightnin’s first feature film was 1980’s Little Darlings, starring Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal.