The South’s New Hollywood

The South’s New Hollywood

TATE TAYLOR ON DEVELOPING NATCHEZ AS A PREMIERE FILM DESTINATION

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Before Wanda Sykes headed home after filming for Breaking News in Yuba County was complete, she took the time to scribble a note in the guest book at Tate Taylor’s restored historic home in Church Hill, Mississippi. She wrote, “I can’t believe I’m going to say this. But the most creatively fulfilled and embraced I have ever felt was in Natchez *bleepin* Mississippi. When are we coming back?”

Bringing first-timers to the South is one of the best, and most fulfilling parts of Taylor’s job as a director, he told me. He and his partner in filmmaking and in life, producer John Norris, have spent the last decade promoting Mississippi, and Natchez in particular, as a premier film destination. In addition to bringing their own projects, including Get On Up, Ma, and Breaking News in Yuba County to the Mississippi Delta—the couple also works to showcase the region’s vast natural and architectural beauty and its range through their production studio Crooked Letter Pictures, and their nonprofit Film Natchez.

“Natchez in particular has such a diversity in its location-ability,” said Taylor. “All periods of architecture are here—from the lavish to the shacks.” The best example of this, he explained, is Get On Up, the 2014 James Brown biopic starring Chadwick Boseman. The scene in which Brown performs his iconic Live At the Apollo show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, for instance, was filmed in the transformed Margaret Martin Performing Arts Center on Homochitto Street in Natchez. “We had to go from Georgia to Paris, to Vietnam,” said Tate. “We had to be in the 1930s all the way to the 2000s. And you can find all of that here.”

A native of Jackson, Taylor moved permanently back to his home state a few years after directing the 2011 Oscar-award winning film The Help, when he embarked on a nationwide search for “an old house that needed restoring in the middle of nowhere that no one could find.” He landed at Wyolah, a one hundred acre property centered around an 1836 Greek Revival home in the tiny community of Church Hill, Mississippi— twenty miles north of Natchez. “So,” he said, “it was an old house that brought me back to this region.”

In the middle of nowhere as he was in Church Hill, Taylor said Natchez quickly became his community. “And I just saw what a sleeping giant the town was, and how much need there was for ideas and opportunities for people who have been underserved,” he said.

After years of promoting the area from within the film industry, in 2019 Tate founded the nonprofit Film Natchez—an organization that “aims to promote the film economy in Natchez through outreach, education, and support.” Though stunted a bit by the 2020 pandemic, the organization has already hosted several workshops and seminars, bringing top level representatives from various factions of the film industry—from stunt coordinators to writers to special effects to casting—as resources for locals interested in exploring such work themselves.

“A lot of what we do is based on the fact that when I and Octavia [Spencer] wanted to get into the business— we were both production assistants on A Time to Kill in Canton, Mississippi—we didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but we had the opportunity to leave and to go and seek out our dreams,” said Taylor, explaining that for a lot of people in the South, the barriers to entering this industry go beyond financial ones. “A lot of people just don’t have that opportunity. Film Natchez is built around the idea of giving people the opportunity and an access point to our business.”

Beyond its educational initiatives, Film Natchez also actively promotes Natchez as a film destination by spotlighting its various backdrops and local actors and actresses, as well as Mississippi’s competitive film incentives, expanded by Senate Bill 2603, which former Governor Phil Bryant signed into law in 2019. These include cash rebates up to $5 million on eligible expenditures and payroll, as well as tax reductions on eligible rentals and purchases. “This was paramount in opening the doors,” said Taylor. “People can make their films anywhere. Without the film incentives, it was a nonstarter for any studio to come here.”

Such investments by the state, Taylor emphasized, have proven themselves to have an incredible impact on the communities selected as sites for film projects. “It’s tried and true,” he said, citing the $17 million that went directly into Greenwood’s businesses during production for The Help—and that’s not to mention the boost in tourism the town experienced following the film’s success.

“It’s a shot of adrenaline,” he said. “We have two movies filming in Natchez right now, and I can’t tell you the merchants who come up to me and throw their arms around my neck and say, ‘You don’t know me, but we just had our best month ever.’ It makes the city proud and then they start spending money, and homeowners start taking pride in their city and spending money. It goes beyond the fact that the movie people are here in town.”

Over the last year, Taylor himself has made some significant investments in Church Hill and in Natchez, having overseen the openings of three—with one on the way—culinary experiences in the Adams and Jefferson County area.

Church Hill Variety Restaurant and Farm, which is settled near Taylor’s property at Wyolah, will offer an elevated dining experience centered on locally-sourced (from the adjacent farm, when possible) ingredients. The restaurant will also boast a farm store with grab-and-go meals and produce. “Jefferson County is a very underserved county,” said Taylor. “There is not a restaurant other than Hunt Brothers Pizza at the Chevron. There’s such a need for healthy food there. So, Church Hill Variety is me serving my community.”

In Natchez itself, Taylor has also gotten his hands on two iconic spots on High Street. He’s reopened the legendary juke joint Smoot’s Grocery, and introduced the new Natchez hotspot, The Little Easy. And this month, he noted, construction will begin on transforming the 106-year-old Broadway Street train depot into a restaurant, too.

After opening his Crooked Letter Pictures Company on High Street in 2020, when the coffee shop (previously Steampunk Coffee Roasters) and Smoot’s went up for sale around the same time, Taylor said it was a no brainer.

WE ARE AMBASSADORS OF THE SOUTH AS A WHOLE. IT IS DIVERSE HERE. IT IS NOT ONLY THE THINGS THAT CERTAIN PEOPLE PERPETUATE. IT’S MORE.

“You can walk out of the office door, and you can get a wonderful chef-driven lunch or dinner, and if you are working late you can go get a drink and listen to some music at Smoot’s,” said Taylor. “It’s all part of curating this film experience in Natchez. The payoff is that when crews and producers come to see what we’ve got going on, we can show them the stage space, then you go ‘And there’s a restaurant right there, and there’s a club, and there’s the Mississippi River, and you can rent all these houses back here, and you never have to even drive.’”

Taylor and Norris’s work in developing Natchez not only as a film destination, but as a vibrant cultural center, joins various other longtime efforts by Natchez leaders in cultivating an evolved identity for “The Antebellum Capital of the World.”

In the wake of the publication of Richard Grant’s polarizing portrayal of Natchez in The Deepest South of All—which scathingly critiqued the city’s long-practiced legacy of plantation tourism and ritual celebrations of the Old South—Tate has observed an increase in national perceptions of his adopted home town as a place stunted by its own racist interpretations of history. “People who don’t know the South, who have never been here, are like ‘Is this real?’ And it hurts—it hurts my casting and all that we are trying to do here. Lopsided and sensationalized clichés hurt the South in general.”

Taylor said that the book, which he criticized for focusing on a small sensational segment of Natchez’s diverse community and overall story, “is just not helpful.” “[Grant] never came to people like me, people in the government or in tourism who have all been working very hard doing exactly what he was suggesting long before he came around,” he said. “The narrative in Natchez has been changing profoundly for years.”

And it goes beyond simply shifting the focus from plantations to culinary destinations and film tours. Taylor noted that Natchez’s leaders have been working with his foundation and with the National Parks Service to construct a true reckoning of the city’s history as one of the biggest markets of enslaved people in the country. “We are going to build a National Museum of Slavery at the Forks of the Road,” he said. “This is going to be the jumping off point of the Civil Rights Trail in Mississippi—it’s going to be in Natchez! And it’s going to tell the whole story. Along with the historic homes that exist here, it must be boldly stated that they were built on the backs of enslaved people. The entire economic engine was. Come see where it began.”

When Taylor first invited Sykes to Natchez, he said she referenced her Netflix comedy special Wanda Sykes: Not Normal. “I really let Trump have it in there,” said the award-winning Black lesbian comedian and actress from Virginia. “Am I gonna be safe?” Taylor assured her that she would be fine in Natchez, and by the end of her time there she told him over and over again: “This is not what we are told of the South. I love this place.”

“In many ways,” said Taylor, “we are ambassadors of the South as a whole. It is diverse here. It is not only the things that certain people perpetuate. It’s more.”

When asked about how he envisions Natchez’s future—in ten years, in fifty—Taylor said that he wants to see four concrete developments: “I want the film industry to be here to stay. I want Natchez to be a sought-after tourist destination. I want our airport to start having commercial flights flying in. And as a result of all of that, of the people moving in and the economic engines created, our schools will improve.”

Ultimately, he said he hopes for Natchez’s growth and evolution to continue. “People talk about the economic prosperity—schools and all—of the early 1980s,” he said, imagining getting back there. “But minus the hoopskirts.” h

filmnatchez.org crookedletterpicturecompany.com