Ready for Its C l ose up

SOLDIERS, GOLFERS, AND ZOMBIES ALL HAVE FOUND A CINEMATIC HOME ON JEKYLL ISLAND

By CURT H OLMAN Illustrations by J OHN S. DYKES

eople on set for film and television productions put in famously long hours. A day on location routinely starts before dawn and lasts until well after dusk.

The already-busy schedule for filming the Season 10 premiere of AMC's long-running zombie drama The Walking Dead was complicated by its location shooting at Jekyll Island's Driftwood Beach. In addition to the usual demands of an outdoor production—the undead's makeup, for example, has to stand up to some pretty extreme heat—The Walking Dead crew also had to deal with nesting season for the area's sea turtles.

"Our first choice for a filming site had nests there, so we had to relocate a little further down the beach," says Mike Riley, the show's location manager. "Fortunately we found an area with a lot of rock and riprap [rock used to protect structures on the shore], which the turtles avoid."

That wasn't the only accommodation Dead made for Jekyll Island's resident reptiles.

"Because it was nesting season, we couldn't have artificial lights, which would attract (disorient) the turtles. So everyone had to wear red headlights instead," Riley says.

The crew adjusted to the unconventional headwear, Riley says, and the work paid off in an episode in which the show's protagonists discover a shipwreck filled with ravenous zombies.

"If you need a beach, Jekyll Island's sort of the go-to place," Riley says. He points to the beauty and accessibility of the island's beaches and the ease of working with the Jekyll Island Authority as reasons why it's become a reliable location for Hollywood.

The natural beauty isn't the only attraction. "The Jekyll Island historic district covers a broad time period," says Andrea Marroquin, curator of Mosaic, Jekyll Island Museum. "From the Victorian/Edwardian era to the Roaring 20s, the historic district can be adapted to fit different stories and settings through time."

Kailey Becker, a locations assistant for the 2021-released sci-fi film The Tomorrow War, says the island's easy to navigate, too, with hotels and shooting locations within miles of each other, "It's also beautiful," she says. "It was sunny and 70 degrees in mid-winter. The Christmas decorations were definitely a relaxing site to see at the end of a long shooting day."

Here's a tour of some of the film and TV productions that have used Jekyll Island as a backdrop.

Glory (1989)

Director Edward Zwick's Civil War epic brought attention to some of the unsung heroes in U.S. history: the soldiers of color who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Glory focuses specifically on the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (including Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher, and Denzel Washington), under the command of Col. Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick).

The production looked to Jekyll Island as the location for shooting the climactic assault in Fort Wagner, a fortification key to protecting Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. "When the project came to Georgia, they wanted to build a fort and shoot on a beach," Riley recalls. "That was probably the largest project that had been shot on Jekyll Island."

Location: The beach attack sequence was filmed on the southeastern part of the island, where the production built a wooden boardwalk to transport dozens of actors and tons of props equipment to the beach. The spot is now called Glory Beach after the Oscar-winning film. The boardwalk still provides beach access to the island’s visitors.

Trivia: Civil War historians have pointed out that Glory shows the soldiers of the 54th attacking Fort Wagner from north to south, with the ocean on their left. The actual attack occurred from the opposite direction.