The Industry Yearbook

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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

Foreword 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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

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.

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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 mid2000s, 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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

Introduction

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Georgia Industry Yearbook

Ed Spivia

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The 1970s The Beginning

(Or, when a raging river, an eerie-looking banjo player, and four little words put Georgia on Hollywoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind.)

OVERLEAF: Ed Spivia, a man with big plans for Georgia.

TOP: Ed Spivia at WGST Radio.

BOTTOM: Martins Creek Falls, Rabun County.

E

Georgia Industry Yearbook

d 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.

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** 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

BELOW, L-R: Ned Beatty, John Voight, Ronny Cox and Burt Reynolds, Deliverance (1972).

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

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

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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

and buy lumber … I thought this should be

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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

SIDEBAR: Billy Redden, a/k/a “Banjo Boy.”

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.

President Harry S. Truman, commissioner

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 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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

“economic development tours” to personally

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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.

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

BELOW, L-R: Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman, Governor Jimmy Carter, Beverly Anderson and Ed Spivia.

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.

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

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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

New York and Chicago. Spivia hoped she

a massive advertising campaign to lure film producers to Georgia. Some of those

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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.

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).

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 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.

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

Georgia Industry Yearbook

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 10

do believe I’ll change your mind.’” Wayne

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.

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,

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.

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, The film commissioner came through and arranged for production to begin at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville shortly after. The Longest

Georgia Industry Yearbook

you’ve got the film.’”

Yard would go on to net more than $43 million in domestic gross sales. 5 It would

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