How Atlanta Is Taking Over the Entertainment Industry
Georgia’s generous tax incentives have lured production companies away from Hollywood, and the state’s homegrown initiatives are continuing to ripenHow Atlanta Is Taking Over the Entertainment Industry
Georgia’s generous tax incentives have lured production companies away from Hollywood, and the state’s homegrown initiatives are continuing to ripen
Welcome to The South Week at The Ringer. For the next several days, we’re celebrating — and reporting on — the richness of the region. You’ll find stories from all over the map, exploring topics such as the enduring legacy of Confederate monuments in Richmond and Montgomery, the evolution of Charleston barbecue, and the intersection of faith and football in Lubbock. We’re also ranking the best Southern rap albums, imagining the André 3000 mixtape we all deserve, and arguing about what even constitutes the South anymore. In the words of two great Southerners, nothin’ is for sure, nothin’ is for certain, nothin’ lasts forever.
Assemble a list of movies filmed in and around Georgia in the 20th century and a pattern quickly starts to emerge: Driving Miss Daisy. Deliverance. Forrest Gump. Fried Green Tomatoes. All of these projects were shot in the South because they’re set in the South, local color being the simplest and most intuitive reason to shoot on location. Rather than meticulously recreate the feeling of omnipresent humidity and quality porch hangs on a Hollywood studio lot, why not go straight to the source?
In 2017, however, there’s a good chance that your latest evening entertainment wasn’t just made in Georgia, but that you wouldn’t know it—unless, of course, you watched the final credits long enough to spot the telltale peach and a URL directing you to the film section of the state’s official tourism website. The Netflix series Stranger Things uses the Atlanta metro area as a stand-in for small-town Indiana; AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire moved its characters from Dallas to the Bay Area without its production ever leaving the Southeast. At a much larger scale, Marvel’s interconnected mega-franchise stays rooted in Atlanta even as its superheroes crisscross the globe on-screen, while The Hunger Games appropriated local landmarks like the Swan House and MARTA train for its vision of the post-apocalyptic future. In Hollywood’s eyes, the South used to be a place to be utilized for its specific qualities and then left alone the rest of the time. (Sometimes, the place’s participation wasn’t even required; the late ’80s/early ’90s sitcom Designing Women was set in Atlanta, but filmed, like most multicamera shows in need of a studio audience, on a soundstage in Los Angeles.) Now, it’s every place, a phenomenon that’s had a dramatic impact on the region even as that region’s flexibility—and therefore anonymity—has meant Georgia’s filming boom hasn’t attracted much notice outside of the area.
Because the entertainment industry is first and foremost a business, the reason behind this momentous shift comes down to cold, hard math. Under HB 1100, better known as the Entertainment Industry Investment Act, Georgia employs one of the most aggressive tax incentive programs in the country, allowing studios to offset a significant proportion of their production costs. Although it was signed into law in 2005, the bill only took off in 2008 after significant revisions. Now, not even a decade later, the incentive has established a multibillion dollar industry in the Peach State, skyrocketing Georgia from a niche production destination to the third most popular filming site in the nation after New York and California. As it’s put down roots, this sector of Georgia’s economy has only grown more entrenched, quietly changing what it means to represent the South onscreen. Just don’t call it Y’allywood.
“We have the complete package,” Lee Thomas says. The Georgia Department of Economic Development’s deputy commissioner for film, music, and digital entertainment is enumerating the reasons the state makes for an attractive filming destination prior to and independent of the incentive: Like Southern California, its geography boasts a diversity of microclimates in close proximity to one another, including mountains, forests, cities, and the beach; a decades-long history of filming means a reliable base of trained professionals to staff a crew; and the presence of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest in the world with 26 direct flights a day to Los Angeles alone, makes the area accessible for workers in more established industry centers to fly in for temporary stints.
But it’s the credit, first and foremost, that brings in the business. HB 1100 offers a baseline incentive worth 20 percent of a production that costs $500,000 or more, plus an additional 10 percent provided the final product includes some kind of promotion for the state. (That’s typically taken care of by the peach logo, though it can be swapped out for anything “of equal or greater marketing value,” Thomas explains.) Almost all productions thus take advantage of the full 30 percent, with some localities, like Savannah, now throwing in an additional 10 percent for films and shows that choose to set up shop there, creating competition for business not just between states, but within them as well. Savannah is a particularly marked example of Georgia’s film offerings expanding from regional specificity to full-service blank canvas; visitors will recognize landmarks from Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, whose central Mercer House is a popular attraction offering public tours, while likely unaware that Chris Evans’s 2017 indie Gifted conducted its principal photography in the same city, partly because Gifted is meant to be set in central Florida.
“It’s a really great formula, because the tax credit has no sunset clause,” says Clark Cofer, a longtime producer who currently serves as co-president of the Georgia Production Partnership, a nonprofit trade organization that works to protect and facilitate the program. “It has no financial clause, no individual cap. It just has no caveats. It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty generous.” (In 2015, Louisiana—which offers a similar incentive attracting productions as varied as Queen Sugar and American Horror Story—instituted a long-term spending cap of $180 million in breaks annually.) The incentive even allows productions that don’t owe the full value of their credit in state income tax, which is most of them, to maximize their benefit by selling the remainder to a Georgia-based business that can then apply the credit to their own individual tax burden. Often, those buyers are large corporations headquartered in the state, like Coca-Cola or Home Depot.
The raw numbers alone demonstrate that the credit has accomplished exactly what it was designed to do: attract corporations—and the dollars they spend—to the state. When I email Thomas’s office to arrange an interview, I’m sent a fiscal-year-by-fiscal-year breakdown of the Georgia film industry’s financial scale, which has ballooned over 20 times in less than a decade from $93 million of direct spending in 2007, the year before HB 1100 was revised, to $2.02 billion in fiscal year 2016. According to the GDED’s estimates, that $2 billion equates to $7 billion of greater economic impact (a number Cofer echoes) collectively generated by a total of 245 film and television productions.
That figure encompasses a head-spinning variety of series and films. There are the entertainment titans that have long called Atlanta home and were instrumental in creating the tax credit, like Turner, in whose TBS Studios the signing ceremony for the 2008 revisions bill took place. Then there are the entertainment titans that have recently relocated, like Marvel, now the primary tenant of the three-year-old Pinewood Atlanta, the U.S. outpost of the historic British studio and the largest purpose-built filming complex in the country outside of Los Angeles. There are midsize productions that use the credit to maximize their finite resources, like Baby Driver, which writer-director Edgar Wright initially planned for Los Angeles before re-choreographing its heists and car chases around Atlanta’s topography. And there are self-contained enterprises like The Walking Dead, which has turned the 4,000-person small town of Senoia, about an hour’s drive south of downtown, into a veritable boom town.
“They had six storefronts, and now they have 50,” Thomas says. “They built another section onto the town, and all of that’s been pre-leased as well. You can go there, and there’s the Woodbury Shoppe [for collectibles], and the Waking Dead coffee shop, and there’s Nic and Norman’s, which [star] Norman Reedus and [executive producer] Greg Nicotero own in town.” You can also take one of several Walking Dead–specific tours of Senoia, attractions that bring in a sizable number of out-of-town visitors. “They completely have transformed that little town and saved it, basically,” marvels Trish Taylor, an actress, former publicist, and Cofer’s copresident of the GPP.
“Usually the sci-fi shows draw more of those types of fans, who are willing to come into town,” says Rodney Ho, a reporter covering the business of television for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (As of 2017, Ho’s beat encompasses around 70 television productions that take place in Atlanta throughout the year; along with his colleague Jennifer Brett, who covers movies, he’s one of two dedicated reporters following the entertainment industry at Atlanta’s largest newspaper.) Ho also points to Covington, the small city the CW’s recently concluded The Vampire Diaries was based out of, as a beneficiary of its association with a popular series; along with its spinoff, The Originals, the show has its own dedicated tour company, Vampire Stalkers.
Mostly, though, locations aren’t associated with the productions that make use of them because they’re designed not to be. Atlanta residents will recognize the site of Anchorman 2’s cameo-laden free-for-all as downtown’s Woodruff Park, but to the average viewer, it’s just New York City, or at least a place that looks enough like it to pass the smell test. (Despite its comparative sprawl, Atlanta is used surprisingly often as a stand-in for denser metropoles, a phenomenon that leads to a lot of visual overlap. “The number of spots that look New York–ish in Atlanta is not unlimited,” Ho notes. “There aren’t a lot of choices.”) For every Atlanta, which spotlights not just the city but parts of it mainstream pop culture tends not to recognize, or Underground, the now-canceled WGN series centered on slaves in antebellum Georgia, there are several Ant-Mans. Curiously enough, the productions that make use of their environs most openly are probably Atlanta’s industry-within-an-industry of reality series, with its popular local outposts of national franchises like Real Housewives, Love & Hip Hop, and Little Women, whose premises necessitate plenty of on-site shooting at shops and nightclubs.
But the decreasing proportion of on-site shooting signals Atlanta’s prominence as an entertainment center. “We never had the facilities to be able to attract the kind of tentpole shows that we’re able to attract now,” Thomas notes—referencing here facilities like Pinewood’s massive campus (18 sound stages on 700 acres, plus its very own Home Depot) and smaller but still significant lots like Screen Gems (10 stages on 33 acres), Eagle Rock (four stages), and Third Rail (two). “We have a lot of studio space that we didn’t have five years ago,” Ho comments. “That’s why there are so many more scripted programs coming in”—programs which can then use that studio space for interiors or green-screen-assisted special effects. “I noticed in the schedule that there are nine scripted shows being shot in Atlanta. One on ABC, one on CBS, three on Fox, and four on the CW, which is by far the most we’ve had so far and doesn’t even include those shot by Netflix, which has at least three shows shooting here. Amazon’s shooting a couple shows here. Syfy’s got a few shows here. AMC has a couple shows shooting here. Almost every network that does scripted programming has something shooting here.”
Of course, every tax incentive comes with a trade-off: an influx of new business in exchange for lost tax revenue for the state and its services. Throughout its tenure, Georgia’s tax incentive has been stewarded by pro-business Republican administrations, the kind that regularly employ similar measures to entice corporations away from bluer states and their comparatively steep fiscal demands. First under Governor Sonny Perdue and currently under Governor Nathan Deal, Georgia’s government has steadfastly maintained that the tradeoff is worth it. Not only has the state implemented the tax incentive, it’s also fine-tuned it to accommodate the gaming industry in 2012 and post-production operations earlier this year; the state also maintains Thomas’s five-person office with its 159 county liaisons across the state, and, through its university and technical college systems, operates the Georgia Film Academy, which works to train skilled crew members to staff productions.
While the massive increase in Hollywood investment is undoubtedly real, so are the financial sacrifices. A Georgia State University study released in late 2016 estimated that the credit would cost Georgia $376 million in potential income for 2017 alone. A Pew Charitable Trust report found that there’s insufficient infrastructure for objectively evaluating the program’s monetary pros and cons—not just the economic impact, the preferred statistic of the GDED, but the net effect of the influx when weighed against lost income. Nobody has yet conducted a thorough survey to properly analyze the tax break’s benefits and drawbacks. Until someone does, both critics and defenders of the tax credit will continue to have rhetorical ammunition.
For now, the breadth and magnitude of what the incentive has created protects it from critics on the right as well as the left. In April 2016, Deal vetoed HB 757, a “religious liberty” bill passed by the socially conservative state legislature and opposed by various business interests—not just Hollywood studios, but also Delta, Coca-Cola, and outside entities considering future investment like the NFL. The message was clear: Georgia’s current executive branch aligns itself more closely with the pro-business wing of Republican orthodoxy than the culture-warrior one, a clear contrast with a state like North Carolina, whose infamous “bathroom bill” cost the state billions in lost business. (North Carolina also has a filming credit system of its own, albeit a less successful one.) But with Deal’s term expiring and a new governor set to be elected in 2018, there’s at least some uncertainty about the future strength of the credit’s statehouse support.
Even if Deal’s successor is less enthusiastic about protecting and implementing the credit, many of the gains in Georgia’s film industry will prove hard to reverse. While writers’ rooms and high-level talent (agents, stars, screenwriters, and the like) remain firmly ensconced in Los Angeles, competing states’ tax incentives have impinged on California’s dominance enough that the state recently expanded its credit program to stanch the flow of industry dollars. (Thanks to Hollywood’s constant expansion, particularly in television, it’s difficult to gauge exactly how much business California has lost to other states, but only three of 2016’s hundred top-grossing films were shot in Hollywood’s homeland and received state tax credits. Georgia, on the other hand, topped the list with 17 productions.) And the longer the credit remains in place, the more reliant the state’s economy grows on its jobs and collateral spending. “The longer, the deeper the ties are to Georgia, the harder it’s going to be to pull back on the tax credits,” Ho notes. Meanwhile, long-term developments are staking their futures on the industry’s continued presence—like Pinewood Forrest, the 230-acre, 1300-residence, possibly billion-dollar complex adjacent to the studio announced last year and spearheaded by Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy.
The sheer scope of Georgia’s film business necessitates that it will remain dominated by massive, international enterprises for the foreseeable future. Looking forward, however, some of Georgia’s in-state groups would like to balance that equation, in part through talent cultivation initiatives like the Georgia Film Academy and the Atlanta Film Festival, the 40-year-old institution that cosponsors a PA training program along with the Georgia Production Partnership. In the long run, the hope is to encourage Georgia’s own version of a Richard Linklater—a homegrown figure who knows and embraces the region instead of using it as a staging ground. Donald Glover, who grew up in nearby Stone Mountain, arguably comes closest, depicting the city with the trained eye of a native. But if the exponential growth of Georgia’s film industry goes to show anything, it’s that there’s always room for more.
“I think that’s probably the next step in our evolution,” Taylor says. “To make sure that we have our screenwriters and our producers and directors that are here making their films and having them distributed. Having the finance and distribution people come here to Georgia and say, ‘Yes, we have some great people here, some talented people here, and original content is coming out of Georgia as well as productions coming in to shoot here.’” The ideal outcome is to have the best of both worlds: the pliability that allows Georgia to play virtually anywhere else, and distinct voices that allow it to play itself.