Lights, cameras could mean economic action for Augusta

Now that Hollywood has started coming to Augusta, sometimes Augusta has to go to Hollywood.

Film Augusta is the agency within the Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau that deals with film and television production companies who are considering shooting their projects in the Augusta area. Earlier this month, representatives of Film Augusta conducted a panel discussion, touting Augusta to filmmakers, at the HollyShorts Film Festival in Los Angeles. A co-founder of the festival, actor and producer Daniel Sol, now lives in Augusta.

Turns out Augusta can be a pretty easy sell to the entertainment industry. And that’s exactly what Film Augusta is counting on.

Before cutting to that action, though, it helps to show the audience a flashback.

In 2002, the state of Georgia introduced tax incentives to lure production companies east, out of California, to produce movies and TV shows here. When those incentives were boosted in 2008, Hollywood really took notice.

The state’s Entertainment Industry Investment Act provides a 20% tax credit for companies that spend $500,000 or more on production and post-production in Georgia. It can be one big project or a bunch of little projects.

Have you seen a movie lately with the Georgia Film Office’s peach logo near the end of the credits? If producers slap that logo onto their final product, that’s an additional 10% tax credit.

One project that filmed in Georgia after instituting those tax breaks was the zombie thriller TV show The Walking Dead. When that show became insanely popular on cable TV, the Atlanta area became a serious entertainment-industry boomtown.

It’s booming so much, in fact, that larger film studios’ activities are sucking out most of the oxygen for smaller production companies to survive, and the smaller guys can’t afford to return to pricier California. So they’re looking for other places in Georgia.

Augusta wants them to look here. And they should look here.

“Atlanta is such a big player in the movie industry to me it really sets the tone for the possibilities that exists in the rest of the state,” Augusta CVB President and CEO Bennish Brown said. “That becomes a huge selling point and opportunity for Augusta.”

When film crews arrive in a city to shoot a movie, they spend money a lot like tourists do. Visitors stay in hotel rooms. They eat out. They also incur unique expenses, such as using caterers to feed actors and crew, or employing local workers to help set up lights or pull wires or build sets. The money adds up.

Until the tax credits and Atlanta’s meteoric rise, Augusta barely registered on Hollywood’s radar. Just about the only movies made around here were a 1997 remake of Disney’s That Darn Cat and a 2007 fish-out-of-water comedy called Who’s Your Caddy?

That’s changed measurably. Since about 2015, Augusta has played host to about one feature-length movie shoot a year, and a lot of TV shows and smaller independent movies.

The latest film was the latest from megastar Clint Eastwood, who used locations around town last year to shoot The Mule, a crime drama about an aging drug smuggler. That was a big production, and since big studios - in this case, Warner Brothers - are loath to share budget numbers about their films, it’s hard to accurately measure the local economic kick of The Mule. But the crew stayed in three hotels while they were here, and used a lot of local police officers on off-duty “specials” to provide on-set security.

That’s another of Augusta’s selling points to filmmakers - the area can provide plenty of cast, as extras, and crew, to help with technical aspects of production. A lot of entertainment professionals live in and around Augusta - and they run businesses that production companies large and small can rely on.

One is IndieGrip, based in Augusta but servicing productions in a lot of Southern cities. It provides expert camera and lighting crew members, and even studio space and other resources for filming scenes.

It shares an address on Gordon Highway with the Augusta Regional Film Office, a business that for several years took the lead as the liaison connecting visiting producers with local resources such as crew and shooting locations. Both are now listed partners of Film Augusta, which the city designated in 2017 to be the official connection point to negotiate details for film and TV production locations.

The variety of unique shooting locations draws a lot of interest, said Jennifer Bowen, the CVB vice-president of destination development who heads up Film Augusta.

Producers are lured to Augusta by locations such as the neighborhoods that can substitute for Anytown USA, or the more stately homes in Summerville. Local architecture spans from the 1700s to the present day. Unused schools can be settings or production office space. Magnolia Cemetery has striking statuary.

Augusta University’s hospital simulator can provide an entire wing for shoots for medical scenes, which often are difficult to shoot in actual busy hospitals.

The abandoned Camp Linwood Hayne, formerly used by Boy Scouts, could make a spooky setting for a horror flick. The old jail on Walton Way can, and has, been used in shoots requiring an institutional prison background.

Sometimes the pictures aren’t enough, and producers need a closer look. So Hollywood visits Augusta.

“Once we bring somebody here, it’s almost a definite close,” Bowen said.

We would encourage Hollywood to visit Augusta much more often. Show business resides in a world where personal connections, word of mouth and a good reputation carries you far.

It would be fascinating to see how far it takes Augusta.