Hollywood Reporter: “Made in North Carolina”
Nice article in the Hollywood Reporter today focusing on movie production in North Carolina. Here are some highlights:
Features like Universal’s “Leatherheads,” Warner Bros.’ Richard Gere-Diane Lane romance “Nights in Rodanthe” and Fox Searchlight’s “The Secret Life of Bees” have brought a huge economic impact to the state and employment for its burgeoning below-the-line workforce. And the CW’s “One Tree Hill” has always been based in Wilmington.
North Carolina does offer what many other up-and-coming runaway production hotbeds don’t — a large number of experienced crew members and infrastructure. “We’ve had 25 years of building up an industry to train professionals,” says North Carolina Film Office director Aaron Syrett.
North Carolina’s incredible diversity of landscape attracts outside talent as well. John Mauceri, for many years the director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, now presides over one of North Carolina’s cultural resources: He is chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a publicly funded institution that rivals USC and NYU in the film school arena. Mauceri’s strategy for upgrading the state’s filmmaking industry is to focus on his school as a breeding ground for talent — training future filmmakers to be creative first and master their craft and film in the state.
One of his key administrative moves was to hire a working producer, Jordan Kerner (2006’s “Charlotte’s Web”), as dean of the film school. “Jordan is working on two levels. He and I are working on getting the funding up — film schools are costly endeavors. Jordan has a vision to encourage the state legislators to build studio facilities in the Piedmont — the middle of the state — and in the mountains, the western part of the state.”
Chief among them is David Gordon Green, whose credits include the recent “Pineapple Express,” from Sony, 2007’s “Snow Angels” and 2003’s “All the Real Girls.” Green came to the school from Dallas in search of a hands-on place where he could learn his craft. “It was a comfortable place to work,” he says, “a very vibrant student body from every economic and regional background, most of whom didn’t have contacts in New York or the movie business. And I found that refreshing.”
At the school, “people like me — from some corner of the country that didn’t come from a lot of money, for whom movies weren’t in their families’ blood — got together professionally. The vibe is a conservatory of the arts, with ballet dancers in the courtyard, actors,” Green says.
There’s also the University of North Carolina’s School of Communication Arts which has a screenwriting and playwriting program headed up by David Sontag — that’s where I’m teaching this fall.
There’s all kinds of talk of late, everything from building more and bigger soundstages in the state to a possible joint MFA program between N.C. School of the Arts and UNC. We’ll see how things shake out.
Trailblazer Studios is focused on TV development and production, but our hope is to move into low-budget filmmaking in the next 2–3 years. And we’d love nothing more than to make movies right here in North Carolina.