Anisa Khalifa: What would you do if zombies took over your hometown?
Unidentified Speaker: And so I would be walking to class. And there would be like zombies kind of laid across the street.
Anisa Khalifa: Or how about a superhero flying through the streets?
(SOUNDBITE FROM IRON MAN 3)
Unidentified Speaker: Is that…?
Unidentified Speaker: Yep.
Unidentified Speaker: Are those…
Unidentified Speaker: Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: It could happen if you live in Wilmington, North Carolina or Atlanta, Georgia. For decades, Hollywood has set up shop in the South. It’s brought blockbuster franchises, hit TV shows, and big economic boosts to the region
Unidentified Speaker: I've always sort of kept that in my head that, the best that I could imagine was to be able to work in the film business in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: But in that time, the industry has undergone some major changes. Today, the talent follows the tax breaks. And each state has to adapt to stay in the game.
Unidentified Speaker: What are the tools that we have or what's the current situation and how do we keep North Carolina top of mind?
Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, my colleague Charlie Shelton-Ormond looks at the evolution of our new Southern Hollywood.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Back in the mid 90s, Jonas Pate was in his 20s living in a tiny apartment on the North Carolina coast.
Jonas Pate: When I first got out of college, I moved down to Wrightsville Beach to write a script.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But to turn any script into a movie, you need money. Thankfully, Jonas heard about someone in nearby Wilmington who had some connections.
Jonas Pate: And when I was down here, and I'd finished that script, I knew Dennis Hopper had owned this building down on Front Street.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Dennis Hopper. The eccentric actor and director. The easy rider. A Wilmington resident.
Jonas Pate: He had made a movie in Wilmington, called Blue Velvet — great kind of cult movie.
(SOUNDBITE FROM BLUE VELVET)
Dennis Hopper [as Frank Booth]: Hey you wanna go for a ride?
Unidentified Speaker: No thanks.
Dennis Hopper: No thanks, what does that mean?
Unidentified Speaker: I don't wanna go.
Dennis Hopper: Go where?
Unidentified Speaker: For a ride.
Dennis Hopper: A ride! Now that's a good idea. Okay, let's go.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: After he worked on Blue Velvet, Hopper liked Wilmington so much, he bought a place downtown.
Jonas Pate: And this was sort of the heyday of his career. He had been in Speed and he was directing a lot and he was really successful at that point.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jonas wanted to get Hopper’s attention. So he had an idea. First, he got a big bed sheet.
Jonas Pate: I got a spray paint can and spray painted on it. Hey, Dennis, I have a killer script. Give me a call. My name is Jay, which is my nickname, and spray painted it on there and went out and hung it on the front door.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Next, he called up the local paper.
Jonas Pate: And I said, Hey, some idiot just hung and a sheet on Dennis Hopper story, y'all should take a picture. So they went down, took a picture and it was on the front page, because I figured this might get his attention.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jonas waited for a call… but got crickets. A few months went by.
Jonas Pate: And I was watching a basketball game down at Wrightsville Beach, and phone rings and its Dennis Hopper. And he said my publicist has sent me a copy of the newspaper that the picture was in and I'm in Wilmington, right now, where's that script? So I jumped in my car and I roared down there and it gave him the script and became friends with him.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That’s amazing.
Jonas Pate: He's a really nice, thoughtful person. I look back on it now in true amazement that he actually did that. Because now that I'm older, I think about how old he was when he did it to someone who was you know, 22, 23 years old, and how cool he was and that connection led to meeting the financiers who eventually paid for the movie. He wasn't in it. But he helped make that connection. And then he came to the premiere at Sundance
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jonas’ movie was called The Grave. It's about two convicts who escape from prison to search for some lost treasure.
(SOUNDBITE FROM THE GRAVE)
Unidentified Speaker: You ever hear the one about the grave?
Unidentified Speaker: The grave?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: They shot the film around Wilmington and got it accepted to Sundance. It helped launch Jonas’ — and his twin brother Josh’s — career in the industry. After The Grave, Jonas went to the West Coast, and worked in LA for a while. He got married, started a family. But eventually Wilmington, and its strong film community, called Jonas back home.
Jonas Pate: First thing we created when we got back: Outer Banks.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Outer Banks. The show about a group of teenagers who go on a hunt for lost treasure, was an instant hit when it came out in 2020. For three seasons, it’s been one of Netflix’s most popular shows.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OUTER BANKS)
Unidentified Speaker: Guys, I think there's a boat down there.
Unidentified Speaker: It's my father's.
Jonas Pate: The show has been so much fun because it's sort of a mashup of our childhood along the Carolina coast, sometimes in Charleston where my mom lived, and sometimes in the North Carolina coast where my dad lived, and we sort of put it all in a blender. So that's why if you watch it. It's like a mash up of geographic names from all over the place.
(SOUNDBITE FROM OUTER BANKS)
Unidentified Speaker: I need that.
Unidentified Speaker: To Chapel Hill.
Unidentified Speaker: Yes, right now.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But… despite the story being set in North Carolina, and Jonas living in North Carolina… filming for Outer Banks happened around Charleston in South Carolina.
Jonas Pate: We wanted to originally shoot it in Wilmington.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So what caused Jonas and his group of treasure-hunting teenagers to make their show outside of North Carolina — a state that for decades was the go-to spot in the Southeast for people making movies and TV?
Let’s go back to the beginning — to the origin story of the state’s movie biz.
Guy Gaster: How the industry as a whole got started was this one man just deciding he could do it his own way.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: That’s Guy Gaster. He’s the director of the state’s film office. He’s referring to The Godfather, if you will — of North Carolina’s movie business.
Guy Gaster: In terms of creating an industry itself, the real catalyst for that was Dino De Laurentiis.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Dino De Laurentis was an Italian film producer — one of the most prolific producers in the industry. From the 1940s into the 2000s, his name was attached to hundreds of movies. They ranged from the critically acclaimed–starring the likes of Al Pacino —(SOUNDBITE FROM SERPICO)
Al Pacino [as Serpico]: I'm a police officer! Hey! It's me, Serpico!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: To some less acclaimed — the 1970s King Kong remake for example.
(SOUNDBITE FROM KING KONG)
Unidentified Speaker: There is nothing whatever to fear…
Dino De Laurentiis: The audience want to be attracted not by the critics. The audience want to be attracted by a great story.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: This is De Laurentiis on NPR in 2002.
Dino De Laurentiis: You must deliver to the audience emotion. And when I say emotion, I mean suspense, drama, love.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: In the early ‘80s, De Laurentiis was scouting locations for an adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter. Here’s Guy Gastor again.
Guy Gaster: He needed a plantation type setting and so he was scouring the southeast. Found a location at Orton plantation that he really liked outside of Wilmington.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And De Laurentiis' affection for Wilmington didn’t go away after the movie wrapped production… just the opposite.
Guy Gaster: Suddenly started saying, why don't I make other movies here?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: De Laurentiis put down roots in Wilmington, created a studio, and started cranking out movies. The buzz about North Carolina soon spread across Hollywood. While Wilmington remained a hub on the coast, productions kicked up across the state with movies like Dirty Dancing,
(SOUNDBITE FROM DIRTY DANCING)
Jennifer Grey: Toldya I never did any of these dances before.
Patrick Swayze: Now it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Last of the Mohicans,
(SOUNDBITE FROM LAST OF THE MOHICANS)
Daniel Day-Lewis: Miss Monroe, they're not strangers.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And The Fugitive.
(SOUNDBITE FROM THE FUGITIVE)
Harrison Ford: I didn't kill my wife!
Tommy Lee Jones: I don't care!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: By the late 90s, success on the big screen expanded to the small screen as well, thanks to a hit TV show featuring four teenagers. Dawson’s Creek — set in the fictional coastal town Capeside — filmed in Wilmington. A few years later in the early 2000s, One Tree Hill came along as the city’s next big show. But Guy says around this time there was a shift in the industry. Studios were looking to lower their production costs. And they saw a chance to do that with state tax breaks.
Guy Gaster: And believe it or not, North Carolina was one of the last states to introduce something that had previously had major film production.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: North Carolina wanted to stay competitive with other states. So lawmakers introduced a tax credit in the mid-2000s as an incentive for studios.
Guy Gaster: When Dirty Dancing was here in the 80s. And The Fugitive, those projects were choosing where to go solely based on location. There was more of a creative decision driving that. Now. It's more financial.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It’s a reminder that behind every piece of movie magic is a checkbook, and a bottom line.
Guy Gaster: And as beautiful as our state is, it's not going to matter if there's not that financial incentive enticement to bring the project here.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: At first, North Carolina’s tax credit seemed to work well. Studios continued to make their movies and TV shows in the state. By 2010, the policy offered a healthy 25-percent tax credit for productions that spent a certain amount in-state.
Guy Gaster: And for feature films, the most a production could get back was 20 million dollars. And we only have one project over the history of that program that reached that, and that was Iron Man 3.
(SOUNDBITE FROM IRON MAN 3)
Robert Downey Jr: I am Iron Man.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Iron Man 3 was a huge get for North Carolina. A good chunk of the movie was shot in Wilmington in 2012. Guy says it was a high water mark for the state’s film business.
Guy Gaster: North Carolina was being considered for those big Hollywood features that the summer blockbusters, typically called tentpole movies.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But then…
Guy Gastor: When our incentive changed, that went away.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: In 2014, state legislators allowed the tax credit policy to sunset — a huge blow for the industry in North Carolina. But folks with strong ties to the film community pushed back.
Guy Gaster: And said, wait a second, we don't want this industry to go away, this is important to us.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And the incentives were salvaged, with a new look. The program soon shifted from a tax credit to a rebate — direct cash back. But with this change, there were new rules for how much North Carolina could dole out to studios
Guy Gaster: There were now caps put on on how much per project someone could get.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: To help understand the ripple effects of this policy change, let’s look at a specific franchise.
Guy Gaster: Great example, the Hunger Games.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: In 2011, the first Hunger Games filmed in North Carolina, around Charlotte and Asheville. This was a part of a gigantic series. Sequels were a guarantee because the first one did great at the box office.
Guy Gaster: But in doing so, then all of a sudden, the stars went from each making under a million dollars to making multiple millions.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now with several multi-million dollar actors on their payroll ramping up their expenses, the studio wanted to film in a state where they could cash in on a good tax break.
Guy Gaster: In North Carolina, you can only count the first one million dollars of an individual's pay toward your in-state spending total.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So a cap on how much a production can get back. But in a state like Georgia…
Guy Gaster: There is no cap. When you look from a business side, if all of a sudden you've got three, four, 10 people that are making over a million dollars, you can go to Georgia, and get all of their salary to count as part of your spending.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And that’s exactly what happened with The Hunger Games. The studio moved filming from North Carolina down to Georgia for the sequels — and with it, lots and lots of money spent within the state. It’s far from the only blockbuster franchise that has found a home in Georgia. The Avengers. Fast & Furious. The Walking Dead. For more than a decade now, countless movies and TV shows have filmed in Georgia, thanks to a much more appealing tax break.
Jonas Pate: They've now built a multibillion dollar industry in Georgia, all the Marvel movies, a ton of Netflix things, it's massive.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jonas Pate again, co-creator of Outer Banks.
Jonas Pate: Credit to them, because they saw an economic opportunity that we frankly squandered
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's cemented Atlanta as the current Hollywood of the South. But can North Carolina get back a piece of that pie? And is there even enough to go around? That’s coming up after a break.
As the director of the North Carolina film office, it’s Guy Gaster’s job to help recruit projects to film in the state. He says to do that, it's important to know what kinds of productions are a good fit for the state’s incentives.
Guy Gaster: Those mid-budget size projects. That's why we're not going and talking with the people that are making the superhero movies necessarily because of how big their budgets are and it just isn't going to necessarily make financial sense to them to come to North Carolina. Whereas the other projects that don't have that big of a budget are willing to do it and see that they can be here and not be shooting at the same time as those that are in spandex.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Guy says no superheroes, no problem.
Guy Gaster: Unfortunately we're not going to have the next Avengers coming in and that's okay.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Instead, North Carolina has become a home for mid-size productions. In the last few years, that’s included some horror films like Halloween Kills and the Scream reboot.
Guy Gaster: Big-name horror projects that did extremely well at the box office that got a lot of buzz, and made perfect sense for coming here because they were the top dog.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Since 2020, the pandemic and labor strikes have caused dips in the industry everywhere. But Guy says if everything is firing on all cylinders, he expects productions in North Carolina to spend in total about 300 million a year.
Guy Gaster: You definitely see the bones and the structure and what worked before and how that's carried over, but it's in a new vehicle and hey, it's, it's starting to pay off.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: On top of pandemics and labor strikes, Guy has also had to navigate fallout from public policy. Like Jonas Pate’s show Outer Banks. For the first three seasons, it's filmed primarily in South Carolina, even though Jonas wanted to originally shoot in Wilmington. But a divisive law from 2016 upended that plan.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NEWS BROADCAST)
Unidentified Anchor: The so-called bathroom bill in North Carolina has caused public outcry in and out of the state…
Unidentified Anchor: …requires people to use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate.
Unidentified Anchor: It's cost North Carolina a lot of money. Business and events have pulled out in protest over the law.
Jonas Pate: The remnants of HB2 was still on the books, which was an anti-trans law. There was, you know, a lot of backlash against that law and a lot of industries, you know, left the state.
(SOUNDBITE FROM NEWS BROADCAST)
Unidentified Anchor: North Carolina's Democratic governor Roy Cooper has signed a bill that repeals and replaces a controversial law.
Jonas Pate: It was mostly repealed, but not completely. And because of that, Netflix asked us to shoot in South Carolina.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: When I chatted with Jonas, he was shooting Outer Banks' fourth season. At the time, production was at a standstill because of the actors' strike. But he said once filming resumed there were plans to bring the Pogues to the North Carolina coast.
Jonas Pate: That's where I live. That's where I want to shoot. And now that HB2 is gone, and the film business here is really going remarkably well. So I'm excited to bring more stuff here.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The fourth season is set to be released later this year. Most filming still happens in Charleston, but Jonas and his crew have shot some scenes in his hometown.
Okay, let’s talk about Georgia, the state that’s taken the throne in the South. And has even started to challenge California as the number one spot to film in the country.
Jewel Wicker: I was just been having this conversation with my mom who is also a native Atlantan and she was like I cannot believe that 69,000 people moved to Atlanta in 2023 like what on earth.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jewel Wicker vividly remembers when she realized film and TV in Atlanta were the real deal. It was 2010, and she was going to college at Georgia State University.
Jewel Wicker: I would come out of class, and Georgia State for people who aren't familiar is in downtown Atlanta and it's kind of spread out throughout the downtown. And so I will be walking to class, and there would be like zombies kind of laid across the street. At first I would think it was a person and I would get closer and be like, this is a zombie. There were props. Um, and they would be filming The Walking Dead on campus, or I would be trying to drive home and there's this bridge that I would cross to get on the highway and there was a truck dangling off the bridge and it was for a scene in The Walking Dead, right? And I was now seeing these really tangible, visible imagery about the film scene popping up.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Jewel is an Atlanta native. She says before film came to town, another slice of the entertainment industry reigned supreme in the city
Jewel Wicker: So I grew up in Atlanta at a time where we had really a robust, um, music scene and I always joke with people that I thought everyone grew up with rappers coming to their middle and high school. Which, you know, as an adult I realized is kind of ridiculous. But that was how accessible the music industry felt to me.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The city still has that music business. But Jewel says for more than a decade, the film scene has taken the spotlight. Jewel is the host of a podcast called The Boom out of WABE in Atlanta. It’s a show about the film and TV industry in Georgia.
Jewel Wicker: The thing that I hear when I'm interviewing people about why they want to work in Georgia's film scene is two things. One, obviously, the tax credit has brought work here, right? So they can come here and they can actually get work. They can have a steady kind of stable career here. But two, it's, you know, in comparison to a place like New York or LA, it's much more affordable, right? Especially, maybe not for the locals, right? Like the people like me who have been here, we're like, wow, prices are crazy. But if you came from New York or you came from LA, it's like, oh my God, this is a steal. And so they're coming for the affordability, right, you can get stable work, has these elements of a big city, although you kind of get that intimate Southern, uh, hospitality feel to it too.
You have this really diverse landscape that makes it possible for it to be quote unquote Anywhere USA, right, that idea. My producer Kevin and I went right on a tour to, um, the studio called Trillith, which is a really big studio here. And we're like driving and they're like, welcome to Wakanda, right. And it's just really this random stretch of grass that has been so many different places in Marvel films and all of these other films because they can really transpose any type of, um, atmosphere on this one stretch of land. And so I think that's true about Georgia's landscape.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So for more than ten years, Georgia has benefitted from a booming film industry. But recently, there’s been some in its state legislature who’ve said wait a minute, maybe we should pull back the reins on these tax breaks.
Jewel Wicker: So kind of for context it's an income tax credit that we're up to 30 percent of the spend for in-state productions.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Let’s break down this enticing 30 percent tax credit. So let’s say a studio is based out of LA. But they come to Atlanta to film a movie. If they spend a certain amount in Georgia — at least 500,000 dollars — they're eligible for this tax credit. It’s a 20-percent tax incentive and then another 10-percent if they put Georgia’s peach logo in the movie’s end credits. But —
Jewel Wicker: If you have a production that's not based here, right, what are they going to do with the tax credit? They're not here.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So what this LA studio can do is sell their tax credit to a Georgia company.
Jewel Wicker: They can sell it to a company that is here, you know, at a slight loss. That's how it's feasible for them, and that's how it's lucrative for them.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But here’s what worries some state lawmakers: if companies based in Georgia purchase a bunch of credits, bank them up, and then redeem them all at once, it would be a big financial hit for the state.
Jewel Wicker: The AP reported earlier this year that, um, Georgia is projected to give out 1.35 billion dollars in credits this year alone. And, you know, that's significant. Supporters of this industry say this is what has allowed Georgia's film industry to thrive and to flourish. And if we cap that, or if we make it non-transferable or any of these things, well then productions are just going to go to another place that has a more enticing incentive, right? There are other places that have film and tax incentives, and if we don't have the one that's the most enticing, they'll go somewhere else.
But the opponents of that say that it's just not worth it, right? They're saying that, are Georgians seeing enough jobs, are they getting enough for this tax credit? And so lawmakers are saying, Is this something that we want to continue and they, they tried to pass legislation kind of pulling that back a little bit earlier this year and it wasn't successful, which I think speaks to the lobbying efforts of the film industry and how powerful, you know, that industry has become here, but that doesn't mean they're not going to keep trying in future years, and I think that we will continue to see conversations about this. This certainly wasn't the first year, and I certainly don't think it'll be the last year that we'll see, continue to see conversations about Georgia's film tax credit and if it's worth it. to Georgians who are, you know, living and working here.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Okay, so Georgia’s position in Southern cinema is still strong. There’s a steady stream of money and jobs still coming to the state. But Jewel brought up something folks in North Carolina said also. The money coming in is nice, but what’s most important is how the stories are being told, and who is telling them.
Jewel Wicker: Georgians are very, um, even in music and film and entertainment in general, Georgians are very protective of their image and they're very protective of this idea that no one can tell their Southern experience like they can. I think that really plays a role in this advocacy that, hey, if you're going to tell our stories, involve us. Film here. Really make sure that we're a part of the process.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: For Jonas Pate, that means continuing to build up film as a business — for the next generation of Southern filmmakers.
Jonas Pate: I hope North Carolina starts to see film as a legacy business, like agriculture, textiles, like it's been around now, for coming up on 50 years in the state, there have been many successes that the state can point to. So think of it as homegrown – it's a homegrown business.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond. Our editor is Jerad Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio, and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.