A movie shooting on location is often compared to a circus, because both are self-contained communities of performers and laborers that visit for a short time, rile up the locals, then pull out, leaving sawdust and elephant dung in their wake, literally and/or figuratively.
Nobody knows this better than Robert A. Halmi, who came to Georgia as a 23-year-old producer 45 years ago to make a TV movie titled “When the Circus Came to Town” that was actually filmed “under the big top” in a tent.
Halmi says they didn’t worry about outside sound leaking in through the thin canvas walls and ruining the dialog because, “in those days, everything was looped anyway.”
Sound recording standards have changed in the ensuing decades, but not as much as the production landscape in Georgia, thanks to the film and TV incentive enacted by the state in 2008 offering an uncapped tax credit of up to 30%. Current shoots include the historical crime thriller “By Any Means,” starring Mark Wahlberg, the Amazon biopic “Madden,” starring Nicolas Cage, and the Apple TV+ series adaptation of “Cape Fear,” starring Javier Bardem and Amy Adams.
This is another thing nobody knows better than Halmi. Six months ago, he opened Lionsgate Studios Atlanta, a built-from-scratch, 40-acre, $200 million facility owned and operated by his company Great Point Studios. It joined more than a dozen other production complexes in the state, including Assembly, Shadowbox, Three Ring and Tyler Perry Studios, representing 4.4 million square feet of soundstage space.
The state even boasts a university with a pro-level production game, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Its 11-acre Savannah Film Studios features a 5,500-square-foot virtual production space with two LED volume stages and a backlot that currently boasts 40 street facades with 8,000-plus square feet of attached dressed interiors. According to D.W. Moffett, chair of the film and television department at SCAD, the studio is ready, willing and able to start taking on Hollywood-level productions.
“When students are working with pros on a professional set, the learning curve is exponentially better,” points out Moffett, a veteran actor whose credits include co-starring roles in the series “Happily Divorced” and “Friday Night Lights.”
Trilith Studios hosted “The Suicide Squad” shoot.
The wealth of permanent facilities means that projects visiting the Peach state today are less likely to find themselves shooting in converted warehouses — as so many do in production hubs spawned by government incentives — or, heaven forbid, a tent. They’re also less likely to be staffed by out-of-towners.
“The tax incentives have been the strongest in the country for a long time, and they’ve developed a really strong crew base, so you don’t really need to bring in anybody to work on a film in Georgia,” says Halmi. “And the crew is less expensive than California crews, and the weather is better than New York, so you don’t have to worry about rainy days or getting snowed out.”
Film and TV workers, both local and visiting, live at the Town at Trilith, a 235-acre, master-planned residential development 25 miles south of downtown Atlanta. It’s located next to Trilith Studios, a production complex featuring 1,000 acres of purpose-built soundstages, offices and backlots that has hosted numerous high-profile films including Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” and a long line of Marvel projects such as “Thunderbolts*” and “Captain America: Brave New World.”
Producer Richard Suckle, who moved from L.A. to Georgia with his wife last year after they became empty nesters, is a part-time resident of the Town. He makes the three-and-a-half-hour drive from his home in Savannah once or twice a month to do in-person work for the production company he’s launching in partnership with Trilith that will take full advantage of its synergistic studio ecosystem.
“Whenever I would go and make a movie somewhere else, the studio facility was essentially a bunch of soundstages and office space, and sometimes you had to travel pretty far to get to the actual facility,” says Suckle, who shot “The Suicide Squad” at Trilith in late 2019 and early 2020. “This is like a community that literally has everything that you would want and need, regardless of whether you were in the movie or the TV business or not.”
In addition to production facilities and living accommodations, Trilith also offers a wealth of supplemental services, including an in-house film finance team and consultation services from its director of creative technologies Barry Williams, a veteran VFX supervisor whose credits include “The Mandalorian.”
“You feel like it’s going to be $15 million to do this, but Barry will do a VFX breakdown and find a way for you to do it for six — and we have the virtual stages and all the technology here to do it,” says Frank Patterson, president and CEO of Trilith Studios.
Season 3 of Sylvester Stallone-starrer “Tulsa King” is being shot in Georgia.
The consistent and sustained growth in filming and infrastructure Georgia has experienced over the last 17 years is unmatched by any other region in the United States, but the state is not immune to the problems facing other domestic production hubs. The industry absorbed repeated hits to the body — a global pandemic, then the double whammy of WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes followed by decline in film and TV shoots many are now referring to as the “Great Contraction” — causing Georgia production spend to drop from $4.4 billion in fiscal year 2022 to $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2024.
But the cruelest blow might be what happened in the wake of the successful strike-avoiding negotiations for new IATSE and Teamster contracts last summer. What seemed like a win for the unions and the industry as a whole has turned into a loss, as an increasing number of projects have decided to shoot in other countries, where they can get lower-priced labor in addition to generous incentives.
“A lot of production has moved overseas, and up north to Canada. That’s no secret,” admits Michael Clark, general manager of studio operations at Eagle Rock Studios Atlanta in Norcross, Ga., which he says is at about 75% capacity, with projects including Season 3 of “Tulsa King,” starring Sylvester Stallone. “However, I believe Georgia is still the best place for productions to be.”
According to Kelsey Moore, executive director of the Georgia Screen Entertainment Coalition, the state is maintaining its status as a top production destination by “focus[ing] on the elements that we can control,” namely by making some important — if unsexy — tweaks to its incentive program.
In January, the Georgia Department of Revenue streamlined its audits, creating a more efficient and predictable process for productions looking to monetize their tax credits.
“The Department of Revenue and the film office in Georgia really listened to some of the overarching issues that productions were facing and cleaned it up a little bit,” says Mark Mosalla, COO of Shadowbox Studios, which also owns and operates Shinfield Studios in England.
The state legislature subsequently stepped up and updated the language covering qualified distribution platforms, including adding FAST channels and removing LaserDiscs, and passed a standalone bill pushing back the sunset date of its postproduction credit to 2031.
“It’s not stuff that’s going to shake up the industry in any way, shape or form,” says Stephen Weizenecker, an attorney with the Atlanta office of Barnes & Thornburg specializing in film and TV financing and tax credits. “But they’ve modernized the definitions, which is good.”
