The Greatest Year Ever for Savannah’s Film and Television Industry

The Greatest Year Ever for Savannah’s Film and Television Industry
By Charles J. Bowen

Charles Bowen

What do an growing old murderer searching his clone, a football-playing personal investigator looking to exonerate his daughter, an escaped slave interacting with well-known ancient figures, and an upper-class cocker spaniel falling in love with a side road good mutt all have in commonplace? They are all main characters in films filmed in Savannah in 2018.

These motion pictures don’t even start to reveal the breadth of ultimate 12 months’s movie and tv trade in Savannah. From movie noir in John Travolta’s “The Poison Rose” to the science fiction motion mystery “Gemini Man” starring Will Smith to Disney’s live-action remake of “Lady and the Tramp,” Savannah has performed host to nearly each and every conceivable style of manufacturing.

Over 200 skilled movie and tv productions have been filmed within the Savannah space in 2018 with any other 147 pupil productions on best of that. Whether huge or small, every and each and every manufacturing served as an financial engine pumping money into each and every nook of the native financial system.

According to the Savannah Regional Film Commission, those productions accounted for $120 million in direct spending in the neighborhood and had a complete financial affect of properly over $250 million in 2018 on my own. These figures shattered the document set in 2017 of $65 million in direct spending with $138 million in overall native financial affect.

As founding father of the Savannah Film Alliance, I see the super monetary affect those productions have day by day on a various vary of native companies. In addition to meals and accommodation, movie crews make the most of dry cleaners, puppy sitters, therapeutic massage therapists, and numerous different native pros. Small companies around the town are discovering a providence in source of revenue from those productions, and each and every month, extra and extra companies that carrier the leisure trade are transferring to the city.

One of the key causes for this growth within the native movie and tv trade is the Savannah Entertainment Production Incentive introduced by means of the Savannah Economic Development Authority. This program supplies money rebates to certified movie and tv productions that time table a majority in their capturing days inside of 60 miles of Savannah City Hall. Since this rebate applies to native spending handiest, it encourages productions to rent native staff and make the most of native companies and carrier suppliers.

The explanation why this incentive is so efficient is that it’s introduced on best of the very beneficiant manufacturing incentives introduced statewide by means of the State of Georgia. But all this executive strengthen would imply not anything with out the numerous native staff contributors, small trade homeowners, trade leaders, and educators, such because the Georgia Film Academy at Savannah Tech, that experience labored tirelessly to turn into Savannah into one of the standard filming locations on this planet.

While those statistics are undoubtedly causes to have a good time, it is necessary to keep in mind that all of this development may also be straight away destroyed by means of one ill-informed swipe of our new governor’s pen. As North Carolina found out after its notorious “bathroom bill,” any effort to roll again the civil rights features of the ultimate 60-plus years beneath the guise of “religious liberty” may decimate Georgia’s movie and tv trade. Just ultimate 12 months, a invoice that may have allowed personal adoption companies to legally discriminate in accordance with “sincerely-held religious beliefs” made it right through the Georgia Senate sooner than failing. Thus, you will need to stay vigilant lest the sort of efforts resurface.

Looking ahead to 2019, Savannah appears to be like well-positioned to carry onto its standing as the second one maximum filmed town in Georgia in the back of Atlanta. Numerous productions have both dedicated to or expressed hobby in filming in Savannah this 12 months. Remember, there’s much more at stake than just the risk to identify a film megastar at a neighborhood eating place or to acknowledge a well-recognized website at the display. Entire livelihoods and actual cash supporting actual households are being constructed by means of the native movie and tv trade and you by no means know the place the float of that cash will in the long run land.

While lately surfing a neighborhood vintage mall, well-removed from the lights-camera-action global, a pal ran throughout a prop grasp purchasing rotary telephones for the 2019 native filming of “The Glorias: A Life on the Road,” a Gloria Steinem biopic. The movie greenback travels some distance and vast. The pocket through which it finishes up might be yours.

Charles Bowen is an leisure lawyer and founding father of the Savannah Film Alliance. He is also contacted at 912.544.2050 or cbowen@thebowenlawgroup.com