Glimpses of home on big screens
Sites in Floyd, Bartow and other N.W. Georgia counties are showing up more often in feature films.
Two new feature films have settings as familiar as home to Northwest Georgians — and more are on the way.
Parts of Cartersville and Bartow County appear as Earth in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” in theaters now. And Rome is credited as a filming location in “Megan Leavey,” which opens June 9. It’s the true story of a woman Marine K9 handler in the Iraq War, starring Kate Mara, Ramon Rodriguez, Edie Falco, Bradley Whitford and Common.
“It had a different name when they shot here, but they were here for two or three days,” said Lisa Smith, director of the Greater Rome Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Filming took place at the Bob Moore Bridge over the Etowah River near the Kingfisher Trailhead.
“We shut down the walking path when they filmed, but up until then we had people walking through,” Smith said.
Ellen Archer, at the Cartersville-Bartow County CVB, said the “Leavey” crew did a reshoot in Cartersville last summer, but the big excitement came with “Guardians.”
“They did a lot of aerial stuff out in the west side of the county, shot some of what we consider our eyesores. You see Plant Bowen,” she said.
They also turned a downtown parking lot into a city street, filming storefronts between the Grand Theatre and the psychedelic Mellow Mushroom facade.
“It must have been a total of 45 seconds in the movie, but it’s the first time we got a screen credit,” Archer said.
Bartow County also is hosting two other productions this month.
“Game Night,” a Warner Bros. movie starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, filmed at the Cartersville Airport last week. It’s due out in February 2018.
This week, crews will be at various downtown sites shooting scenes for “The Best of Enemies,” starring Taraji P. Henson of “Hidden Figures” fame, Sam Rockwell and Anne Heche.
“It’s a civil rights movie set in Durham, North Carolina, in the 1960s,” Archer said. “They’ll be at the Bartow County Courthouse, Ross’ Diner and the lobby of Cartersville City Hall.”
A TV miniseries debuting Aug. 1 on the Discovery Channel also features Bartow sites.
“Manhunt: Unabomber” uses Red Top Mountain State Park cabins, trails and the vistors center along with Doug’s Place restaurant in Emerson. It stars Sam Worthington as FBI agent Jim Fitzgerald and Paul Bettany as Ted Kaczynski.
“And that’s just this year,” Archer said, with a laugh.
Getting the action
Bartow sees more film action than other Northwest Georgia counties because it’s inside a 30-mile ring around Atlanta where crews don’t have to be paid a higher per diem. Being outside “the union zone” is Rome’s only drawback, according to Smith.
“It increases production costs,” she said. “But the ones that do come here, they love it. Part of the issue with (Los Angeles) is their awful traffic.”
Michael Colford for the Tyler Perry Studios comes up to film exterior shots in Rome, “because it’s so easy for him to do,” Smith said. And the Bob Moore Bridge features in the TV show “Hap and Leonard,” which is now filming in Georgia.
Getting production companies to come up in the first place, however, is a competition that involves creativity. All 159 Georgia counties are certified film-ready and the Georgia Department of Economic Development has contacts in each one.
“They’ll call up and say ‘Lisa, think about what Mars looks like. That’s what I need,’ so we went out and shot a chert pit and sent that,” Smith said. “Or ‘I need a farmhouse with two columns and a fountain out front that we can blow up.’ You never know what they’re going to come up with.”
Randall Franks, the film and TV liaison for Chattooga, Walker, Dade and Catoosa counties, said he’s always fielding those types of calls.
“They’ll say ‘we’re looking for a secluded waterfall with a pond’ or a house that looks eerie, or a large stretch of woods,” said Franks, who played Officer Randy Goode in the TV series “In the Heat of the Night.”
He helped find the farmhouse in Walker County that was used in the 2011 film “Water for Elephants” as the childhood home of main character Jacob (Robert Pattinson).
“It was abandoned, but it had been a two-story farm-tenant house,” Franks said. “They came in and transformed it, and it became the opening scene.”
Archer said many of the scouts who work in Georgia are familiar with Bartow now, but she does get occasional calls asking for help in locating the owner of a setting or arranging the use of a government building.
“I just got a call about the old gold dome on the Bartow County Courthouse, and they were also looking for an old jail,” she said. “We don’t have an old jail, so I sent them to Calhoun because they still have theirs.”
Local benefits
Archer said she tries to direct location scouts to nearby counties, if possible, because it could encourage them to set up their production office in the area. That extends the “union zone” and
means more local spending.
How much spending is unclear, since there’s no single source supplier of the company’s needs.
“One thing that shocked me, though, was for Reese Witherspoon’s “Devil’s Knot,” she said. “They spent over $14,000 on fuel for their generators. And that was a local spend.”
The 2016 Feature Film Study released by Film L.A. last week counts 17 big-budget movies filmed in Georgia, making it the top location worldwide. Their budgets totaled just over $950 million, with half that amount spent on location.
Included in that figure was “The Divergent Series: Allegiant,” partially filmed at Joe Silva’s Lindale Mill in mid-2015. The movie had a total estimated budget of $142 million budget and about $99 million of that was spent in Georgia. It also came in for about $30 million worth of incentives from the state.