Carol Badaracco Padgett, Senior Writer
Production coordinators perform one of the most elemental and vital jobs in the film world — literally making them happen. And yet, it seems their role is one most people never even think about.
That’s one of the reasons Johanna Baidya, a production coordinator in metro Atlanta and travel coordinator for Sony Pictures Entertainment, showed up to network at the Le Meridien Atlanta Perimeter in Dunwoody this past Thursday night, Oct. 19, 2023.
In an event co-hosted by Discover Dunwoody and Enterprise Entertainment, production coordinators like Baidya got a chance to meet up and step into the spotlight.
“I’m glad to be here and network with people in my field and the companies that help us do our jobs,” Baidya said about the role she has built a professional career around since training at the Georgia Film Academy. It’s both an important role on-set and a serious career that helps support her family.
These are the duties of a production coordinator: Their work begins in the planning stages in pre-production, where they set up a production office and put together staff, supplies, and organize equipment. Cast and crew work permits, travel accommodations and visas all fall within their organizational sphere, and they’re also responsible for distributing shooting schedules, compiling scripts and script revisions, and maintaining cast and crew lists.
To their leaders’ credit, Discover Dunwoody and Enterprise Entertainment realized the hand-in-glove fit between their organizations, the hotel and automobile needs of a large-scale film production, and the time-sensitive requirements and demands of the production coordinator.
Discover Dunwoody, as the official destination marketing organization for the City of Dunwoody, promotes the city as a top place to do business and hold events – including film productions. One duty of the organization is to spend a percentage of the hotel and motel tax revenue collected by the city for the promotion and development of city-wide tourism and conventions.
Enterprise Entertainment, Discover Dunwoody’s co-host of the production coordinator event at Le Meridien, is the division of Enterprise Rent-A-Car that specializes in supplying cars for film production, from vehicles for cast and crew to high-performance exotics, box trucks and SUVs that will appear on film.
Whether you ask Baidya as a production coordinator, Ray Ezelle, the executive director of Discover Dunwoody, or Lishers Mahone, Enterprise Entertainment Division’s area sales manager, what they need most to help facilitate film production business, they’ll all say the same thing: “Relationships.”
They need to know one another, trust one another, and be able to pick up the phone and work together at a moment’s notice – particularly in the film industry where production and scheduling changes are inevitable and flexibility is paramount.
“These pros do so much to make a film happen, but they don’t get the attention that other roles do, like directors, producers and writers,” Ezelle sums up. “They deserve this attention and these resources.”
Other attendees at the Le Meridien production coordinator event included hotel representatives from Residence Inn by Marriott, Crowne Plaza Ravinia, and Sonesta Suites.
