Georgia Entertainment’s Cartersville Unscripted brought the state’s creative and innovative economy into a single room on Wednesday, June 24, at the Savoy Automobile Museum in Cartersville. The event was presented by Cartersville Museum City and Savoy Automobile Museum, and proved out a thesis the program was built around: that Bartow County is becoming one of Georgia’s clearest examples of convergence across film, gaming, entertainment, technology, and innovation.
The Savoy Automobile Museum set a stage that was hard to beat. The world-class venue has already drawn productions from Dodge, Chrysler, and BMW precisely because it offers something cameras cannot manufacture. The evening’s attendees moved through the galleries before settling into a program that mirrored the museum’s own DNA: storytelling, preservation, design, and craft applied to the creative economy.
“This is exactly the kind of room Georgia Unscripted was built to convene,” said Randy Davidson, founder and CEO of Georgia Entertainment. “This is a region in motion, with the people, the institutions and the leadership to keep it moving. Bartow County is doing what the rest of the state should be paying attention to, and the conversations that started inside Savoy are going to keep moving forward long after the lights came up.”
The evening featured remarks from State Representative Matthew Gambill, Steven Schumacher, president and CEO of Cartersville Museum City, and C. Scott Votaw, assistant vice chancellor of the Georgia Film Academy, highlighting legislative leadership, destination marketing and workforce development.
A featured panel followed, moderated by Dr. Jessica Lindberg of Georgia Highlands College, with panelists Katrina Pitts, Jason Satcher, Katie Weatherford, Jack Rip and Morgan Chen — a group of operators actively shaping the future of Georgia’s creative industries through storytelling, talent development and community-driven growth. The conversation moved across arts, tourism, gaming and independent film, surfacing the through-lines between sectors that too often get discussed in isolation.
The evening also featured a conversation on international co-production between the Rome International Film Festival and partners from Israel.
“Educators were trading ideas with elected officials,” said Jezlan Moyet, president of Georgia Entertainment. “International partners from Israel and Rome were sitting alongside Bartow County operators. That kind of cross-sector contact is rare, and it is the whole reason we build Unscripted the way we do.”
The evening concluded with a reception at Elevate in downtown Cartersville, where conversations and collaborations continued well into the night.
Cartersville Unscripted partners included: Cartersville Museum City, Savoy Automobile Museum, Artistic Heights Academy, CineFi, Consulate of Israel, ABS Payroll, Georgia Insider, Hall Booth Smith, Morgan Chen Productions, Creative Cabin Studios and others.
Photos by: Jennifer Reynolds, Elise Nation, Sydney Minard and Crizz Quinn
