These days, Atlanta is the moviemaking mecca of the South. Francis Ford Coppola sold his vineyards in Sonoma, California in 2021 as a way of helping finance his big-budget Megalopolis in Atlanta (with an all-star cast said to include Adam Driver, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Aubrey Plaza, Forest Whitaker, and Nathalie Emmanuel). Since 2006, media mogul Tyler Perry has produced scores of movies and TV shows from his sprawling, 330-acre studio on an old military base. Marvel Entertainment, now quite active in Georgia, has shot portions of both of its Black Panther pictures there.
Sadly, however, what is often overlooked is the fact that even before Ted Turner launched CNN in Atlanta in 1980, it was the visionary Jimmy Carter—Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975—who first turned the state’s business hub into a production-friendly playground for entertainment companies. As early as 1973, he established a state film commission in Georgia, the first entity of its kind outside of California. See more at Vanity Fair.
