Strike Possibility Boosts Role of N. Carolina City in Hollywood

There are no vacancies at Wilmington’s nine bustling EUE Screen Gems Studios sound stages. Here in the town with the largest movie studio east of the Mississippi--a place where a real estate flier for a three-bedroom house boasts, “The Muppets Slept Here!”--business hasn’t been this good in years.

For that, Wilmington can thank the possibility of a Hollywood writers strike after Tuesday and the Screen Actors Guild’s June 30 strike deadline.

Studios are racing to complete shooting before the SAG deadline, and by then, seven feature films and television movies will have been made in Wilmington. In all of 2000, a total of nine film projects were shot in town.

For Wilmington and similar cities--notably Denver; Austin, Texas; and Nashville--this year’s hurry-up production schedules have proved an antidote to the recent trend of movie production companies choosing cheaper locales in Canada and overseas.

Those in fierce competition for Hollywood’s largess hope the appeal of their cities outlasts the strike scare and keeps drawing projects away from Southern California.

“The bottom line: In the first six months, movie folks will have spent the lion’s share of what we’ve taken in on average for each of the last several years,” Johnny Griffin, Wilmington’s film commissioner, said. “If there is a strike, the whole year still looks pretty good, and if there’s no strike, we only stand to do better.”

While strikes could prove devastating for many individuals, the buildup has been a boon. By the end of June, movie production will have brought $50 million in direct dollars to town, 75% of last year’s 12-month total of $66 million.

And the possibility of strikes has helped do something that film commissions in these cities have tried for years to accomplish with only mixed success: It brought the major studios to town. And they’ve done more than just shoot on location. With time at a premium, producers have made extensive use of local resources.

Call it an instance of the understudy taking the lead. Regional technicians believe that, once given the chance to perform, they’ll be able to draw producers back again.

In Nashville, a DreamWorks SKG big-budget military thriller (as yet unnamed) has meant valuable experience for local crews and editing facilities that under normal circumstances would have been bypassed in favor of Los Angeles-area professionals.

“The strike has sped everything along,” said Courtney Pohlman, deputy director of the Tennessee Film, Entertainment & Music Commission. “It helped us secure our prison--where they are filming--on very short notice. They’re doing a lot of things differently, including doing all their voice recording here with a local firm when they’d usually just take it back to L.A.”

For Screen Gems, the year of the looming strikes has added 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures to the power players that have filmed at the studio that Dino De Laurentiis built 18 years ago.

Although the studio lot, on an azalea-lined road in this waterfront city of 100,000, has since passed through other owners, studio President Frank Capra Jr. said most of the battle has always been getting people to take a chance on a place 2,600 miles away from the motion picture capital.

“We’ve benefited tremendously from repeat business,” Capra said. “It’s nice to see the other majors in town, because once we get them here, we have a better shot at getting them to come back.”

“A high-profile project like the John Travolta film here now, ‘Domestic Disturbances,’ makes a big difference,” Wilmington’s Griffin said. “Sometime in the future, when the producers or the assistant directors or the cinematographers who came this year make another movie, they’ll think of us. That’s how you build business.”

And in these far-flung Hollywood outposts there is a plan of action for the coming months--which are sure to see a slowdown in production even if no one walks off the job.

Film commissioners across the country say they will use the pause to increase location files, streamline responses to requests by producers and aggressively market their states and towns.

In Richmond, Va., where file cabinets are full of Manila folders containing snapshots of possible locations, the move to digital access is underway. The pace will pick up in the coming weeks as the office has some extra time to devote to the time-consuming process of scanning the files into a computer.

“If we focus on the indigenous film community, it will only help grow the crew base,” said Andrew Edmunds, Virginia’s location manager. “The more local crew we have, the easier it is to get feature and television work.”

And if some of the weaker competitors--cities where filmmaking is not as entrenched--drop out of contention because of the labor turmoil, that may be good news as well.

“It’s a cleansing thing. The strong survive,” said Tom Copeland, the Texas state film commissioner. “There’s only so much production out there that’s going to leave Southern California, and you’re probably going to see a thinning of the ranks.”

The trick, however, may be keeping people in business through a strike or a slowdown. A production center like Wilmington beats out other locations largely because of what it can offer: a mini-slice of Hollywood 2,600 miles away. An inch-thick production guide offers services from set dressers to stunt people to a costume warehouse and about 800 crew members who make their living solely from the movie business.

Peggy Farrell said she is certain a strike would shut her down. More than four decades ago, when she chose a life in show business, her mother offered a single piece of advice drawn from her own lifetime as a Broadway seamstress: Learn to be secure in being insecure.

Until now, the costume designer has lived by that rule, riding out the bad times and never getting too confident in the good. Not anymore.

Farrell, whose 10,000-piece period costume collection stretches 200 feet down long rows in an old tobacco warehouse, said her memories of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike are still vivid.

“The only way I could maintain a shop was to borrow from the bank, and it took me five years to pay it back,” she said. “That’s not something I want to do at this stage in my life.”

So a strike--even a short one--probably would mean selling her $3-million to $8-million collection of clothes: from the vintage undergarments in “The Legend of Bagger Vance” to the pillbox hats of “Apollo 13” and the khakis that won her an Emmy for the “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” Even she admits the chances are slim that someone would buy the whole collection from her and stay in Wilmington.

The story is the same for Cliff Willman, whose Classic Picture Car business is only about a year old. Willman, a Wilmington native who once assembled tobacco barns in the building that now houses the Screen Gems corporate office, is an unlikely player in the movie business.

A volunteer firefighter, Willman was sucked into show business when it descended on his hometown and somebody called looking for a firetruck that wasn’t red. The bulky, mustachioed man--who also runs a special-effects company--said even a short strike would put his car-rental enterprise out of business.

With $8,000 in overhead a month before he pays himself and his employees, Willman estimates it would take only a month before a strike would force him to start selling off his inventory of vintage cars.

At a time when he had hoped to be adding to his collection, he instead is biting his nails. “I wouldn’t dare spend a dime on anything new when I know I have no business coming in,” he said.

But if there is no strike, Willman said, it may be his best year yet.

“I’ll be trying to add to my inventory,” he said. “I’ve been looking for vintage station wagons. They’re hard to find.”