The New Georgia Encyclopedia is supported by funding from A More Perfect Union, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
DeForest Kelley, an Atlanta native, was an actor best known for playing the role of Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the television series Star Trek and feature films.
From the collections of the Margaret Herrick Library
J. Richardson Jones, an Atlanta native, was a journalist, filmmaker, and entertainer whose work both challenged segregation and celebrated African American life during the Jim Crow era.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
J. Richardson Jones, kneeling right, is pictured on a handbill from the 1925 production of his play Thy Will Be Done at the Strand Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida. The play was later produced in July 1926 at the Douglass Theatre in Macon. An Atlanta native, Jones began his career in vaudeville and radio, and later became a journalist for the Atlanta Daily World.
Courtesy of Middle Georgia Archives, Washington Memorial Library.
A poster advertises Parade of Negro Progress, a Technicolor feature film based on a short newsreel produced in 1939 by J. Richardson Jones as an advertisement for the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. The feature played in all-Black theaters around the South in 1941-42.
Courtesy of Archives Division, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System
Tyler Perry, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is an Atlanta-based filmmaker, playwright, and performer. His Tyler Perry Studios, established in Atlanta in 2008, is the first major film studio in the nation to be solely owned by an African American.
Photograph from AMFM STUDIOS LLC
Actress Butterfly McQueen is best known for her portrayal of Prissy in the film Gone With the Wind (1939). McQueen spent her childhood and many of her adult years in Augusta, where she died in 1995.
Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.
The Great Locomotive Chase, a Disney film released in 1956, depicts the events of the Andrews Raid of 1862, in which Union raiders seized a Confederate train in north Georgia during the Civil War. The film is an adaptation of the written accounts of William Pittenger, a Union participant in the raid.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Silent film comedian Buster Keaton directed and starred in The General (1927), a fictionalized account of the famous Andrews Raid of 1862, in which Union raiders seized a Confederate train in north Georgia during the Civil War.
Photograph from www.filmreference.com
Scott Wilson, an Atlanta native, was an actor with credits in more than fifty feature films and in numerous television productions. His filmography includes In the Heat of the Night (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), The Great Gatsby (1974), Dead Man Walking (1995), Pearl Harbor (2001), and Junebug (2005).
Courtesy of Scott Wilson
Sherman's March (1986), a documentary film by Ross McElwee, chronicles the filmmaker's search for love in the modern South while loosely retracing Sherman's 1864 march to the sea. Portions of the film take place on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, and on the Georgia coast, near Savannah.
Filmmaker and professor Ross McElwee is pictured during the filming of Bright Leaves. In 1986 McElwee's documentary Sherman's March, much of which was filmed in Georgia, was released to critical acclaim.
Image from AdrianMcElwee
A film crew shoots a commercial for Georgia tourism at Stone Mountain in 2006. Commercial production increased dramatically in the state during the first years of the twenty-first century, with such major corporations as Coca-Cola, Delta, Ford Motor Company, and General Electric choosing to film in Georgia.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
A camera operator works on a film set in Georgia, where the film industry has generated more than $4 billion for the state's economy since the 1970s. The Georgia Film, Video, and Music Office, established in 1973 by then-governor Jimmy Carter, recruited more than 550 major projects between 1973 and 2007.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Sally Fields (left) and Burt Reynolds are pictured during the filming of Smokey and the Bandit (1977). An enormous commercial success, the film was one of several projects that Reynolds brought to Georgia during the 1970s.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Cast members of the television series In the Heat of the Night pose during the filming of an episode in downtown Covington, circa 1994. From left, Denise Nicholas (Harriet DeLong), Carroll O'Connor (Sheriff Bill Gillespie), and Carl Weathers (Chief Hampton Forbes).
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Crew members shoot an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard in Covington, circa 1979. The first several episodes of the series were filmed in Covington before production moved to California. The famous shot of the airborne General Lee, the Duke cousins' muscle car, was filmed at nearby Oxford College.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Mary-Louise Parker (left) and Mary Stuart Masterson are pictured during the filming of Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), adapted from a novel by Fannie Flagg. Although set in Alabama, the film was shot in the small town of Juliette, in Monroe County. Portions of the film set, including the Whistle Stop Cafe, are now open to visitors.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Robert Redford (right), the director of The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), demonstrates a golf swing to the film's stars, Matt Damon (left) and Will Smith (second from left). The film was shot in the streets and country clubs of Savannah.
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Students in the video production program at West Georgia Technical College in LaGrange work on a class project. In addition to producing three television series, students at the college have won awards for two documentaries, Soaring with Eagles and Helping to Build Hope.
Courtesy of Technical College System of Georgia
Attendees of the 2006 Savannah Film Festival congregate outside the historic Trustees Theatre, which was restored by the Savannah College of Art and Design. The festival, which is hosted by SCAD each fall, offers feature-length, short, and documentary films from around the world.
Courtesy of Savannah College of Art and Design
The Athens-based rock band R.E.M. has filmed some of their music videos in Georgia over the years, including collaborations with Chattooga County artist Howard Finster and Hall County artist R. A. Miller. From left, Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and Mike Mills.
Courtesy of Warner Brothers Records
With increased financial incentives to film in Georgia, international studios invested resources to produce in the state. These three photographs show the Pinewood Atlanta Studios site in Fayette County before, during, and after construction. Originally part-owned by British Pinewood Studios, the Fayette location has since become an independent venture named Trilith Studios.
From USDA-FSA Aerial Photography Field Office. Collage by Jonathan D. Hepworth, New Georgia Encyclopedia.
With a generous state tax credit passed in 2008, Atlanta became known as “the Hollywood of the South.” Here, a parking lot across from the Richard B. Russell Federal Building becomes a Lagos, Nigeria, street scene in filming the movie Captain America: Civil War in 2015.
From torontokid2, Wikimedia Commons
The television film Andersonville (1996), directed by John Frankenheimer, portrays the experiences of Union soldiers held at Andersonville Prison, the notorious Civil War prison located in Sumter County. The miniseries, starring Carmen Argenziano, Jarrod Emick, Frederic Forrest, and Ted Marcoux, was filmed partially in Coweta County.
A sketch of the Andersonville prison, by John B. Walker (1864). The set of Andersonville, a 1996 television film directed by John Frankenheimer, was modeled on the buildings of the original prison.
Courtesy of Georgia Historical Society, Georgia Historical Society Collection of Photographs, 1870-1960, #GHS 1361PH-21-13-4296.
Warm Springs (2005), a film produced by Home Box Office, chronicles the experiences of Franklin D. Roosevelt at his home in Warm Springs during the 1920s. The film, which stars Kenneth Branagh as Roosevelt and Cynthia Nixon as Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, was filmed on location at Warm Springs, in Meriwether County.
Franklin D. Roosevelt first visited Warm Springs in 1924, after contracting polio, and soon thereafter bought a home in the area. The house later became known as the "Little White House," after Roosevelt's election as U.S. president in 1932.
Courtesy of Explore Georgia, Photograph by Ralph Daniel.
The Three Faces of Eve (1957), a film starring Georgia native Joanne Woodward, is an adaptation of a book by the same name, written by doctors Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley. The narrative chronicles the experiences of a young housewife with multiple personalities, who was initially diagnosed and treated at the Medical College of Georgia (later Georgia Health Sciences University) in Augusta. The film was produced and directed by Nunnally Johnson, another Georgia native.
Melvyn Douglas was a prominent film, television, and theater actor in the mid-twentieth century, and one of the few to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony award. Born in Macon, Douglas first entered show business at the age of two, when he won first prize at the 1903 Georgia State Fair Baby Show.
Actor Melvyn Douglas (right), a Macon native, chats with actor Paul Robeson at a benefit in Washington, D.C., in June 1942. Earlier that year Douglas, an active member of the Democratic Party, was appointed head of the Office of Civilian Defense Arts Council, which enlisted the help of artists to support the war effort during World War II.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Melvyn Douglas (seated) starred as Henry Drummond in a stage production of Inherit the Wind during the 1950s.
Joanne Woodward, born in Thomasville and raised in Marietta, became a major film star during the 1950s. Known for playing southern characters, Woodward won an Oscar in 1958 for her portrayal of a Georgia woman with multiple personality disorder in The Three Faces of Eve.
Photograph by Fran Collin
Joanne Woodward, a Georgia native, married fellow actor Paul Newman in 1958 and starred with him in a number of films, including The Long Hot Summer (1958), The Drowning Pool (1975), and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). The couple also established the food-products line Newman's Own, which donates all proceeds to charity, as well as the Scott Newman Foundation, which works to prevent drug abuse.
Courtesy of Westport Country Playhouse
Joanne Woodward, a well-known film actor and Georgia native, sits in the auditorium of the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut. Woodward served as the company's artistic director from 2000 through 2005.
Courtesy of Westport Country Playhouse
Hollywood actor Kim Basinger signs autographs in 1991 at the University of Georgia's Henry Field Stadium tennis complex. An Athens native, Basinger donated a lighting system to the facility.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Kim Basinger arrives at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Buckhead, circa 1990. Born in Athens, Basinger is a well-known Hollywood actor, as well as a fashion model and recording artist.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Kim Basinger attends a 2006 benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Oscar-winning actor and former model is a native of Athens. In 1989 the actress purchased the town of Braselton in Jackson County, with plans to build a movie studio and begin a film festival there. In 1994 she sold the town.
Photograph by Corbis
Elmo Ellis's 1950s campaign, "Removing the Rust from Radio," encouraged the revitalization of radio in the wake of television's growing popularity. Ellis was honored with a Peabody Award and was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
Courtesy of History of WSB Radio
William Lundigan and Susan Hayward played the newly married couple William and Mary Thompson in the 1951 film I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, which was filmed in north Georgia around Cleveland and Helen. Hayward was honored by the state senate as an "adopted daughter of Georgia" during the film's Atlanta premiere.
Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Susan Hayward, a successful Hollywood actress during the 1940s and 1950s, poses for a publicity portrait, circa 1939. Hayward starred in I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), written and produced by Lamar Trotti, a Georgia native. The film was based on The Circuit Rider's Wife (1910), a novel written by Georgia author Corra Harris.
Image from Wikimedia
Susan Hayward received an Academy Award for her portrayal of convicted murderer Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958). Hayward, a native of New York, moved to Carrollton with her husband in the late 1950s and remained until her death in 1975.
Image from Insomnia Cured Here
Georgia native Miriam Hopkins received an Oscar nomination for her performance in Becky Sharp (1935), the first full-length color film made in Hollywood. A few years later Hopkins was disappointed to be passed over for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind (1939).
Image from Wikimedia
Actress Miriam Hopkins was born in Savannah and grew up in Bainbridge. She began her career in the 1920s as a dancer and vaudeville performer before finding success as a Hollywood actress during the 1930s. Hopkins appeared in thirty-six feature films over the course of her career.
Image from Wikimedia
Georgia native Julia Roberts, an established Hollywood icon, has starred in numerous films, most notably Pretty Woman (1990) and Erin Brockovich (2000), for which she received an Academy Award. Roberts, pictured in 2005, also owns a production company and is known for her philanthropic work with UNICEF and the International Rett Syndrome Association.
Photograph from Corbis
The character actor Charles Coburn began his acting career as a young boy in Savannah. In 1896 he moved to New York City and established himself as a stage actor. About forty years later, after the death of his wife, Coburn moved to California and worked in radio, television, and film.
Journalist Walter J. Brown graduated from the journalism school at the University of Georgia and went on to establish his own news bureau and eventually his own broadcast empire in Georgia and South Carolina. The Walter J. Brown Media Archives, housed in the main library at UGA, are named in his honor.
Courtesy of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.
Jessica Tandy (as Daisy Werthan) and Morgan Freeman (as Hoke Colburn) on location in Georgia while filming Driving Miss Daisy (1989).
Courtesy of Georgia Department of Economic Development.
Burt Reynolds was an actor and filmmaker recognized around the world. Over the course of his career, Reynolds made a number of films in Georgia, including Deliverance (1972), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), The Cannonball Run (1981), and Sharky's Machine (1981).
Holly Hunter plays the role of Barb in the 2004 film Little Black Book. Hunter, a native of Conyers, began her professional career in 1981 and has established herself since that time as a versatile actress of both stage and screen.
Photograph from Corbis
Jane Fonda has been an active presence in Atlanta since her move to the city in 1991. A well-known Hollywood actress and former wife of CNN founder Ted Turner, Fonda has initiated both philanthropic and artistic endeavors within Georgia.
In 2001 the Jane Fonda Center at Emory University in Atlanta opened to conduct research in adolescent reproductive health. The center also offers training for health care professionals. Jane Fonda, who donated $2 million to open the center, stands beside Dr. Michael Johns, the chief executive officer of Emory Healthcare.
Courtesy of Emory University
Ossie Davis at the 1963 Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C.
From Wikimedia
Ossie Davis, a native of south Georgia, was an acclaimed actor, civil rights activist, and writer. Along with his wife of fifty-six years, Ruby Dee, Davis received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1995 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2004.
Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Yale Collection of American Literature, Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, a film based on the novel A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910) by Georgia writer Corra Harris, was released in 1951. The film, which features William Lundigan and Susan Hayward, was produced by another Georgia native, Lamar Trotti, who also wrote the screenplay.
Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Lamar Trotti (middle), a prolific Hollywood screenwriter and producer during the 1930s and 1940s, visited the University of Georgia campus in 1945 with John E. Drewery (left) and T. W. Reed (right).
Jane Withers, an Atlanta native, starred in thirty-eight Hollywood films over twelve years, beginning with a bit role in the 1932 film Handle with Care. In 1934 she performed a scene in the film It's a Gift with comedian W. C. Fields, who later praised her abilities.
Courtesy of Classic Movie Kids
Jane Withers, a child star in Hollywood, California, during the 1930s, was born and began her career in Atlanta. The young Withers sang, danced, performed impressions, and starred in her own radio program in Atlanta before moving to Hollywood in 1932.
Courtesy of Classic Movie Kids
In 1934 Jane Withers won the part of Joy in the film Bright Eyes, starring Shirley Temple, the most popular child actor in Hollywood at the time. Withers's successful performance led to a contract with Fox Studios and to her first starring role in the 1935 film Ginger.
Courtesy of Classic Movie Kids
At the age of fifteen, Atlanta native and child star Jane Withers wrote a story for Fox Studios that became the 1941 film Small Town Deb. Frustrated with continuing to be cast as a child by the studio, Withers wrote a part that enabled her to play a character closer to her actual age.
Courtesy of Classic Movie Kids
Nunnally Johnson, a native of Columbus, wrote for newspapers in Columbus, Savannah, and New York City before embarking on a career as a screenwriter and film director in Los Angeles, California. An accomplished short-story writer, Johnson excelled at adapting fiction, including the novel Tobacco Road by Georgia writer Erskine Caldwell, for the screen.
Courtesy of Dorris Bowdon Johnson
In 1991 the U.S. Postal Service commemorated several iconic comedians, including Georgia native Oliver Hardy. He is pictured alongside Stanley Laurel, with whom Hardy starred in several successful comedies during the twenties and thirties, including the Academy Award-winning film The Music Box (1931).
Courtesy of Smithsonian National Postal Museum
As a young boy, Oliver Hardy lived in several Georgia towns, where he began singing in local theater productions. Hardy continued to perform during his college years and in 1913 embarked on a film career in Jacksonville, Florida.
The New Movie, Feb. 1930
By 1926 Oliver Hardy had appeared in more than ninety Hollywood films, including both comedies and dramas. Hardy typically played the role of the "heavy," a large and intimidating villain often seen in silent films of the 1920s.
Image from Insomnia Cured Here
The comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy was formed in 1927 when the duo starred in The Second Hundred Years for Hal Roach Studios. Laurel and Hardy performed together in sixty short and sixteen feature films between 1927 and 1940.
Image from Insomnia Cured Here
Oliver Hardy, a native of Harlem, Georgia, became one of the most recognized and acclaimed slapstick comedians during the 1920s as part a comedy team with Stan Laurel. Today Laurel and Hardy are remembered with museums in each of their hometowns, as well as an international appreciation society.
Image from Wikimedia
Sterling Holloway poses with Winnie the Pooh at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Holloway created the voices of Pooh and a number of other animated characters for Walt Disney Studios.
Courtesy of Donnie Jarrell Collection
Alan Ball at work on the set of the HBO series Six Feet Under, for which he wrote, produced, and directed. The series received the Peabody Award in 2002. Ball also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1999 film American Beauty.
Photograph from Corbis
Eatonton native Alice Walker's award-winning novel The Color Purple (1982) chronicles the self-empowerment and growth of the character Celie, a poor Black woman living in rural Georgia.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On August 27, 2004, the crew prepares the set for the musical stage adaption of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The production opened in September 2004 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The film premiere of Gone With the Wind took place at the Loew's Grand Theater in Atlanta on December 15, 1939. Mayor William B. Hartsfield declared a citywide holiday, and a crowd of 18,000 gathered outside the theater to catch a glimpse of the film's stars. In attendance were lead actors Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, a portrait of whom is visible above the theater's entrance.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
This commemorative stamp was issued March 23, 1990, in Hollywood, California, as part of a set of four stamps recognizing classic films released in 1939 and winners or nominees of Academy Awards in 1940. Gone With the Wind won eight Academy Awards that year.
Smithsonian National Postal Museum
Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone With the Wind, meets star Clark Gable at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie. Gable portrays Rhett Butler in the film.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Gone With the Wind star Clark Gable meets with fans at the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the movie.
Courtesy of Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In this publicity photograph for Song of the South, Walt Disney (center) reviews the film's storyboards with actors Bobby Driscoll (left) and Luana Patten (right). Although the film was not well received by critics, it won an Academy Award in 1948 for Best Song, "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah."
Courtesy of Song of the South.net
Critics praised the animated sequences in Song of the South but were unimpressed with the live-action scenes. In this movie still, Brer Rabbit is confused by the silence of the Tar Baby.
Courtesy of Song of the South.net. Copyright 1946 Walt Disney Productions
James Dickey played the role of a sheriff in the 1972 movie version of his novel Deliverance (1970), which starred Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight.
Courtesy of Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, James Dickey Papers.
Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty starred in the 1972 John Boorman film adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance.
Photograph by Walt Jabsco
Convicts are shown circa 1909 working on one of the first graded roads in Rockdale County. The convict lease system was abolished in 1908, as one of many reforms enacted during the Progressive era, but soon chain gangs took the place of convict leasing.
Courtesy of Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia, #
roc063.
Erskine Caldwell settled outside of Georgia shortly before he was twenty-five, paying extended visits to his parents in Wrens for as long as they lived there. Though he lived much of his life outside the South, the region stayed on his mind and figured prominently in most of his writing.
New York native Berendt lived off and on in Savannah for eight years, interviewing locals and gathering material for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Photograph by Marion Ettlinger
Critics generally were unimpressed with the film adaptation of John Berendt's book or with The Lady Chablis, who played herself in the movie.
Courtesy of The Lady Chablis
Published by Random House in January 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil quickly became known in Savannah as simply "The Book." Since that time the nonfiction narrative has sold more than three million copies in 101 printings, has been translated into twenty-three languages and appeared in twenty-four foreign editions, and has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Savannah.
At the age of thirty-nine, Flannery O'Connor died on August 3, 1964, of lupus, the disease that had also afflicted her father. She is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. The posthumous collection The Complete Stories received the National Book Award in 1972.
Courtesy of Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College and State University
Carson McCullers, considered one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding.
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
Vereen Bell wrote fiction and magazine articles set in the southern outdoors, and he achieved popular success with Swamp Water (1940).
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Frank Daniel Papers.
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