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It all began with a magazine cover in 1983.
In the pre-production process for his upcoming movie Firestarter, producer Frank Capra, Jr. was searching for a mansion to serve as the setting for the story of a couple who volunteered for scientific experiments while in college and bore a child with the ability to start fires merely be thinking about them. He saw a picture of an antebellum mansion depicted on the cover of Southern Accents magazine and sent his location scouts across Texas to search for a similar mansion.
After scouring the Lone Star State, Capra still did not have the house he was looking for. The producers decided to visit the real thing, the plantation house featured on the magazine cover. That mansion was the private Orton Plantation, built on the Cape Fear River in Winnabow, North Carolina in 1725. After discussions with the owners, the producers worked out an agreement to film Firestarter on the old rice plantation.
After working in the Wilmington area for a short while, director Dino DeLaurentis began to recognize the coastal region as the ideal location to realize his long-festering dream of establishing a major East Coast film studio. He bought land on North 23rd Street and began building his dream studio around an old brick warehouse. He christened his new film paradise DEG Studios (DeLaurentis Entertainment Group).
What DeLaurentis discovered in the Wilmington region was a variety of diverse locations able to portray a wide variety of settings, a temperate climate that enabled year-round shooting and, even though no feature films had been previously shot in the area, a skilled, film-savvy technical populace. Most important, North Carolina was a Òright-to-workÓ state which was conducive to keeping production costs low.
After DeLaurentis blazed the trail, film-making in the Cape Fear Region around Wilmington exploded. Virtually non-existent as a Hollywood location when North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt established a state film program in 1980, within ten years the state ranked second only to California in revenues derived from the film industry. Fully 10% of the Wilmington-area economic base was grounded in the nascent movie business. DeLaurentis, however, was no longer sharing in the bonanza. His studio was felled by financial difficulties and he lost it to Carolco in 1988.
For the better part of a decade, activity in the ground-breaking studio was limited to commercial production. In 1996, the facility was purchased by a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures and was revitalized as the EUE Screen Gems Studio. Frank Capra, Jr. returned as president and the production lot once again became one of the largest feature film studios east of Hollywood.
Today the studio at 1223 North 23rd Street features a three-block, four-story urban back lot that has portrayed cities across the globe in the movies. The lot covers 15 acres and has a main street, four cross-streets and four complete buildings with shootable interiors. There are nine sound stages ranging from 7,200 to 35,500 square feet with more than 100,000 square feet of filming space available. Screen Gems Studio also offers a surface tank of over 600 square feet for aquatic scenes. The studio also offers an ample supply of set lighting, grip, and expendables, production offices, construction mills, plaster and paint shops, props, a screening room, editing suites and a commissary with on-set catering. Weekend tours of the studio lot are available.
With Screen Gems leading the way, the state of North Carolina now boasts seven facilities statewide, 29 stages and more than a million square feet of controlled space for production. Many locations in the Wilmington area are popular with Hollywood scouts as well. Wrightsville Beach was featured in Sleeping With The Enemy starring Julia Roberts, To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday with Michelle Pfeiffer, and Weekend at Bernie's. Southport provided the setting for Spies, about German submarines spotted off Long Island and Crimes of the Heart with Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange. Southport is also the filming location for the television series Dawson's Creek standing in for the coastal New England town of Capeside, Massachusetts. The popular teenaged soap opera has caused a decided spike in tourism in the town from fans hoping to connect with the show.
All told the Wilmington area has played host to over 300 feature films, mini-series and television movies and six television series since Frank Capra, Jr. happened to pick up a copy of Southern Accents less than 20 years ago. It is little wonder that Wilmington, North Carolina has earned the reputation as Hollywood East.
If you want to see the picturesque mansion that started it all, the Orton Plantation Gardens are 18 miles south of Wilmington on SR 133. Although the mansion is closed to the public it can be seen from the public gardens, which are open from March through October.
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