http://www.tennessean.com/
An article that makes some references to the Orbison Building in Nashville, TN
Friday, 03/31/06
The Big Picture
Years in the making, Nashville's television and film industry is finally
poised for the Hollywood treatment
By Bill Ditenhafer
The Roy Orbison building, a former warehouse turned office suites, sits
at the confluence of Broadway and West End, just before Broadway
straightens for its final, honky tonk-lined run for the Cumberland
River. For a long time this small area of the city was something of a no
man's land, empty square acreage (and square footage) to be passed
through on your way downtown or back up toward Music Row. Now, of
course, the nearby Gulch area is trading in its urban squalor for a
trendy new downtown cachet and block after formerly underutilized block
between, roughly, the edge of Vanderbilt University and interstates 40
and 65 is making up for lost time in a hurry with condominium high-rises
and shiny new office towers. And yet the Orbison Building is still a bit
off by itself, more the physical vanguard of the growth as opposed to a
part of the body of the movement. It's as though the building saw its
usefulness before it could actually be used and simply stood its ground
until the city could catch up to it. Which, it just so happens, is right
now.
In an airy fifth-floor corner suite, Anastasia Brown blasts a virtually
seamless mash-up of classic Marty Robbins and the hip hop collective the
Wu-Tang Clan, Robbins's form-perfect song structure providing the
ultimate framework for---and contrast to---the subversively laid-back
aggression of Ghostface Killah and RZA, et al. It's a bold combination,
digging deep into the core of both genres (this is no mash-up of Big &
Rich and Kid Rock, after all) and pulling out something surprisingly
whole. She's talking about one of her latest projects, the Quentin
Tarantino-produced Daltry Calhoun, a coming-of-age story of sorts
starring Johnny Knoxville that's set to include this unlikely alliance
of country & western and hip hop on its soundtrack. Her office is
busy-chic, a tasteful combination of interesting furniture and prints,
personal photos, and stacks upon stacks of CDs in various postures of
access. Behind her, outside the Orbison Building, stretches the
relatively small but famous Nashville skyline. From this vantage, Music
Row is, as it were, at her feet.
As the bass line thumps, it comes to mind that Anastasia Brown is
probably the only person in the entire world right now who could've
managed to get Marty Robbins mixed up with the Wu-Tang Clan and Quentin
Tarantino in a high-profile Hollywood movie.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that's probably because no one else
has ever tried before. But let that not distract you from what Anastasia
Brown, former Music Row executive and current co-head (with Eric
Geadelmann) of the 821 Entertainment Group, has accomplished in just a
few short years. Starting with the Steven Spielberg and Leslie
Bohem-produced miniseries Taken, winner of the 2003 Emmy Award for
Outstanding Miniseries and nominated for a Golden Globe award, Brown has
served as music producer---kind of like the casting director, but for
songs, and with the longer-term impact of soundtrack sales---for
multiple independent and feature films including, most recently,
Miramax's Calhoun and the upcoming music-driven Warner Bros. feature
August Rush, starring Robin Williams, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Freddie
Highmore. And with Nashville-based artists represented in every movie
she makes ("I consciously scour Nashville first, all genres, for music
that could work for my director's vision before I go outside of
Nashville," she says. "I'm loyal to Nashville big-time. I'm as loyal as
a dog."), now more than ever Music City, long a hub of struggling indie
activity, is finally poised to make its presence felt in Hollywood.
Not that we haven't broken through a few times and in other ways before.
This year's most high-profile televised event, the Academy Awards,
featured Nashville native Reese Witherspoon, who starred in a
multiple-Oscar-nominated movie about Nashville icons Johnny and June
Carter Cash. To date, Walk the Line has earned more than $100 million,
and the effects on tourism that even this single film will yield on the
Nashville economy and culture in coming years may be incalculable. Many
celebrities who've lived and worked in Nashville have long graced the
big and little screens, most often country music stars or their family,
from Dolly Parton (Nine to Five), Randy Travis (Matlock), and Minnie
Pearl and George Jones (40 Acre Feud), to the more recent Reba McIntyre
(Reba), Billy Ray Cyrus (Doc), Faith Hill (The Stepford Wives remake),
Tim McGraw (Black Cloud, Friday Night Lights, the upcoming remake of My
Friend Flicka), and, of course, Ashley Judd, star of numerous films.
Even so, Brown's approach to Nashville's role in the
multi-billion-dollar film industry is unique. Instead of asking how we
can turn more musicians into actors, she wondered why more films
couldn't play our music. Duh. But as obvious as this sounds, the road
has not always been smooth.
"When I told my friends in LA about my idea of starting a music
supervising business in Nashville, they said 'Don't do it,'" Brown
recalls. This, she says, was after the success of Taken, a 40-hour
miniseries that featured over 50 percent Nashville artists. "I have to
admit, it gave me pause for a moment. I wanted people to say, 'Yeah, do
it---no one's ever done that before.' But they didn't."
Still, she persisted, and hooking up with Nashville film producer Eric
Geadelmann proved to be the perfect next step.
"Eric and I merged to become 821," she says. "We got the corporation: a
music supervising company, a label, a digital packaging company, a
production company, all under 821.
"It totally makes sense," she goes on. "Jon Levin, a very successful
packaging agent with CAA, said, 'Oh, yeah, I get it---a production
company with Southern sensibilities. You should have Pat Conroy, John
Grisham."
The idea is still fresh to both Hollywood and Nashville, but its logic
is starting to spread. Because of their successful experience making
Calhoun, which was filmed in Columbia, Tenn., Tarantino, Knoxville and
Calhoun director Katrina Bronson are creating a TV series that would be
based in Nashville. And, says Brown, "Les Bohem, who wrote Taken and is
writing three other scripts for Steven Spielberg right now, and who's an
Emmy-winning screenwriter and producer, is writing a script for a future
film inspired by Nashville."
But the groundwork for a film industry in Nashville was laid long before
Anastasia Brown came along, and has recently grown dramatically through
the concerted efforts of both for-profit professionals like Anastasia
and non-profit entities working to generate more feature film and
television activity locally.
In the 1950s and '60s, Nashville began developing a local filmmaking
infrastructure initially based around the creation of commercials to
service local television stations. In the '70s, though, our town began
attracting Hollywood motion picture projects, most notably Robert
Altman's somewhat infamous Nashville, which left many locals wondering
whether the iconoclastic filmmaker was depicting a Nashville from an
alternate universe or sacrificing our locale as a metaphor for his
greater gripes about America. Nonetheless, all the hubbub of the '70s
precipitated the creation of the Tennessee Film, Entertain-ment & Music
Commission (its current moniker), and from then on Hollywood motion
picture projects were courted to drop millions of dollars into our
economy. To date they've included a string of projects including Blue
Valley Songbird (Dolly Parton), The Last Dance (Sharon Stone), The Green
Mile (Tom Hanks), and The Last Castle (Robert Redford), among numerous
other works stretching back three decades.
Two major developments occurred in the 1980s that would forever change
the Nashville filmmaking landscape. The success of MTV eventually
spawned its country music equivalent, CMT, and with the rise of CMT, the
sudden demand for hundreds of music videos per year necessitated a rapid
expansion of both the creative and business infrastructures of the
filmmaking community, attracting producers and directors from as far
away as New York, California, and Canada to Music Row during the late
'80s and early '90s. The other significant development was the
successful launching of the Ernest movie franchise, starring the late,
great Jim Varney. The Ernest films, helmed by John "Buster" Cherry and
Jerry Cardin, have reportedly earned $200 million worldwide to date; but
just as significantly, that franchise had tremendous impact on the
careers of future Nashville filmmakers such as writer/director Coke Sams
(Existo), writer/producer Dan Butler (America's Dumbest Criminals), and
a number of other creatives, cast and crew who've gone on to form their
own film companies and projects.
In the mid-1990s, the bottom nearly dropped out of the local filmmaking
economy, however, when the country music market share ---like all forms
of music---hit one of its cyclic low points, and Music Row began cutting
back on both the amount and budget size of music videos. This had a
dramatic impact on the droves of professionals working in the music
video industry. Further exacerbating the situation was that CMT, along
with TNN, was sold by Gaylord to CBS/Westinghouse, later acquired by
Paramount Viacom, eventually to become formally part of the MTV/VH1
family. The net result was that CMT would come to rely less on its
original music video profile and begin to resemble a country music
version of MTV, involving more "reality"-based programming, much of it
produced in-house. It was time to explore new opportunities.
"In the late '90s, our filmmaking community began to take deliberate
steps to think in other categories," says Andy van Roon, president of
FilmNashville, the trade organization based in the Nashville Convention
& Visitors Bureau, which serves just over 1,200 businesses and
individuals in the film and television community. "We sincerely
appreciated that country music enabled our local infrastructure to
initially expand to significant proportions, but also realized that for
the sake of our livelihoods, families, and true independence as an
industry---and as artists---we had to move more broadly into long-form
filmmaking. This means that, in addition to courting the ever-important
Hollywood productions to town, we had to develop more of a local
permaculture where we could continuously create, finance, and ultimately
secure domestic and foreign distribution for our own feature films,
television movies, documentaries, and one day even sitcoms and dramatic
series."
Along with FilmNashville, a number of non-profit film organizations and
offices have been on the front lines of this effort, including the
Nashville Film Festival, the Tennessee Screenwriting Association, the
Watkins Film School, the Nashville Screenwriters Conference, the
Nashville Composers Association, the Alliance of Film & Television
Actors, the Mayor's Office of Film, and, of course, the Tennessee Film
Entertainment & Music Commission.
David Bennett, Executive Director of the Tennessee Film, Entertainment &
Music Commission, provides a concrete sense of the economic power of the
filmmaking industry statewide. "Gross operating revenues in the state
currently exceed $5 billion---that's 5,000 people with a payroll of over
$260 million. It's a major industry here. Gross production dollars---the
actual production budget for TV commercials, videos, television series,
corporate videos, religious videos, independent films and feature films
for 2004-2005---was $486 million."
On continuing to attract major Hollywood productions to our state and
city, Bennett is both cautionary and hopeful. "Louisiana is our primary
competition, plus North Carolina and Georgia. In 2002, Louisiana passed
a film-and-TV incentive package that was so robust it blew the industry
open there. They started out in '02 with a base of about $20 million a
year in film production. Hollywood really responded to their tax credit
incentive package, and in three years they've grown to $350 million a
year. Production companies were circling Louisiana like buzzards,
waiting for someone to move so they could land. Universal's Ray was due
to be shot in Georgia but they didn't have their incentive plan in place
yet, so it went to Louisiana."
To make Tennessee competitive with other states and countries vying for
film business, Bennett formed a film production team from across the
state and hired a Hollywood top gun consultant to create the Tennessee
Film & Television Production Study, many months in the making and
completed as of February 1 of this year. The goal of the report is to
yield state legislation for a Visual Content Act similar to the one
Louisiana put in place.
"This report was created by law," Bennett points out. "It's a first-time
occurrence. Never have we evaluated the size of the industry. Basically
what we're saying is if you spend half a million dollars you qualify to
receive a 17 percent transferrable tax credit. If you use Tennessee
crew, you get another 5 percent. And Tennessee music, another 3. That's
a total of 25 percent to incentivize both major and indie productions.
We're starting out slow, and we're doing it purposefully. This is a
macroeconomic issue, but it filters down to the local companies. And
what they've found in both Louisiana and Georgia is that the local
companies really prosper from this."
Tessa Atkins, director of film for the Mayor's Office, is in agreement.
"Tennesseans by heritage and heart are idea people who've spun lead into
gold," she says. "I believe they will again this legislative session by
passing the Visual Content Act, the state incentive package to lure
films to Tennessee."
And Atkins also believes in the vision of a home-grown filmmaking
economy: "Branding a city has a lot to do with screenwriters and/or
novelists. Nashville is a hotbed full of story stylists and lyricists.
That one lucky screenplay can catapult a writer and the city itself to
silver screen fame. The city or setting can become synonymous with the
television series or movies that are shot there. This can mean big bucks
for travel and tourism. For example, the Dawson's Creek series was a
huge draw to Wilmington, N.C. And I can't mention cities without noting
Sex and The City---not that New York needed more advertising, but the
series showcased New York weekly. I believe the beauty and flavor of a
film can be derived from a backdrop, and every tourist envisions
themselves one day standing in that scene."
Atkins cites the capabilities of Nashville filmmakers, as well. "Our
crews are world-class," she notes. "Often when Memphis lands a feature
they pull most of their crew from Nashville. And creative talent---the
secret untapped resource of Nashville---sets Nashville apart from other
cities whose sirens are seductively singing from the bluffs with
incentives packages of their own. Nashville is stockpiled full of talent
waiting to be harvested. A large part of our future is clearly
indie-driven. I believe we're just the city to develop the independent
film director and producer. We have a unique feel and incredible
character. We have a strong film-friendly community. This could be our
niche and, more importantly, our time."
She may be right. An increasing number of local indie filmmakers have
recently created feature films that have found profitable distribution,
though with vastly different experiences.
Curt Hahn, writer and director of No Regrets starring Janine Turner,
knows what local filmmakers are up against. "Putting all the elements
together to make an independent feature film is a monumental challenge,"
he observes. "You need the right script, a bankable cast, a great crew,
the perfect locations, great music and lots of money. But even when your
film is finished, you're only halfway home. You still need to sell the
rights to a distributor to get your film seen and recoup your
investment. This is the point at which most independent producers fail.
We identified 78 prospective distributors for No Regrets. Some
specialized in domestic distribution, others international. We began
marketing it to them while we were still editing the film. Within days
we had a written offer from Lifetime Television. After some serious
negotiating, we signed with Lifetime for domestic rights. International
rights went to MarVista Entertainment. In the first year, Lifetime has
shown the film nationally five times and MarVista has licensed the film
to dozens of countries around the world, including HBO in Europe. No
Regrets has even been translated into Chinese."
Spurred on by that success, Hahn is now co-producing Two Weeks, starring
Sally Field, Ben Chaplin and Tom Cavanagh, with Los Angeles-based
writer-director Steve Stockman. Two Weeks was shot in Nashville last
year and has just completed editing. Hahn's company is also actively
developing three new feature films, including Autumn Soul, written by
Nashville attorney Ben Fordham.
Steve Taylor, director of The Second Chance which features Contemporary
Christian music star Michael W. Smith, has a different story. "I'm a
rookie director and we had no conventional Hollywood stars, so getting a
major like Sony to distribute our indie film was like winning the
lottery," he says. "Despite our very tight budget, I think they felt
we'd made something that looked like a real movie and had an audience.
It speaks highly of Nashville's filmmaking infrastructure that virtually
our entire cast and crew were Nashville-based. Meanwhile, I've just
finished the screenplay on a comedy with the working title Jerry's Kids
that I hope to shoot next. Most of it will be shot in Nashville, and I'm
assuming it's going to be easier to secure funding this time around. My
wife graciously agreed to let us take out a home equity loan to fund a
third of The Second Chance budget, but, she said, 'we're only doing this
once.'"
Antony Vidmer, writer and director of High Roller---The Stu Ungar Story,
which stars Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos, conveys some of the
harsher realities of his experiences: "I'd love to be able to say that
securing distribution for High Roller was the result of a careful plan
executed to perfection, but it's not true---it was just luck. Truth is,
we made quite a few mistakes in our naive first foray into the jungle of
Hollywood, not the least of which was to give away our premiere to the
first film festival that asked, thereby effectively eliminating us from
consideration for the major fests that followed. For us, in the end, we
were invited to participate in the Director's Guild Film Finder Series
in LA, where New Line Cinema, with whom we'd made a deal, was one of the
15 distributors in attendance. In short, had we not had that one
screening at the DGA, High Roller might still be on a shelf instead of
doing $6 million in rentals.
"As a result of this experience, it occurred to us that there must be
hundreds of marketable movies out there that for one reason or another
never found their opportunity to find an audience," Vidmer says. "So we
decided to create FYLMZ, a film festival that takes out all the
gatekeepers and personal agendas and committees, and begins by asking
the audience to vote for the movies they want to see based on a trailer
and synopsis posted on the web [at <http://www.fylmz.com>
www.fylmz.com], and ends with 20-60 films participating in a traditional
brick-and-mortar film festival where the winner gets a $1 million
distribution deal."
On the television side, there are local powerhouses like Jon Small,
producer of the hit series Nashville Star, country music's answer to
American Idol (and which has featured Anastasia Brown as a judge). In
addition to music videos, his company, Picture Vision, has produced
mainstream TV programming for over two decades. From the groundbreaking
Garth Brooks live HBO concert special from Central Park to Janet
Jackson's Velvet Rope HBO special from Madison Square Garden, Small has
been involved with live TV concerts for major rock and country stars for
a long time. But when he was first approached by Universal TV about
Nashville Star, "Their initial idea was to shoot the series in Hollywood
and use karaoke to highlight the contestants," says Small. "If that were
the direction the show would've taken, I would've passed. I wanted to be
involved with a program that would show the true color of Nashville. We
have the best musicians and songwriters and the best history of colorful
performing artists. I really wanted to keep the integrity of the town
intact. No more hay bales. I still fight that every day. But that's what
makes it fun and challenging to produce."
Carey Burch, film and television agent for the William Morris Agency,
adds to Small's view of how Nashville's filmmaking community needs to be
perceived and where it needs to be headed. "There's a preconceived
notion about Nashville by those in LA and New York. There's a sense that
we're a hillbilly town when really there's a vast amount of untapped
talent in this sophisticated environment of ours. My goal and intent at
William Morris is to not only educate both coasts as to what we have to
offer film/TV-wise, but to introduce them to the writers, directors and
actors who have so much to say."
Nashville is building bridges to Hollywood on other fronts as well, as
with Alan Brewer, who just scored a new film that recently premiered at
Sundance, Come Early Morning, starring Nashville native Ashley Judd.
Brewer's experiences and involvement in the Nashville music community
over the past several years were key to his being hired to compose and
produce the score.
"The writer/director, Joey Lauren Adams [co-star of Chasing Amy and Big
Daddy], was intent on working with a composer who not only had scored
features before but who had a strong feel for various aspects of country
music and country-blues, and who would be comfortable writing and
performing a guitar-based score," Brewer recalls. "After we met and
talked music for a few hours, Joey decided I was the guy, and I
subsequently had a blast working on the movie."
Brewer now has two feature films in development that would likely be
shot in Tennessee, and is music supervisor for and one of the producers
of a music-oriented mini-series, along with Nashville-based
creator/executive producer Daryl Sanders and executive producer Andy van
Roon.
And not to be dismissed, Nashville has a powerful new generation of
independent filmmakers who are currently generating between 50 to 100
short films per year, a loose group of creatives ranging from students
at the Watkins Film School and Vanderbilt to local filmmakers competing
in the annual 48 Hour Film Competition. FilmNashville is the producer of
the 48 Hour Film event in Nashville, and hands out over 70 awards each
year for everything from Screenwriting and Editing to Scoring and
Directing. Think of it as the Academy Awards for local indie filmmakers.
Last year's award-winner for Best Actress in a 48 Hour Film, Kai Porter,
relays her experience: "The competition occurs over one weekend where a
crew writes a screenplay, acts, directs, composes, edits, and delivers
the finished product all within 48 hours. What started out as an
unnerving experience actually ended up being a blessing in disguise."
Anastasia Brown might say the same thing about her career change. Coming
off of a highly successful decade on Music Row---she was partners with
the legendary Miles Copeland and is commonly considered to have
discovered Keith Urban, among other career highlights---starting over in
a whole new business was at times intimidating, even for the usually
indomitable Ms. Brown. But through her initial years of involvement with
the Nashville Screenwriters Conference, she realized she was in a unique
position.
"That year at the conference"---1999--- "everyone was coming up to me
and saying, 'Oh, man, we'd use Nashville music so much more if we knew
who to go to for it,'" she says. "'You should be the go-to person.' That
planted a seed, so I studied it and said, OK, I'm going to become a
music supervisor."
Nothing, of course, happens overnight, especially in show biz. The
opportunity to combine Marty Robbins and the Wu-Tang Clan for Quentin
Tarantino---or, for that matter, to hire local songwriters like Blue
Merle's Luke Reynolds to write original music for the upcoming Warner
Bros. feature August Rush---came only after years of forging
relationships on all three coasts, ours being the third. And though she
sees a growing opportunity for the Nashville film industry in the field
of music supervising, she also sees the development of local film and
television production as a whole as vital to our city's future.
"There are other cities similar to ours that are enjoying a thriving
production business," Brown says, in reference to incentive packages and
programs similar to the one presented to state legislators now. "This is
what our government and voters should understand---that it's really good
for us. It takes a lot of people to make these projects happen, and when
they get here, they'll eat our food, they'll shop in our stores, they'll
hire our workers."
To innovators like Brown and to longtime local industry promoters like
van Roon and Bennett, it is, honestly, that simple. The key is to get
everyone else to see the big picture.
"The more film and TV that's done out of Nashville, the more our
music---country---will be used. It's just common sense," Brown notes,
adding, with her trademark smile as she looks out of her office window
at the vibrant downtown district literally rising up around her, "I
don't think people think the movie business here in Nashville is really
do-able. I don't think people think it's a very realistic goal. But I
do."
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