John Latenser is a location manager: when a director needs to shoot scenes with a particular backdrop, he’ll find some options, sign agreements with property owners, figure out safety measures and what to do if it rains. Latenser has worked on “Black Panther,” “Transformers,” “Deep Impact,” and other projects, going back decades. A few years ago, he moved from Washington, D.C., to Georgia, which was on its way to becoming “the Hollywood of the South.” The industry has reportedly created nearly a hundred thousand jobs in the state and generated an estimated $2.7 billion in direct spending in Georgia during the last fiscal year. Georgia is home to a major international airport and a variety of filmable landscapes—mountains, beaches, a big city, countryside—but what really made it a top filming location are the tax credits. Since 2008, production companies working in Georgia have earned credits equaling thirty per cent of most of their expenses simply by flashing the state’s peach logo at the end of movies and TV shows.
But, in January, Latenser told me recently, many of his colleagues began to get anxious. “There was a weird lull in production here at the beginning of the year,” he said. “No one could quite put their finger on it. We didn’t know what was going on. It seemed logical that people were waiting to see what happened politically.” Tom Pierce, a colleague who works in location management, told me the same. “One of the rumors was that they were kind of waiting to see how it would settle out with the governor’s race,” he said.
New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.
It was just a rumor, as far as they know, but there was a logic behind it: four of the Republicans running for governor, including the party’s eventual nominee, Brian Kemp, had promised to sign a Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law if they were elected. There are versions of RFRA legislation in some twenty states; these laws often aim to protect businesses and individuals who wish to deny services to gay couples on the basis of religious belief. Georgia passed RFRA legislation in 2016—but, before it had been signed into law, Disney, Netflix, CBS, M-G-M, Steven Spielberg, and others in the film industry publicly condemned it, and many threatened to take their projects elsewhere. Ultimately, the state’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, vetoed the legislation, defying the more conservative members of his party. “I do not think we have to discriminate against anyone to protect the faith-based community,” he said at the time. (Deal, having served the state’s limit of two consecutive terms, will step down in January.)
Austin Amelio in “The Walking Dead,” which was filmed in Atlanta. Photograph by Gene Page / AMCAs the race between Kemp and his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, heads into its final stretch, much of the press coverage has been focussed on which candidate will be able to turn out the most supporters, and also whether some Georgians, particularly African-Americans, will be denied their right to vote. The conservative Kemp and the progressive Abrams make such different pitches to voters that it can be hard to imagine anyone having trouble choosing between them. But if swing voters do exist, they likely include local business leaders, many of whom tend to vote Republican but who may see Kemp as more concerned with cultural issues than economic ones. (More than five hundred Georgia employers recently signed an ad in the Atlanta Business Chronicle saying that they oppose RFRA legislation.) In August, Kemp and Abrams attended a luncheon in Macon hosted by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. At the event, Abrams denounced RFRA legislation, reportedly drawing loud applause. The Georgia Chamber of Commerce has endorsed candidates in nine races, all of them Republicans. At the luncheon, the president of the Chamber announced that it would not make endorsements in statewide races that did not feature an incumbent—such as the governor’s race.
On Monday, Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, held a street-corner press conference with other Democrats and local businesspeople in front of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce’s Atlanta office, and spoke about the threat that they believe a Kemp administration would pose to Georgia’s economy. Among the participants were a few film-industry veterans, including Garreth Stover, a production designer on “Dynasty” who moved to Georgia from California ten years ago, with his wife and two children, despite the “stereotypes about the South,” as he put it to me. “He wins, I leave,” Stover said of Kemp at the press conference, as Matt Earl Beesley, an executive producer of “Dynasty,” waited for his chance to denounce Kemp, and his agenda, at the podium, in only slightly softer language.
Josh McKoon, a Republican state senator who has been one of the primary supporters of RFRA legislation in Georgia, is skeptical about such threats. “Hollywood and the entertainment industry seemingly don’t have a problem shopping their wares to countries with real human-rights problems,” he told me, mentioning Hollywood actors taking jobs in China and participating in promotional events and “star tours” in Singapore. “There’s no evidence that Hollywood will walk away from the richest government subsidy in the country for their industry.” He added, “It’s a bluff—and, anyway, I don’t think we should determine how free our people are going to be or what civil rights may be enjoyed by Georgians because of what an outside industry may or may not do.”
Kemp—whose campaign declined to comment for this piece but directed me to other sources—has insisted that the legislation he supports would simply echo a federal statute that already exists—which raises the question of why the legislation would be necessary at all. Abrams, who was the minority leader in the state legislature from 2007 to 2017, told me that the reason Georgia didn’t pass RFRA on the state level was that the federal law existed. “There’s no necessity for adopting a state version except as a pretext for allowing discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” she said. When I asked McKoon about Abrams’s comments, he told me, “Look, whether we pass RFRA tomorrow or next year, it has no impact on the fact that there is not a law in place affording L.G.B.T.Q. people protected-class status.” In July, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Atlanta, held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not extend federal workplace protections to gays and lesbians, declining to reconsider a previous ruling. (In February, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York, reached the opposite conclusion, in a ruling on a different case.)
McKoon had hoped to replace Kemp as Georgia’s secretary of state but lost the Republican primary, in May, and so, come January, he will no longer hold elective office in Georgia. Meanwhile, Georgia’s speaker of the House, the Republican David Ralston, does not seem to be a fan of RFRA laws: earlier this year, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I haven’t seen very much out of the states that have tackled these issues that makes me want to model after places like North Carolina and Indiana and the others.” In North Carolina, the so-called bathroom law, House Bill 2, which was passed in 2016 and subsequently revised, caused filmmakers and production companies to relocate projects out of the state. (Norm Bielowicz, a former director of the Georgia State Film Office, told me, “Nothing is being made there. And they have a tax incentive.”) Indiana’s RFRA law, which was revised after Republicans in the state went over the language with state business leaders, was signed, in 2015, by Mike Pence, the governor at the time. The Trump-Pence Administration has, not surprisingly, been RFRA-friendly: in May, Trump signed an executive order creating a “faith initiative” that critics say could “facilitate discrimination justified by religion.”
In disavowing RFRA laws, Ralston, the Georgia House speaker, said, “I’m kind of a forward-looking guy, and I want to look forward.” The question, though, may not be one of looking to the future or the past so much as looking within Georgia or beyond it. Kemp and his allies have taken to saying that a vote for Abrams is a vote to “turn Georgia into the next California.” It’s intended as a reference to her criminal-justice policies, but it might make more sense in the context of RFRA and the state’s relationship with the film industry. “I’ve talked to studio heads in L.A. who have said that if it passes they will leave,” Abrams told me. It’s not only the film industry, she added: tech entrepreneurs interested in Georgia have said the same. Amazon is currently considering Atlanta for its second American headquarters, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has hosted several meetings of Atlanta leaders pitching the company. Some fear that RFRA legislation would kill the chances of Amazon coming to Georgia.
Ansel Elgort in the film ”Baby Driver,“ which was filmed in Atlanta. Photograph by Wilson Webb / TriStar Pictures
Latenser, the location manager who moved to Georgia from D.C., told me, “When I’m driving directors and producers around who are California-based, and they see the Stacey Abrams signs in certain neighborhoods, they get pretty excited. But then they’ll see Trump signs, and they’re not sure what to think. They’re like, ‘People here really support him?’ And, yeah, in Georgia, a lot of people do.”
