Kris Bagwell heads Screen Gems at Lakewood movie studio

Screen Gems at Lakewood's new boss Kris Bagwell seems like a kid in a candy store, or at least a teenager with an all-access pass to Six Flags, as he motors a golf cart around his domain.

Once a horse-racing track and a summer resort, then an agricultural showcase, the Lakewood Fairgrounds and its Mission-style structures have been through many incarnations over the last hundred years. The latest version was as an abandoned eyesore and a magnet for vagrants.

That storyline changed this spring when the city announced that film and television production giant EUE/Screen Gems would invest millions in the property and turn it into a facility rivalling most others on the East Coast. This was good news for the state's booming movie industry and even better news for the city of Atlanta, which bought the lease on the property for $4 million in 2005,  but hadn't found a tenant.

Though just minutes southeast of downtown, the 116-acre tract that includes the Aaron's Amphitheater and the former Lakewood Fairgounds seems like a kudzu-wrapped island of rural emptiness in the middle of the city.

Today the empty is filling rapidly.

On the 34-acre parcel occupied by EUE/Screen Gems, Bagwell rolls past the site of a 37,000-square-foot soundstage rising out of the ground, as dozens of workers steadily assemble the steel and concrete.

"‘Avatar' was shot on a smaller sound stage than this," he says, gesturing to the yawning foundation, prickling with rebar.

A few blocks away in the Lakewood "village," Bagwell drives inside another structure, an aging 35,000-square-foot exhibition hall, one of three built beginning in 1915. Bagwell's cart looks like a toy beneath the 50-foot ceiling. Now an empty shell, the scale of the hall fools the eye.

"You can build a house inside here with no problem," says Bagwell.

For 60 years the handsome stucco and red-tile structures hosted the Southeastern Fair, showcasing cows and pigs and demonstrating Georgia's agricultural muscle to the world. The fair had diving horses, a roller coaster and streetcars bringing visitors from downtown. After the midway departed, the buildings hosted the Lakewood Antiques Fair.

From 2005 on they stood empty, slowly crumbling. In 2007 they were placed on the list of Atlanta's most endangered historic landmarks.

Roof repairs and a new coat of paint have stabilized the structures. A fourth structure, the site of indoor concerts long before the outdoor amphitheater was built next door, has been fully renovated with 75 tons of air conditioning and an updated electrical system.

Inside this space a film crew from BET is setting up lights to tape a new episode of the popular cable television series "The Game," while trailers outside stand ready for stars Tia Mowry and Pooch Hall. (Magic Johnson showed up recently for a guest appearance.)

"The Game" began filming while the paint at Lakewood was still drying, which demonstrates the pent-up hunger for these sort of facilities. Bagwell's biggest challenge, said Ed Spivia, retired film commissioner and guru of all things cinematic in Georgia, will be meeting this demand.

"He’s going to have to run to keep up," says Spivia.

Atlanta multi-media giant Tyler Perry has his own soundstages, but he keeps those facilities busy turning out up to four movies a year. Turner Broadcasting and others have some studio space available, but not enough.

"Atlanta has talent but no studio space," says Bagwell. "This will be a first-rate television and film production facility, seven miles from the country's biggest airport and five miles from downtown Atlanta."

That's the elevator pitch, the one-sentence come-on that sums up what EUE/Screen Gems Studios at Lakewood will have to offer. As executive vice president, Bagwell, 48, will spend part of his time using that pitch to drum up business and the other part managing the demands of the productions already in gear.

A film and video veteran with 26 years in the business, Bagwell is well-suited to that role, say industry watchers. The 6-foot-5 Atlanta native is a former producer/writer/editor at WAGA-TV who has also climbed the ladder at MTV and launched several multi-platform media companies. Most recently he served as president of a Pancreations Inc., creating specialized video and interactive material for such customers as WebMD and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Bagwell lives in Buckhead with his two sons, Trevor and Brendan. He is separated from wife Lisa Clark, longtime WAGA television personality.

The arrival of the Screen Gems facility looks like the beginning of the next golden age of movie-making in Georgia. The first one occurred in the 1970s and '80s, when commissioner Spivia presided over the filming of "Sharky's Machine" and its sequel at Lakewood and environs. That age ended when the studios moved their business to Canada to take advantage of the exchange rate.

Productions returned in a big way beginning in 2008, after the state created a 30 percent tax credit for movie and TV companies. In 2007 movies shot in Georgia generated a $467 million economic impact.