North Georgia is ready for its close-up. Actually, it’s been ready.
"Come up and see us. We'll treat you like a movie star," said Kevin McBurnett, city manager of Emerson, a Bartow County town with a population of just under 1,500. The Sundance Channel pilot "The Red Road" has filmed there, and a new movie called "Line of Sight," directed by Jonathan Demme ("Silence of the Lambs"), is considering Emerson as a filming location.
Past projects to film scenes there include the movie "Need for Speed," starring Aaron Paul, Michael Keaton and Dakota Johnson, who's just been announced as the choice to play Anastasia Steele in the "Fifty Shades of Grey" film adaptation.
We're told scouts working on the "Hunger Games" three-quel "Mockingjay" have been assessing sites in North Georgia, while "Kill the Messenger," with Jeremy Renner and Rosemarie DeWitt, recently filmed at Red Top Mountain. The 2012 Farrelly brothers comedy "The Three Stooges," starring Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos and Will Sasso in the key roles with Jane Lynch, Jennifer Hudson and supermodel Kate Upton cast as nuns, filmed at a bucolic estate in Cartersville.
Of course, shooting in lovely North Georgia doesn't necessarily guarantee lovely box-office results. Did you see "Wanderlust" with Jennifer Aniston? If not, you're not alone.
“Fans wandered away — well, actually they ran away — from ‘Wanderlust’ at the movie theaters this weekend,” the Radar website snarked when the movie opened to lackluster crowds last year.
On the bright side, Aniston talked up Clarkesville, where the movie filmed, in a number of promotional media visits.
"It really called attention to Clarkesville and the beauty of the area," said Clarkesville Main Street director Mary Beth Horton. "It boosted the economy a ton."
While the movie filmed there, crew members often dined at area restaurants, and Aniston had her nails maintained at a local salon. Her co-star Paul Rudd quipped during a GQ magazine interview that the town is "right where they shot 'Deliverance,' which the town is very proud of. The kid from that movie with the banjo now works at a local Wal-Mart."
Actually "Deliverance" was filmed in Tallulah Gorge, south of Clayton, which is where "Killing Season" with Robert De Niro and John Travolta did a good bit of work. That movie, released earlier this year, wasn't exactly what you'd call a smash hit, either.
"(T)he film is quite awful — badly written, ineptly staged, horribly acted, historically suspect and boring beyond belief," wrote www.rogerebert.com critic Peter Sobczynski. "Cheaply made, dramatically inept and staggeringly dull."
Here’s hoping future films shot in North Georgia are met with happier endings.
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