Four corporate sponsors have come forward to save Piedmont Park's "Screen on the Green" movie series.
Delta Air Lines, Georgia Natural Gas, Comcast, and Coca-Cola have signed on as sponsors. Delta is the lead sponsor.
Earlier this month, the Piedmont Park Conservancy announced that the series of summer flicks had been canceled due to a lack of sponsorship.
Peachtree TV was last year’s sponsor, but Turner Broadcasting turned over the station’s management in January to Meredith Corp., which also runs CBS Atlanta. That same month, the station told the conservancy that it would no longer sponsor the event.
"Some events in Atlanta are so much a part of the culture here that people tend to assume that they will just be here year after year," said John Jamieson, GNG's senior vice president of retail operations. "This event does not just happen automatically."
Wednesday the Conservancy and city officials announced that the series will return for a series of five consecutive Thursdays beginning next week with the showing of "Back to the Future."
"Had it not been for Atlanta’s strong corporate and philanthropic and civic partners, we would not be here to make this announcement today," Mayor Kasim Reed said.
Reed said the move to cancel the film series was not a marketing ploy to get potential sponsors to step up.
"We’re in tough fiscal times. We were facing some hard decisions and that’s really where we were," he said.
The film series costs more than $300,000, said Yvette Bowden, the president and CEO of Piedmont Park Conservancy. This is because the infrastructure for the "Screen on the Green" series is put up and then removed for each film.
"You have to pull down the infrastructure every week to frankly put the park right back in the public domain," Bowden said. "Because it isn't something that just sits there every week, it's awfully expensive."
Officials said earlier this month that the cancellation had nothing to do with last summer's incident where fights broke out during the showing of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."
Reed said the lineup will stick with classic films and ensured that "we will have a very thorough and strong police presence to ensure that this event remains safe and really world class."
Reed said that funding remains in place to provide security -- either from the Atlanta Police Department or a private group -- for Piedmont Park.
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