Ga. Town Attracts Filmmakers, Not Jobs

CRAWFORDVILLE, Ga. (AP) - This tiny Taliaferro County town seems to have changed very little during the past 70 years.
But that’s not true.

Every few years, the town gets new street signs, new storefronts open and locals put on different clothes—if only for a few days.

Then all that newness goes away, as film crews pack up the illusion they created, and the town reverts to the Southern out-of-the-way place that caught movie location scouts’ attention in the first place.

“I think there must be some kind of grapevine in Hollywood that lists Crawfordville as a good place to film your movie,” said Mayor Herman Milner.

But the county seat of one of the poorest counties in Georgia doesn’t draw the same sort of attention when an industry is looking for a new town.

The population in Taliaferro County, 45 miles southeast of Athens, has shrunk during the past two decades to about 1,900 residents today.

Most graduates of the county’s single comprehensive school leave to find work after graduation, according to school officials.

One-quarter of those who stay live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate was nearly 8 percent early last year, even before the state’s economy went south.

The feature that draws movie executives—the lack of new infrastructure and new industry—is just what’s been shrinking the county.

Hollywood movie-makers have used Crawfordville as a favorite backdrop for more than 30 years because it seems frozen in time as the perfect Southern small town. More than a dozen movies have been filmed there in 20 years—from Kenny Rogers’ “The Coward of the County” in 1978 to Reese Witherspoon’s “Sweet Home Alabama” in 2001.

This week, a film crew of 45 will arrive to shoot “Get Low,” a Depression-era film starring Robert Duval, Sissy Spacek and other stars.

The town’s notoriety as a movie set is a point of pride, Milner said, but doesn’t translate into dollar signs for the city.

“It has very little impact on the local economy,” he said. “But it’s good. If it gives a couple of local citizens a couple of days worth of work—then it’s good.

“Everybody’s shown a lot of interest,” he said of the first movie shoot he’s presided over as mayor. “There’s a general enthusiasm about it.”

This film only includes a few dozen roles for extras compared to 300 in “Sweet Home Alabama,” so people are less excited than in 2001, said Robert Kendrick, the town’s historian and liaison to Hollywood location scouts.

But even as the sameness of Crawfordville draws movie people, Milner has his hands full with changes.

Athens Technical College is finishing up a satellite campus on Blaine Street to train locals for construction and auto repair jobs.

The county also is building a new courthouse annex next to city hall, and city leaders have spent a year developing a comprehensive economic development plan, so that they can apply for state economic development grants through OneGeorgia.

“Our goal is to attract new industry,” Milner said. “But no new business is going to move here unless we have the infrastructure to support it. We need infrastructure before we can bring in business and businesses can create jobs.”

The closest that the town has come to new infrastructure in the last decade was when the crew of “Sweet Home Alabama” erected a water tower as part of the set, but the movie people took it down at the end of the shoot.

“I asked them where the water tower that was in the movie wing security for “Get Low.”

The buildings are always a little more ornate, more historic-looking or covered with strange signs, he said.

In one of the scenes for “Get Low,” the crew will add a new porch to a dilapidated farm house in the nearby community of Robinson—just before they burn it down, Nunn said.

“It will be the most exciting thing that happens around here for a while, for sure,” Nunn said. “But it’s kind of depressing, don’t you think? Watching them build all that stuff and knowing that it’s just on the surface.”