New York Times Article

THE ARTS IN: Wilmington, N.C; Where Movies Take Root, All the Arts Flower

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: May 18, 1998

In 1983, Frank Capra Jr. came here in search of an antebellum mansion to burn down. As the producer of ''Firestarter,'' a film being financed by Dino De Laurentiis, he had already been to Virginia, Texas and Louisiana looking for just the right house. Then, on the cover of a magazine, he saw a picture of the Orton plantation in nearby Winnabow, built in 1725, with a chapel on the grounds and 20 acres of landscaped gardens.

Mr. Capra liked the house so much he used it to film in and the company built a replica on the property and burned that instead. By the time filming was done, he and Mr. De Laurentiis had recognized that the temperate weather, the inexpensive labor (North Carolina is a right-to-work state) and the combination of riverfront, oceanfront and countryside settings (Wilmington is inland, on the Cape Fear River, but just 12 miles from Carolina's southeastern coast) were all conducive to movie-making. So they decided to stay in this city of 65,000 people and build a studio. And though that studio has changed hands several times, it is now resurgent, and Mr. Capra is back, having returned two years ago to run it for its latest owner, EUE Screen Gems.

''The only thing it didn't have back then was support services, a crew,'' said Mr. Capra, who at 63 has the cheeriness you might expect from a man whose father directed some of the greatest feel-good movies of all time. ''If you wanted to film here, you had to bring in everybody.''

That is no longer true. And as a result, virtually everyone in Wilmington credits the arrival of the movies with invigorating the city's arts community, making the town notable for something other than sending Michael Jordan into the world. As show business celebrities have come to town (some, like Dennis Hopper, bought property here), it has developed a reputation in the Southeast as hip and happening. The alternative music scene, for example, is small but tenacious, with a handful of clubs in town and at least one local record label. The third annual Wilmington Exchange Festival, a seven-day event featuring 36 bands, some independent film showings, microbrew beer tastings and a comic book and fanzine exchange, is scheduled to start Thursday and run through May 27.

Perhaps most striking is Acme Art, an artists collective begun in 1991 when five local painters and sculptors bought a warehouse in a run-down part of town for $100,000. The idea was to avoid the bureaucracy involved in setting up a nonprofit entity. The five use part of the warehouse for their own studio space and rent out the rest to pay the bills; at any given time, 16 or 18 people may be renters, filling the building with a rare vibrancy.

''This place has changed my life,'' said Sandra Ihly, who is using rolling pins, ironing boards, corsets and other artifacts of the 1940's and 50's to create disturbing and often sexually charged pieces on the subject of women's traditional roles in marriage and society. ''My art has gotten bigger. I think bigger thoughts. I set my sights higher. I think it's incredible to have a place like this in North Carolina.''

Downtown, by all accounts a wasteland a decade ago, has begun to flower. It isn't exactly a cultural mecca yet, but cafes, galleries, music bars and crafts shops bring visitors to the waterfront, where the retired battleship North Carolina sits imposingly in the middle of the riverscape.

After a healthy political fight, the City Council recently approved the renovation of a dilapidated church in a struggling neighborhood to turn it into a cultural center with artists' studios and performance spaces. And the Mayor, Hamilton Hicks, is pushing for construction of a $14 million downtown convention center, financed by the private sector, that would also hold a concert hall.

''We want to do this on a regional basis, a building to serve all the neighboring counties,'' Mr. Hicks said.

The movies brought arts-minded people to town and arts-related jobs for the local labor force. Carpenters and construction workers have become specialists in set building; local artists and artisans have been commissioned to design sets and create pieces for use in films.

''What I find unique about Wilmington is the movies,'' said Al Frega, a sculptor and one of the founders of Acme Art, who works with discarded machine parts and other industrial material, and has rented several of his pieces to film companies. He and his wife, Donna Lee Frega, a writer, sleep in the bed that was used in the horror film ''The Crow.''

In the last two years, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, a school of 9,400 students that is known primarily for marine science, has begun putting together a film studies department (Mr. Capra teaches classes there). Its newly created M.F.A. in creative writing, which stands to bolster a tiny writers' community in town (it has brought the poet Philip Levine to Wilmington this year and will bring the novelists Alison Lurie and Tony Hillerman soon), includes screen-writing workshops.

With eight sound stages and an urban back lot, Screen Gems has become one of the largest studios in the country east of Hollywood. Currently it is the home of the WB network's television series ''Dawson's Creek,'' and the new Muppet movie, ''Elmo in Grouchland,'' is in preproduction. Wilmington Film Studios, a smaller company, has arisen as well. Altogether, some 230 features, mini-series and television movies have been filmed in the Wilmington area in the last 15 years, including ''Billy Bathgate,'' ''The Hudsucker Proxy'' and, infamously, ''The Crow,'' during the filming of which Brandon Lee was killed.

The Good Fortune Is Spread Widely

''We do more filming in Wilmington than they do in 45 states,'' said Mark Stricklin, the director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission. More than 900 technical crew members live in the immediate area, and some 500 members of the Screen Actors Guild live within a day's drive. And then there are the related businesses like cameras and camera supplies, costuming, catering, and aircraft rentals, 1,000 enterprises with substantial ties to film production, Mr. Stricklin said.

The influx of film people has given a lift to the many community arts groups, including a blues society and a ballet company for teen-age dancers. The most notable impact has been on the theater; there isn't a single Actors' Equity company in Wilmington, but these days fledgling troupes are appearing and disappearing with some regularity, as actors and techies seek to fill in the gaps between movie paydays.

''This is a town where the local actor you see on the community stage tonight you might turn on your TV and see on HBO tomorrow night,'' said Tony Rivenbark, the executive director of Thalian Hall, a historic theater that is the city's primary showplace. ''Because of the film industry, we have a higher caliber of actor here than in maybe any other community this size.''

Actually, Wilmington has a theatrical history of some prominence. In 1759, the playwright Thomas Godfrey wrote ''The Prince of Parthia'' here, which, when staged eight years later in Philadelphia, became the first play by an American playwright ever produced on an American stage. ''It lasted one night,'' Mr. Rivenbark said. ''Dreadful play.''

Thalian Hall, a building in Italianate Revival style that holds both an elegant 682-seat theater and City Hall, dates from 1855. And the town has connections to contemporary theater as well; Linda Lavin, now starring in ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' and Pat Hingle, in ''1776,'' are longtime Wilmington residents who occasionally appear on stage here and teach master classes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful arts organizations in town are still the most mainstream.

One, the St. John's Museum of Art, which houses a modest collection of North Carolina regional art and several color prints by Mary Cassatt, will double in size when it moves to a new building being designed by the North Carolina-born architect Charles Gwathmey.

The others are three symphony orchestras: the Wilmington Symphony and the Cape Fear Symphony, both local amateur groups, and the Raleigh-based North Carolina Symphony, which plays six concerts a year here. The community support they have is at least partly behind the new convention center and concert hall; they now play in a 1,000-seat auditorium on the university campus, where more often than not they sell out.

Sound of Jazz, Too, Enlivens the City

''We have 39 serious musical events a year in Wilmington and no proper venue,'' said Don W. Fishero, a transplanted Texan who is the executive director of the Arts Council of Lower Cape Fear, acknowledging that classical music garnered more support locally than any other kind. Jazz is becoming more prevalent, he said, ''but that's the influence of the new Northerners.''

''Before that,'' he added, ''we just had a bunch of bubbas down here, and I can say that because my neck is red and my pickup is dustier than yours.''

Lou Criscuola, a New York actor who founded the Opera House Theater, the city's most prominent company (and maybe the only one that pays its actors consistently) 14 years ago, said musicals like ''Man of La Mancha'' and ''Annie'' were his bill payers. Dramas don't do terribly well, he said, and any stage production where the Lord's name is taken in vain is doomed.
''You can say anything but the G-D word,'' he said, adding that he left in all of David Mamet's profanity in a recent production of ''American Buffalo,'' but excised the one ''God damn.'' It didn't help much; in spite of creditable staging and acting, at one performance there were only eight people in the audience.

Most oddly, given the city's newest cottage industry, moviegoers here are not the most discerning. Though there are plenty of theaters in town, all focus on Hollywood studio products. Perhaps that will change if Mr. Capra's expansion plans are realized. He wants his studio, which is basically a rental operation for other producers, to begin churning out its own product. To that end, this fall he will be the host at a symposium in town with experienced film producers and financiers for local banks and other potential investors whom he hopes to interest in locally made films.

''Can you mount films here, create, write and finance them?'' he said. ''We don't have that yet. But that's the critical step for creating a real film community in Wilmington, one that can rival New York or L.A.'' He paused for a second, a little chagrined at his over-enthusiasm. ''Well, we'll never quite do that,'' he said.