Celebrating NC On Screen

North Carolina loves its connections to the production of movies and television programs.

But our political decision-makers did not love that connection enough to appropriate sufficient funds or extend tax credits to persuade movie and television producers to site their programs in North Carolina. That decision in the last legislative session will surely be revisited this year.

The difference of opinion about subsidizing the film making business makes for interesting political alliances. Anti-big-government-libertarian Republicans will join with anti-big-business Democrats to oppose such subsidies.

On the other hand, community boosters and business developers in both parties will argue that government’s help to the movie business is good for the state.

Whatever our legislators decide about paying film producers to work here, we still love our movies and television. Just think about the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield or Andy Griffith’s Mount Airy.

We love to see programs and movies made in our towns, our streets, and our houses. When the television series Homeland showed the house where my children grew up in Charlotte, I called everyone I knew to tell them to look for it.

In Chapel Hill, some of us still remember getting a brief moment of fame as extras in Robin Williams’s Patch Adams, which was shot on the UNC campus.

I get excited when any of the books written by authors featured on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch become the basis of a movie or television program. Think about Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, or Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza.

Ron Rash’s blockbuster, Serena, is the basis of a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence that is scheduled for release later this year. Another film, based on his 2006 novel The World Made Straight, will premiere at the North Carolina Museum of History on Saturday evening, January 10th.

Nicholas Sparks’ books and the movies based on them are usually set in North Carolina.

Charlotte author Kathy Reichs’ best-selling Bones series is the basis of a long-running TV series.

More recently, Columbus County’s Jason Mott blasted onto the national scene with his book, The Returned, which became the basis of the ABC series, Resurrection.

The latest North Carolina connection to the video production world came last month when Amazon challenged Netflix with a set of its own original series for its “Prime Instant Video” service. Mozart in the Jungle is a 10-part series based on Chapel Hill native Blair Tindall’s 2005 book, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.

Tindall’s late father, UNC-Chapel Hill Professor George Tindall, authored a popular U.S. history text and was known as the dean of historians of the U.S. South.

Blair Tindall’s book combined a memoir of her musical career with what one commentator described as an exposé of “the scandalous rock and roll lifestyles of the musicians, conductors, and administrators who inhabit the insular world of classical music.”

After study at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, Tindall took her oboe-playing talents to New York City where she played at Carnegie Hall with big name classical performers and in the Broadway orchestra pits for productions like Les Miserables and Miss Saigon.

The Amazon TV series follows a young North Carolina oboist through her experiences in music and life in New York.

“She looks just like I did,” Tindall told me about Lola Kirke, the actress playing Hailey Rutledge, the struggling young oboist.

According to Rolling Stone reviewer Kory Grow, “Beyond the show’s humor and rock & roll exploits, Mozart in the Jungle captures the world of classical music in a very real way, as professional orchestras struggle with dwindling funds, budgetary concerns and the pressure to appeal to younger audiences.”

That is all well and good. But forgive me if I just celebrate the North Carolina connections.