In 2013, “The Spectacular Now” felt like the perfect choice to close out the Atlanta Film Festival.
Athens native James Ponsoldt shot the movie – a coming of age romance based on Tim Tharp’s novel of the same name – in his hometown during the summer of 2012. Just four years after the Georgia General Assembly expanded the state’s film tax credit from its original inception in 2005, a Georgia-specific film – made by a Georgia filmmaker, no less – had taken the independent cinema world by storm. But all the success in the world couldn’t compete with the experience of filming in the streets and houses Ponsoldt grew up in.
“For me, coming back to Georgia, filming in Georgia, it’s just so deeply personal,” he said.
Almost 15 years later, Ponsoldt returned to this year’s 50th Atlanta Film Festival for a retrospective screening of “The Spectacular Now” – one of many screenings celebrating the history and breadth of not only the festival itself, but the Georgia filmmakers who populate its past.
For this piece, I spoke with three people with different ties to Georgia’s film industry and strong connections to the festival, whose journeys have taken them all in different directions. Some were born and raised in small towns they longed to put onscreen, and some were making films in Atlanta long before it became a Hollywood production hub. Some moved to L.A., and some stayed behind. But, whenever they ended up, they all returned for the festival’s 50th anniversary to pay homage to the state where it all started.
James Ponsoldt
Beyond screening “The Spectacular Now” at the festival in 2013, Ponsoldt was among the first cohort of the festival’s Screenplay Competition winners in 2008. According to him, that particular screenplay was for a film he never ended up making – a sort of “Southern ‘Goodfellas,’” about organized crime in Georgia in the 1970s.
Ponsoldt’s actual first feature ended up being the 2006 film “Off the Black,” a drama starring Nick Nolte as an alcoholic high school baseball umpire who reconnects with a former player. Originally, Ponsoldt intended to shoot “Off the Black” in Georgia’s Oglethorpe County in small towns like Lexington and Crawford, not far from where he grew up. But he ended up making the movie in upstate New York, in part because of the lucrative nature of the state’s tax credits.
“It was part of the heartbreak – all I wanted to do was shoot that movie in Georgia,” he said.
Ponsoldt moved to New York for film school at Columbia University before Georgia’s tax credit was established, developing a “scrappy, DIY approach to independent filmmaking.” He moved to Los Angeles full time in 2006, but tries to carry the lessons he learned growing up in an art town like Athens – where artists flock and bands like R.E.M. and the B-52s made their names – with him.
“People stay in Athens because the quality of life is so good compared to places like New York and LA, or London, or wherever – you can live a lot cheaper, and you can make risky art, and there’s a community,” Ponsoldt said. “ It was very much about the art, and about the music, and about the culture, and about community, and wasn’t about getting famous.”
Ponsoldt wouldn’t get to live out the dream of filming a movie in his hometown until “The Spectacular Now,” his third feature. The novel was based in Oklahoma, but Ponsoldt had the idea to change the setting to a place he knew intimately.
“The novel was not so specifically about Oklahoma. It wasn’t about young kids in the rodeo. It was kids who were not in a huge city, and were not in the middle of nowhere – like a college town that could be anywhere,” he said. “My promise to everybody involved was, it’s going to be so much better and more specific because it’s in Athens. You’re gonna have a community that embraces you with open arms and supports you.”
Community is something that draws Ponsoldt to film as much as it does back home to Athens. Film, he said, is not like being a sculptor or a poet – it’s not something you can do on your own. And film festivals like Atlanta’s help drive home the notion that film is a medium made by communities for communities.
“We’re gonna have people on a Tuesday afternoon come out to the Tara or the Plaza and watch a movie by a filmmaker you’ve never heard of, but who made something amazing and put their heart into it,” Ponsoldt said. “We’re gonna get a couple 100 people to laugh, cry, and cheer together, and be reminded that this is a collective medium.”
David Bruckner
While Ponsoldt was dreaming about shooting a movie back in his hometown, David Bruckner (“The Ritual,” “The Nighthouse”) was living out the scrappy life of an independent filmmaker on the streets of Atlanta. Bruckner grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta and attended the University of Georgia before coming back home in 2001.
“In 2001, of course, there wasn’t a robust film industry in Atlanta,” Bruckner said. “Hollywood didn’t have stages there. They weren’t shooting a ton of movies. So there were, emergent, many of these kinds of grassroots efforts.”
Bruckner was involved with a group called POPfilms, a company run by fellow filmmakers Jacob Gentry and Alexander Motlagh, that would eventually produce “The Signal,” an Altanta-made feature co-directed by Bruckner. There was also PushPush Theatre (now PushPush Arts), an arts collective that started the Dailies Filmmaker Program, which saw a plethora of local filmmakers (including Bruckner) hitting the town and making as many short films as they could. Many of those shorts screened at the Atlanta Film Festival over the years, he said.
“It was a very grassroots effort that I think could only exist at a time when digital video technology was getting cheaper, so it was quicker and easier for us to shoot,” Bruckner said. “There was enough of a low friction environment that we could just make lots of stuff in a very low friction way.”
“The Signal” would be Bruckner’s breakthrough, along with his co-directors Gentry and Dan Bush. The film is told in three parts, each section written and directed by a different filmmaker, following a mysterious communication signal that drives people to murderous rage. Bruckner said they shot much of the film in his and sound designer Jeremiah Prescott’s loft near Pullman Yards, moving out so they could turn their former home into film sets. According to Bruckner, after the shoot a host of new freelancers moved into the space – another collective called Studio Outpost, which helped do all the sound and visual effects for “The Signal.”
“The Signal” was one of two retrospective screenings that Bruckner was a part of at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival, the other being the 2012 horror anthology “V/H/S.” Watching “The Signal” was a “shock to the system,” Bruckner said. He gets self-conscious watching those early films, but can’t help but feel a little impressed.
“I’m also really blown away by how fearless we were,” he said. “We were taking huge swings.”
Throughout Bruckner’s early days in Atlanta, the people he met while involved with collectives like POPfilms and Studio Outpost were the team that helped him through what he called the most prolific time in his career. And the ability to be that prolific outside of a studio system informed the type of filmmaker he became.
“Not being tethered to the business and being part of a momentary ecosystem where you can create a lot really helps you find a voice,” he said. “[It] really helps you discover what your own interests are.”
Much like Ponsoldt, Bruckner emphasized the importance of the community he was working with at that time. Atlanta might have more big budget productions today than it did back then, but he thinks the existence of his little cohort outside of that system created something special.
“Having an environment where you’re working with the same team, you’re working with the same actors, there’s a lot of back and forth,” he said. “The fact that everyone’s in concert does tend to produce something a bit more coherent. I think you can do that in a community, and you can do that in a town like Atlanta.”
Drew Sawyer
Around the time Bruckner and company were making “The Signal,” Drew Sawyer, founder of Moonshine Post, joined up with Studio Collective. As the years went by, the relationships between these Atlanta filmmakers got stronger. Sawyer even ended up with a role in “Amateur Night,” the segment of “V/H/S” directed by Bruckner.
“I’m not an actor. That’s the only thing I’ve really acted in,” Sawyer said. “But it worked, right?”
Sawyer eventually went into the post production business fulltime, founding Moonshine Post. The idea was to legitimize the “garage-band style” way of working that Studio Outpost had taught him and make it into a business. Over the years, Moonshine has worked with studios and big companies, but Sawyer makes it a point to remember his indie roots.
“That’s why we still give a filmmaker grant out at the Atlanta Film Festival,” he said. “We still actively try to meet filmmakers at the film festival that we want to work with. I will still go out and make indie films.”
This year, Moonshine was represented at the Atlanta Film Festival’s opening night screening of Macon Blair’s “Idiots,” produced by Atlanta native Alex Orr. The premiere felt like a homecoming of sorts – Moonshine did post production for the film, and Orr came up in the same era as Sawyer and Bruckner. His feature debut, 2007’s “Blood Car,” closed the festival down with its own legacy screening.
Coming from that 2000s era group of filmmakers cemented a bond between Sawyer, Orr, and so many others. That bond was clear in the festival’s 50th anniversary. So many of the filmmakers who came back to celebrate – Orr, Bruckner, Ray McKinnon, and others – are all from a similar era. And so many of those connections have stayed the course.
“The people I work with that have stood the test of time, we all kind of met in this one moment in time, in these collectives,” Sawyer said. “Those were the diehards that wanted to see it through, that really found their tribe that they could keep making stuff with and iterating on. I still make movies with those people.”
When Orr produced “Creepshow,” the 2019 horror anthology series that served as a continuation of the 1982 film of the same name, Sawyer and Moonshine came on board to help.
“Alex Orr brought me into ‘Creepshow’ because he knew that I would fight tooth and nail to build the best thing I could with sticks and glue if I had to, because he and I both came from the trenches of indie film,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer sees movies like “The Signal” and “Blood Car” as a beautiful moment in the history of Atlanta independent cinema. Some of those people have moved away from Atlanta, their careers taking them to L.A. or New York or elsewhere. But Sawyer has stayed here and thinks that young independent filmmakers today could be just as successful as he and his cohort were back then.
“There’s no reason that people can’t succeed more than the filmmaker group that I came from,” he said.
