This story is part of a series of interviews with Atlanta creatives about what it’s like to be working in Atlanta’s independent film scene. Click here to read more stories.
The first time I spoke with local Atlanta producer Kiah Clingman, she had just helped win a $1 million grant through the AT&T Untold Stories program for “Color Book,” David Fortune’s Atlanta-made film about a single father’s sojourn to take his son to his first baseball game.
That was in 2023. Last week on June 19, after a successful festival run, “Color Book” debuted on Netflix. It’s a bit of a full circle moment for Fortune as a filmmaker – he was part of the Netflix and Ghetto Film School Content Creator Program in 2022, as well as Film Independent’s Amplifier Fellowship, which is supported by Netflix. But still, according to Klingman, the process of finding distribution for the film was a hard one.
Throughout my Indie Spotlight series, which kicked off back in March, one of the topics that constantly arises is the idea of a fully-realized, top-to-bottom industry in Atlanta – a place where projects are greenlit, financed, produced, finished, and find distribution. Speaking with Clingman – who is a producer, filmmaker, and actress – about this idea, we talked a lot about what Atlanta filmmakers need to feel properly supported. She sees “Color Book” and its success as proof that Atlanta filmmakers are worth taking seriously.
“It takes projects like ‘Color Book’ – an Atlanta-based writer/director getting $1 million and deciding, I don’t want to film my first feature in L.A. or New York,” Clingman said. “I want to do it in Atlanta, and hire an Atlanta-based producer, an Atlanta-based crew. It takes projects like that, and then that project getting on Netflix for the world, and Atlanta, to say, ‘I want to invest more into the folks that are here.’ They’re just as talented.”
A lack of talent or workforce is not Atlanta’s issue. But growing an industry takes time. L.A. has been an epicenter of filmmaking for over 100 years. Georgia’s film industry – while existent before the introduction of the film tax credits in 2008 – has grown exponentially since those came into the picture.
It takes time to build out a fully functioning film industry where a local filmmaker can take a movie all the way from inception to distribution, backed by local dollars. Clingman just hopes that in ten years, we’re not still having the same conversations about making that a reality.
“We need more folks who are financiers and distributors, who are in Atlanta promoting and funding Atlanta-based projects, Atlanta-based filmmakers,” she said. “And then carrying it all the way up – really pushing it out on a Hollywood level when it comes to distribution and marketing and promotion.”
In every conversation I’ve had with filmmakers in Atlanta, funding is always named as an issue, whether it be the necessity for more local grants or the possibility of changes to the state’s tax credit to support smaller budget films.
But Clingman believes there is also a need for more education about marketing and distribution. One of the differences between L.A. and Atlanta she pointed out is the difference in career trajectory. Film is an industry where trajectories vary from person to person. But in her view, the century-plus-old infrastructure in L.A. can make things a little more streamlined.
“There’s a lot of community built into producing here in Atlanta, compared to some friends I know in L.A.,” she said. “[In L.A.], they may have started working as a [production assistant] on a big studio film, or they may have started as a writer’s assistant, or a director’s assistant, and they worked their way up. Or they started as an office [production assistant] and they worked their way up to the producing route in a more traditional sense. But we have a lot of producers in Atlanta that started by making things on their own or making things with their friends.”
Producing in Atlanta, she said, necessarily means coming at the job from an independent mindset. While she loves the community aspect of that approach, she does wish Atlanta creatives had more opportunities to learn how the pipeline works. Making “Color Book,” she said, they had a lot of things going for them – a $1 million grant, support from the Tribeca Film Festival, a wonderful movie, and a successful festival run with a lot of awards.
“The proof was in the pudding. And we still were getting pass after pass after pass after pass,” she said about the distribution process. “This Netflix partnership, it took a lot of different folks working together and pushing the film to make it all happen.”
Clingman said that for the “Color Book” team, distribution wasn’t necessarily any of their strong suits. That’s where more education about marketing, promotion, and distribution would have come in handy.
“We don’t have a ton of panels where it talks about how to distribute your film. What do you do after you have a successful festival run? When should you attach a sales agent? Things like that, we did not know,” she said. “Had we known some of that, some of the hurdles that we experienced, we could have prevented some of those.”
Even with all these hurdles, Klingman has invested in Atlanta as her home base. However, in early 2020, she moved to L.A. for a brief period of time – and then, a month later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
She stayed in L.A. through December 2020 before moving back to Atlanta. In 2021, she began producing her first feature film, and things started to grow away from the plateau she thought she hit before she left. She thought she needed L.A., but, particularly as the pandemic changed how people worked, she realized that wasn’t the case.
“I was like, you know what? I’m gonna make this my home base,” she remembered thinking. “I may go out to New York or L.A. for projects, but I want to really build here. I want to be around the community I built here, and this is where I want to pour all my energy and my time. I want to bloom where I’m planted, and not look elsewhere.”
