Stepakoff is Building New Film Writing Program

When Jeffrey Stepakoff was a child in Dunwoody, his mother would take him when she went to the movies at Phipps Plaza. They were, for the most part, grown up films, like Woody Allen’s, “Manhattan,” or Mel Brooks, “The Producers.” They were not the usual kid’s stuff.

Both Allen and Brooks had started their careers in early television and they both made the words they put down on the scripted page the foundation of their very successful string of films. Stepakoff remembers going home after those screenings in Buckhead and using an old typewriter in his basement to type out his first juvenile attempts to write his own stories and his own movie scripts.

“I had, even as a 10-year-old,” Stepakoff said, “an impulse to write, an impulse to tell stories inspired by the movies my mom would take me to see. I grew up loving movies, television, and books, and it made me want to be a writer.”

After college at the University of North Carolina, a master’s degree in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University led him to Hollywood where he worked steadily in the growth of broadcasting 30 years ago, He worked as a writer, story editor, and producer on hundreds of hours of TV series. He helped to create such hits as, “The Wonder Years,” and “Dawson’s Creek,” where, as an executive producer, he worked over four seasons to help turn the series into a billion-dollar franchise.

He wrote a bestselling book about his experiences on “Dawson’s Creek,” created three novels that did well and came back to Georgia to teach scriptwriting for nine years at Kennesaw State University. After the Georgia legislature passed legislation in 2008 to grant a generous tax incentive to encourage the film and TV industry to make films in Georgia, Stepakoff established the Georgia Film Academy at the Trilith Studios south of Atlanta. The studios are the largest in North America, with 34 of the nation’s most technically advanced sound stages built over 700 acres of what was, recently, Georgia farmland. This year’s blockbuster “Superman” film, directed by James Gunn, was mostly shot there.

The tax incentive program established a film and television production program in the Georgia Department of Economic Development that spent $2.6 billion to generate $11 billion in economic growth over the last three years. Stepakoff says in the scramble to build out the industry for productions that mostly originated in Hollywood, Georgia failed to encourage locally grown productions, the work that he so loved when he worked in the film industry in Hollywood.

“Georgia is essentially a film factory. We have a great subsidy –our film tax credits. We have phenomenal infrastructure. Gosh, these are world-class stages with incredible support services. But if you want to have a permanent, sustainable business, if you want to impact the world through the stories that are seen and told, you do that by training the storytellers, the writers, and keeping them here in Georgia.”

With the support of Dan Cathy, who has led the development of the Trilith Studio complex, Stepakoff established the Trilith Institute, an ambitious nonprofit effort to bring together a new generation of creative talent. It encourages productions that are homegrown and locally inspired. The program is built around professional training opportunities, short form workshops in the development of advanced production skills, and a writer’s room program.

If you want to have a permanent, sustainable business, if you want to impact the world through the stories that are seen and told, you do that by training the storytellers, the writers, and keeping them here in Georgia.

“At the end of the day,” Stepakoff notes, “when you peel back the onion, the essence of the economic activity and the core of the business is about not just the written word, but the story. And if you want to peel it back just a little bit more, our focus, my focus, at the Trilith Institute today, is about those who tells those stories.’

Cathy built the stadium the institute helped to create for its first feature film project, “A Mess of Memories,” written and directed by Ebony Blandings. It’s an intense drama that explores the emotional complexities of family life. This month, a second production, a pilot for TV, is being put together.

Both productions are the result of a yearlong Emerging Creative In Residence program that provides mentoring by professionals like Stepakoff, production funding and support by the Trilith Studio complex. It’s the first step in a program to change how entertainment is created here, what Stepakoff calls his tikkun olam, or “change the world” initiative.

“No other studio, no other state has ever focused with the same passion and conviction and investment that we’re making here at the Trilith Institute. This is how we change the world. Train writers and directors, keep them here, and create a new, intentional North American entertainment industry.”