Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 2, 1994 TAG: 9402020007
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Brown Kelly
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sound like fiction? Well, it's film.
The $16.1 million is the amount production companies reported they spent in the state while they were making movies or commercials using Virginia landscapes as backgrounds.
It took a lot of courting of film companies. A lot of trips to California to "cold call," which is jargon for nobody knew they were coming.
What sells them on Virginia? Locations, of course. But the main attraction is the cost of living, meaning a four-bedroom house can be had for $100,000 and salaries are 90 percent of the national average, said Marcie Oberndorf-Kelso, deputy director of the Virginia Film Office.
The time span between when a company shows interest in the state and when it actually comes to make a movie or commercial can be as short as two weeks or as long as several years, she said.
For example, there were five years from contact to contract with "Sommersby," the Civil War-era film that starred Richard Gere and Jodie Foster.
Oberndorf-Kelso said the office staff thought it had taken only four months - October 1991 to February 1992 - to firm up the "Sommersby" project for Virginia until they found some old files that had belonged to a former employee.
The files contained correspondence dated 1987 between the film office and a film company about a script "called `Sommersby,'" she said.
And that was longer than Jodie Foster's character had to wait for her hubby to return from the war.
Once a film company shows interest in Virginia, though, the staff hurries to send it photographs of possible sites. Right now, they are helping a company find locations that could sub for Louisiana, but Oberndorf-Kelso says nothing is ready to announce.
A television miniseries, "Vanishing Son" is being shot now in the Newport News area.
\ Heading north on Roanoke's Roy Webber Expressway at the Elm Avenue exit, there's a new sign for a "Scribner's" outlet. It may have made many think of books, but they were reading the wrong tale.
The Scribner name is related to the famous New York City book company, but Scribner's, which is on Ninth Street, is going to be Scribner's Factory Outlet, and it won't sell books.
It will sell T-shirts and sweats at prices from 99 cents to $15, said its owner, Greg Scribner.
He has moved his screen-printing business from Vinton into the Roanoke quarters and hopes to have the rest of the place open by mid-March. In addition to merchandise imprinted with Roanoke Valley high schools' logos and names, he said the place will have a train running on a ceiling-high track and murals of Roanoke Valley landscapes on the walls.
by CNB