As the fond memories of our brush with celebrity during last summer's shoots for The Last Song and The Conspirator begin to fade, the state and the greater Savannah area are still making efforts to secure the future of the entertainment industry here.

For all his business acumen and professional savvy, Black Maria Film & Video Festival founder John Columbus thinks like an artist.

Every Memorial Day weekend in Telluride, Colo., a collection of short films is screened for those interested in ecology, conservation, wildlife, beautiful landscapes and thrilling adventure - the great outdoors, as it were.

What do sumo wrestlers, transgender elder care workers, émigrés in Vietnam and beauty pageant contestants all have in common? If you answered that they were all encompassed by the spectrum of Jewish cinema in the 21st Century, you’d be right.

Stepping into the home of Hal and Nancy Miles is sort of like wandering unexpectedly into a long lost vault buried somewhere between the studios of Disney and Warner Brothers.

There is a presumption, Jim Reed believes, that his weekly film screenings at the Sentient Bean are nothing more than kitsch, with titles like Beach Blanket Mutants From the Planet Picard and The Nazi That Ate Chicago.

Working as an extra in a movie, particularly a big time production like The Conspirator, directed in Savannah by Robert Redford, sounds like a lot of fun. Truth be told, it is.

Hollywood returned to Savannah in 2009, after a decade–long sabbatical. Other states offered substantial tax incentives for film production companies, making it far more lucrative to shoot there than in Georgia. But when Governor Sonny Perdue changed Peach State policy in 2009, he effectively rolled out the red carpet for moviemakers.

My nominee for Savannah's Man of the Year has to be Mark Owen McLeod. The 53-year-old native of Appling, Ga., was arrested in June and charged with stalking Miley Cyrus while she was on Tybee Island, filming The Last Song. Tybee police said McLeod was hanging around the fringes of the set, "making inappropriate comments" to young girls gathered there. According to an official report, he told officers he was on the beach "to be ...

Last week, when the bronze statue of Savannah boy–done–good Johnny Mercer was unveiled, everyone who’s anyone was there. Except, that is, for Stratton Leopold, another of the city’s great success stories.

Two days after another George Clooney film screened at the Savannah Film Festival -- The Men Who Stare At Goats -- another film starring the actor was the Festival's super-secret "Director's Choice."

Part Two of our profile of the talented young SCAD filmmakers whose works are entered into the student competition at the 2009 Savannah Film Festival.

Don’t let the title fool you. Director Paul Cotter’s debut feature film Bomber — ostensibly about an elderly English man who wants to apologize for his role in levelling a German village during World War II — is less about ambiguous wartime morals than it is about the dynamics between a slacker and his aging parents.

Most of us have seen the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning black and white photo of a Vietcong prisoner about to be shot in the head by a South Vietnamese police chief. Today we see that sort of extreme violence portrayed all the time, whether on cable TV or in dozens of video games. But in 1968, Americans weren’t used to such graphic images coming into their households.

A mere fifteen-minute boat ride from Savannah, Ossabaw Island is one of the most magical places on earth. Once the stomping ground of plantation owners -- the island features the oldest continuously used road in America -- the moss-drenched, marsh-encircled island later became the happy hunting ground of Northern millionaires.