These days, Atlanta is the moviemaking mecca of the South. Francis Ford Coppola sold his vineyards in Sonoma, California in 2021 as a way of helping finance his big-budget Megalopolis in Atlanta (with an all-star cast said to include Adam Driver, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Aubrey Plaza, Forest Whitaker, and Nathalie Emmanuel). Since 2006, media mogul Tyler Perry has produced scores of movies and TV shows from his sprawling, 330-acre studio on an old military base. Marvel Entertainment, now quite active in Georgia, has shot portions of both of its Black Panther pictures there. Sadly, however, what is often overlooked is the fact that even before Ted Turner launched CNN in Atlanta in 1980, it was the visionary Jimmy Carter—Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975—who first turned the state’s business hub into a production-friendly playground for entertainment companies. As early as 1973, he established a state film commission in Georgia, the first entity of its kind outside of California.

Thirty years ago, I was under contract with Viking to write a biography of Carter, focusing largely on his Nobel Peace Prize–winning post-presidency. (Carter, who is now 98, has reportedly sought hospice care.) His daughter, Amy, was a close friend. So the 39^th president and I spent a lot of time talking—with a tape recorder going. In the 1990s alone, we clocked more than 30 hours in conversation. And among the discussions I treasure most, which never made it into the book, was one that began on October 29, 1993, at his one-story home in Plains, Georgia, as he regaled me with the backstory of how he had first hatched the idea of creating what he termed a “Hollywood of the South.”

Months earlier I had brought a busload of college students (from Yale, the University of Virginia, the University of New Orleans, and elsewhere) to volunteer alongside Carter as he built a house for Habitat for Humanity in Americus, Georgia. After long days of hammering in the heat, the students would all sit down to a picnic-style dinner of fried chicken and catfish with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Also present at the time was Elizabeth Gilbert (future author of Eat, Pray, Love), who would write an article in Spin magazine about this group of enterprising students erecting a new home with a former president.

Because I had so much access to Carter, we’d explore all kinds of topics. And on that October afternoon, I homed in on his fascination with—of all things—Hollywood movies. He told me that as a young governor (he was 46 when he took office), he had wanted to adapt MacKinlay Kantor’s historical novel Andersonville into a major motion picture. The book had a touchy premise for its time, addressing how Andersonville, the largest prison camp of the Civil War, had been the site where 13,000 Union soldiers had been killed, many of them by starvation, disease, and outright neglect.

Carter explained why he’d been drawn to Andersonville. He knew that the 1939 film version of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, had reaped immeasurable economic bounty for Georgia: for decades, tourists would flock to Atlanta, hoping to walk the streets of the city that had played so central a role in the Civil War saga. Moreover, Mitchell’s apartment in town, at 979 Crescent Avenue—where she had written the lion’s share of her Pulitzer Prize–winning book—had itself become a tourist site. An even bigger attraction was “The Battle of Atlanta” cyclorama painting (then on display in Grant Park). It was immense: over 49 feet tall, weighing 10,000 pounds. (The only other cyclorama in the country that could rival it in scope was the three-dimensional “Battle of Gettysburg,” in southern Pennsylvania.)

Scouting for a Civil War update, Carter searched for something more powerful and relevant from a historical perspective, a tale that would also be less racially fraught and romanticized than Gone with the Wind. “Then I reread Kantor’s Andersonville,” he said, “and realized that that was a better story to tell than Sherman’s March. Plus, it would bring jobs to Americus, Georgia, near Plains, where the National Park Service maintains a Civil War battlefield unit.”

Andersonville, in his view, would be a more probing and impactful cinematic epic—one that could be filmed in rural Georgia. In addition, it would provide a thousand blue-collar jobs and open up the Peach State to a wave of other movie productions—not to mention potential tourists. (The Kantor book was optioned but never made into a film. It wouldn’t be until 1996 that John Frankenheimer’s Andersonville—a TV miniseries partly shot in Georgia—made it to the screen.) Nevertheless, Carter had convinced scores of Hollywood companies to come on down to Atlanta.

“I think the last year I was governor, we had 26 films made in Georgia,” he recalled. “We really went all out. I went to Hollywood and met with the producers. I went to New York and met with [banker] David Rockefeller. He hosted a luncheon so I could make my pitch to all the producers [he knew in the film business].”

Carter realized that a state could garner a potential financial windfall if it gave incentives, permits, and tax breaks to movie companies. While the practice had caught on in cities like New York, Chicago, and Toronto, the idea of enticing producers to come to the South was a relatively new one. “We would do anything that was legal,” Carter said. “Sometimes we would stretch the law to make it easy for them to make the films. Burt Reynolds came down here several times and made Deliverance in Georgia during that time, and made The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit, and different things.”

Under Carter, the state would launch what today is called a Camera Ready Communities program, connecting producers with skilled county liaisons, who offered resources like film studios, lodging, and assistance with securing local permits. When I asked Carter what the appeal of Georgia was for Hollywood—perhaps the red clay fields or the siloed agricultural hamlets as backdrops?—he cut me off. “The fact that we would do anything for them,” he laughed. “For instance, when [producers] wanted to make The Longest Yard, we turned over the Regional State Prison. And they wanted a football field. They wanted a fence put up, and we got Coca-Cola”—headquartered in Atlanta—“to put up old-fashioned advertisements around the football field. They wanted a 1932 gray pickup truck, a Ford, and we put an ad in the papers in Georgia and located a gray 1932 pickup truck. They wanted a place for Burt Reynolds to stay so we talked to the prison warden, who said, ‘You can have my house,’ and the warden moved into a motel. They bought new furniture and Burt Reynolds stayed in the warden’s house.”

At the time, the country was going through a recession. Carter was telling fellow citizens to lower their thermostats to save energy. He was also limiting the use of private planes for state business. But the governor—a fiscally conservative Democrat—thought of ways to write off some of the state expenditures on Hollywood entertainment, and the team behind The Longest Yard agreed to film in Georgia. Carter was helping fill the state coffers—and being frugal to boot. “By the way, when the movie was over,” he said, smiling, “the warden auctioned off the chairs and beds and so forth that Reynolds had used and made a big profit like that.”

Jimmy Carter believed that if Hollywood grasped the no-red-tape largesse of Georgian hospitality, filmmakers and film moguls would turn Atlanta—or swatches of it—into a sort of homey back lot. Hollywood producers like Barry Sandler and Jack Giarraputo were offered many carte blanche favors by the governor. For The Longest Yard, Carter remembered, “they needed a cheering section of gay Black prisoners. And this is a very sensitive thing for Georgia back then in the early ’70s when I was governor. I greenlighted it. I told the director of the prison system, it was Mike McDougall, to go ahead and approve the gay cheering section. So that’s the kind of thing. If they wanted to burn down a building or set some woods on fire—whatever they wanted, we would do.”

The entrepreneurial gambit worked. After a time, film and television productions began to spring up across the state. Governor Carter had understood that all those film trucks would bring with them tons of money and smiling faces—not to mention civic pride. His constituents, he correctly surmised, liked seeing local blocks and buildings on national television. “Now, in the aftermath of my overtures,” he told me, back in 1993, “there are a lot of TV programs still made in Georgia, like In the Heat of the Night on Thursday night—made in Georgia.”

That said, the overseers of the state’s film initiative had their work cut out for them. Carter was infuriated, he said, that when George Busbee succeeded him as governor in 1975, he gutted Carter’s open-door movie-making policy. Busbee, also to Carter’s consternation, pushed for local cinema owners—who had previously had to show films from a slate provided by movie producers or distributors—to have more flexibility in deciding which movies would appear in Georgia theaters. This meant the potential blacklisting of certain R-rated films by conservative and evangelical theater owners. As a result, Carter lamented, “the producers of motion picture films decided almost to boycott Georgia. And they moved their big movie operations to Florida and other states. That doesn’t apply to TV. They still do a lot of TV in Georgia.”

Flash forward to March 11, 2018, when I revisited Plains to attend a service at Maranatha Baptist Church with Carter, accompanied by my wife, Anne, and our three kids. Afterward, we attended what would be my seventh Bible class with the devout evangelical Christian. Over the years, I have held public conversations with Carter for organizations like the Council of Foreign Relations and C-SPAN. I have traveled with him to Haiti (to meet with then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide) and the Middle East (where we dined with Israel’s Shimon Peres in Jerusalem and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Gaza City). So we’d become close.

After Carter’s Bible class that day, I remarked on how his old “Hollywood South” strategy from the 1970s had been rather prescient. In what had come to be known locally as the Tyler Perry era, that year some 455 film and TV productions had been shot in Greater Atlanta due to the reimplementation of Carter’s tax break and statewide cinema infrastructure efforts. When I mentioned that I’d recently read that moviemaking was a multibillion-dollar business in Georgia, he nodded with detectable glee. “Hollywood,” he said proudly, “is helping make Georgia a blue state.”

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and a professor of history at Rice University and author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize. His most recent book, Silent Spring Revolution, was excerpted in Vanity Fair in December.