That never came to pass, so Spivia pivoted, turning it into a popular antique market until 2006. Former Georgia film commissioner Ed Spivia’s Filmworks USA in the early 1980s signed a longterm lease in hopes of turning Lakewood into a first-rate movie studio. Burt Reynolds, for his film “Smokey and the Bandit II,” famously blew up the Greyhound. They also built a dirt race track, an amphitheater, a Carnival Midway and a big roller coaster dubbed the Greyhound.īy the 1970s, the fair had lost its appeal and shut down. Lakewood opened in 1916 as an agricultural fair with supporters raising money to erect Spanish Mission-style exhibition halls. Kris Bagwell, the studio’s first executive director who is departing later this month, promised hundreds of jobs with a goal to establish Georgia as a truly hospitable home for TV series and big-budget films. Two years after the state passed generous tax credits to entice the likes of Disney and Sony to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the state of Georgia, EUE/Screen Gems gambled its own millions of dollars to renovate and open its own studio on 30 acres of Lakewood land in 2010. None of this would have happened in Georgia without the risk-takers at EUE Screen Gems, which also owns sound stages in New York, Miami and Wilmington, North Carolina. Over the years, it has hosted countless farmers showing off their prize pigs, hordes of teenagers screaming down a 66-foot roller coaster drop and crowds of antique shoppers angling for bargains.Īnd over the past decade, on the same property, Denzel Washington’s Whip crash-landed an airplane, Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen fended off foes with her signature bow and arrow and Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven took down a scary demogorgon. The Lakewood Fairgrounds in South Atlanta has a storied past going back more than a century.
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