Memphis is a city of innovation — from rock-and-roll to self-service grocery stores, FedEx to Gebre Waddell’s Sound Credit software, that fact is undeniable. It’s also a city known for Black arts, in myriad forms. Now, three local Black-led organizations adept at marrying art and innovation, BLP Film Studios, Tone, and Unapologetic, aim to make Memphis a beacon in the South. In doing so, they’re making the city a better place.
The Road to Whitehaven
Jason Farmer’s journey to arts entrepreneur started simply enough. In 2008, he took his son Jason II to see the first current-era Marvel movie, Iron Man. “He started saying, ‘I want to be a filmmaker,’” recalls Farmer. “As a parent, you think that’s going to be a quickly passing thing, but he stuck to it. He started to make little sets at the house. We bought him a camera, and he started to film his sister acting out roles.”
Farmer decided he needed to figure out how to support his son’s ambitions, but since his background is in military and law enforcement, he knew nothing about the movie business — or even where to begin. “I posted on social media that I needed someone to reach out to me who may be in a film space, and a friend, who I hadn’t seen in a number of years, reached out to ask what it was that I needed. I told her what my dilemma was, and she started to send me out to various independent film projects, to various agencies and film festivals. And that’s what started the journey.”
Now, Jason II is a film student at Morehouse College, and Farmer is spearheading BLP, an ambitious project to create one of the largest film production facilities in the South right here in Memphis.
Farmer is not the first person to try to kickstart a homegrown film and television industry here. In 1929, one of the earliest sound films in history was filmed in Memphis. Director King Vidor’s Hallelujah was a musical with an all-Black cast, which introduced many people to authentic gospel and blues. Modern filmmaking in Memphis can be traced back to the establishment of University of Memphis’ film department and the creation of Marius Penczner’s 1982 monster noir, I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. In 1989, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, filmed entirely in the then-moribund South Main neighborhood, became a seminal work in the independent film movement. That inspired some Memphians to see the city through Jarmusch’s eyes as a shabby chic nexus of popular culture waiting to be rediscovered. In the 1990s, homegrown auteur Mike McCarthy made three psychotronic films by the skin of his teeth. Meanwhile, the city played host to its first major Hollywood productions in decades: the John Grisham adaptations, The Firm and The Rainmaker, and Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt. In 2000, an upstart-film festival called Indie Memphis found its first star in Craig Brewer, who gained attention in Hollywood with the pioneering digital film The Poor & Hungry and then fought for four years to produce Hustle & Flow in his adopted hometown. The aughts brought more big productions, such as the Oscar-winningWalk the Line and 21 Grams.
But after the 2008 financial crisis, things changed. Hollywood productions became much more reliant on state-level tax incentives; in the South, Georgia and Louisiana offered more generous deals than Tennessee. In 2010, Brewer’s remake of Footloose, which was originally written to be set in rural West Tennessee, was lured away to Georgia. The nascent Memphis film industry essentially collapsed, as experienced crew members departed for the greener pastures of Atlanta. Local filmmakers continued the indie tradition of creating daring works on shoestring budgets, but the city would not host another major production until 2019, when NBC filmed the TV series Bluff City Law here.
That’s the environment Farmer found himself working in — and trying to change. “I’m not a creative,” says Farmer. “I started to look at it from a business aspect. What was the business case for the Memphis film industry — or lack thereof? What were those challenges?”
One big problem has always been a lack of adequate facilities. “For 30 years now, major productions in Memphis have always been able to ‘make do’ with such existing spaces as warehouses and factories — or various other empty spaces that fit the specifications for a soundstage space,” says Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commissioner Linn Sitler. “The minimum specifications have always been the same: 28-foot to 30-foot-tall ceilings, clear span, no windows, and non-metal roofs. Our clients look for a space that would also provide an overall quiet outside environment with lots of parking and nearby offices.”
The lack of suitable soundstages was almost a deal breaker for Bluff City Law, Sitler says. “Only at the last possible moment was a former skating rink located, which did meet the minimum soundstage requirements. The offices were still miles away. The traffic noise of Summer Avenue was right outside, but it was the best we could offer.”
The Atlanta area, by contrast, offers producers several full-service production facilities, including Trilith Studios, where much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is produced, and the homegrown Tyler Perry Studios. “I spent really a lot of time doing background research on these other places,” Farmer says. “What emerged from that was, without challenges here in Memphis and in Tennessee, we had an opportunity to carve out a niche space that had really not been explored. We really needed to look at it as creating infrastructure and the supporting ecosystem that it takes to support projects. We want to go after the industry, as opposed to going after one-off projects.”
Farmer says his research suggested that the situation was far from hopeless. “We came up with a model that allowed us to use our natural asset, which is the great cultural history here. … At the same time, there were some things that were starting to happen with the industry trying to be more attentive to marketing to Black and brown audiences.”
For decades, Black productions were a hard sell in Hollywood. Conventional wisdom in the white-dominated boardrooms was that white people would not see Black films, and that African-American casts could not sell a picture in vital overseas markets like China. This thinking willfully ignored counter-examples, like the immensely successful films of Tyler Perry. Recent breakthroughs, such as the success of 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, have exposed conventional wisdom about race in Hollywood as myth. Earlier this year, Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America, which features an all-Black cast led by Eddie Murphy, became Amazon Studios’ biggest hit ever, driven by huge international interest, particularly in Africa. Black films, Farmer says, are good business. “There have been a number of studies that have supported the argument, most recently the McKinsey & Company study that said the industry is leaving about $10 billion a year in potential revenue on the table by not backing productions that are reflective of the communities we live in.”
It’s not enough to just market to BIPOC audiences. Hallelujah might have been a groundbreaking Black musical, but since King Vidor was a caucasian raised in Jim Crow Texas, it is also rife with harmful stereotypes. Many big content producers are now actively recruiting Black producers and directors to create stories that better reflect the community. “With Memphis positioned as the largest suburban minority population in the country, it makes it easy for us here,” Farmer says. “We’re trying to help them answer questions around DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — and we can do it in an organic manner here in Memphis because of the community makeup.”
BLP Film Studios seeks to close Memphis’ infrastructure gap by creating a sprawling film and television production campus in Farmer’s native Whitehaven. Located just west of Highway 51 near the Mississippi border, BLP Studios will feature 12 soundstages and assorted support and administrative facilities. Farmer says the area meets the criteria of available land and easy access to air and ground transportation. “I knew that Whitehaven had a lot of untapped potential,” he says. “There were just a lot of things that, from a business standpoint, when you looked at creating a platform to attract people from around the world, made Whitehaven the obvious choice. And I had great confidence because I come from that community. Whitehaven embraces its children, so to speak.”
Orange Mound Tower Rises
Vacant for two decades, the United Equipment building is an Orange Mound landmark. From the front door of Tone’s gallery space, Victoria Jones can see the former feed mill towering over Lamar Avenue.
Jones, whose first job out of college was with Crosstown Arts, founded Tone in 2015 as The CLTV. “My goal originally was just, how do I get more Black artists into Crosstown?” she says. “But we had an opportunity to see through programming how needed it was for the rest of the city and for artists.”
Jones says Black artists have never had the freedom to create like their white counterparts, immersed in the privileged high-art world. “What does it mean for Black artists to have a touch point, to do some experimenting, to get creative outside of this kind of white space? A lot of times, when we get new spaces, we have to toe the line of perfection for fear of losing access to the space. What happens when we carve out a space where Black folks can show up authentically and fully themselves in that experimentation? We got to see that start to happen as we were doing programming at Crosstown. It just became really important to us to dig in somewhere, create a home, and build a foundation, so that artists have this touch point consistently.”
Jones’ nascent organization signed a lease on a former retail space at 2234 Lamar, where they could stretch out and mount new and daring shows and performances by Black artists. But Jones says their eyes were always on the future. “We weren’t the first for Black artists, but the lack of sustainability has caused every generation to have to start over. So we have been thinking since we started for real about what it means to sustain. What does it mean to hand this baton off to the next generation of artists? And so for us that came with property, having access to consistent space. What would that mean for generations of artists, creatives, entrepreneurs?”
The arc of urban gentrification goes something like this: Artists looking for cheap studio space move into blighted neighborhoods where they can create art, mount shows, and host events without getting the cops called on them for disturbing the peace. People who would normally avoid such places attend the events, have fun, and get used to the neighborhood. Landlords see the renewed activity in properties they had long ago given up on and encourage more artists and associated businesses to move in. Then, when a critical mass of activity is reached, they raise the rents, which makes the area unaffordable to the very people who put in the work to make it attractive again. Artists are evicted in favor of more well-heeled businesses looking to burnish their brands among young people flocking to the hip neighborhood. The poor people who lived there all along are also evicted as collatoral damage to the landlords’ rising fortunes.
Unapologetic founder IMAKEMADBEATS says the only way to break the cycle is for the creatives to become owners, not tenants. When he tells people he grew up poor in Orange Mound, “People look at me like I survived Baghdad or something. We didn’t think anybody was fighting for us or fighting for change. Nobody cared. We were just the selected ones to go through it, the 6 percent to 8 percent that’s got to go through poverty.”
As Unapologetic’s fortunes increased, IMAKEMADBEATS says finding a permanent home in Orange Mound became an urgent priority. “Whether it was to fulfill our ideas as founding partners or to protect the neighborhood or doing our part to help establish wealth and sustainability for the community to be able to buy into, there’s so many reasons to take the longer, harder route of ownership and doing what’s necessary to become developers.”
With the successful Crosstown Concourse model as a guide, Tone and Unapologetic set out to buy the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center, where Tone’s gallery is located, but the deal fell apart at the last minute. Then Jones looked out the window and saw Orange Mound Tower. “I think as soon as we really started considering the tower as a viable option, it became the best option. It’s obviously way more work, but we can start from scratch and build a state-of-the-art campus for Black innovation, Black artists, Black culture, and Black businesses.”
With the vital assistance of Historic Clayborn Temple Executive Director Anasa Troutman, Tone and Unapologetic secured a grant from The Kataly Foundation in Lancaster, California. “She brought those funders to Memphis to introduce them to other organizations,” recalls Jones. “On their trip, they stopped by the gallery. We didn’t even go on-site. They just looked at [the tower] from the gallery, and we told them what it would mean to Black creatives, what it would mean to this community, what it would mean to Memphis as a whole. They are so dedicated to empowering grassroots, community-led organizations, as opposed to paying somebody from outside the community to come fix or save it. They empowered us to purchase the building, with the catch that we find a local match.”
The Kataly grant encouraged local donors and investors who were on the fence to join the project. “It set us up to get a funder that we had kind of warmed up, but couldn’t get them fully commit,” says Jones. “They saw someone else believe in us. It’s the domino effect that can happen with matches.”
The Orange Mound Tower development will include ample residential and commercial space, as well as a massive performance venue and incubator facilities for nascent entrepreneurs. Unapologetic will occupy a three-story office and recording-studio space.
The prospect of refurbishing such a huge space for creative reuse is daunting, but Jones says they have had nothing but encouragement from the community. “We got a chance to watch Crosstown work through some of that. Todd Richardson offered up the advice to pilot as much of it over here as we can before we move across the street. I’m talking about Memphis becoming the cultural beacon of the South. We’re actively putting those pieces in place now.”
Unapologetic and Tone celebrated the purchase with a massive Juneteenth celebration that attracted thousands to the first of what will be many concerts on the grounds of Orange Mound Tower. “If our success is any indication, every time we open our doors, people come,” says Jones. “These folks have been wanting a place to go. Our folks have been needing a home, and so to be able to offer up a home that we actually own is going to truly change the city.”
She also sees this as an opportunity to encourage more grassroots activism and local Black ownership. “Memphis is too big and too Black for us only to be one, so every move where we can kind of stretch out some and offer up space to even more folks, we’ll take it. Then just watch what happens.
“It’s going to transform the city, I believe.”