Relocated locals want to turn region into an entertainment capital

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

A group of Steel City expatriates who have forged powerful careers in show business are returning home this weekend to promote a new vision for Pittsburgh as a film and television production center.

They want to utilize the city's own natural resources -- its people and institutions -- and its largely untapped Hollywood connections to develop talent, scripts and entertainment projects that would bring in jobs and revenue.

The Pittsburgh Entertainment Summit, to be held Saturday at the WQED studios in Oakland, will introduce the concept to an invited audience of 200 civic, business and political leaders.

The Hollywood luminaries returning home include Rob Marshall, who directed the Academy Award-winning movie "Chicago"; Eric Gold, a manager and producer whose clients include superstar Jim Carrey; David Conrad, star of the NBC series "Miss Match"; and producer Bernie Goldmann, who is making Angelina Jolie's next film, "Taking Lives," and was president of the company that produced "The Matrix."

They are among the 30 out-of-town members on the advisory board of the Steeltown Entertainment Project, which aims to help Pittsburgh "get a piece of the $130 billion revenue from the entertainment industry many of its expatriates have helped create," according to the summit program.

"We have exported billions of dollars in entertainment revenue," said Ellen Weiss Kander, Steeltown's executive director. "We want the entertainment business to be the new steel business of Pittsburgh."

Those Hollywood movers and shakers with a Pittsburgh background also include John Wells, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate who has become television's top producer, responsible for "The West Wing," "ER" and "Third Watch." Oscar-winning actress Shirley Jones got her start at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Jamie Widdoes, originally an actor, has directed many TV series including "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teen-Age Daughter." Sisters Maxine and Sally Lapiduss have written and produced TV sitcoms ranging from "Roseanne" and "Home Improvement" to "The Nanny" and "Mad About You."

Many of them will participate in Saturday's summit. They will talk about how they got started in the business and try to "demystify" the entertainment industry while explaining how Pittsburgh can cash in on the production of movies, television and new media. The summit will be the focus of a Nov. 20 prime-time "On Q" special on WQED-TV.

The group will gather again Saturday night at The Andy Warhol Museum for a cocktail reception, where the short documentary "Pittsburgh: Hollywood's Best Kept Secret" will premiere. Produced by another former Pittsburgher, Laura Davis, the film will include a clip of Wells talking about the city's potential as a production center.

But the most important event of the weekend may take place Sunday, when the Steeltown group will gather behind closed doors to come up with the venture's first project.

"We're not coming to announce, 'This is our plan.' We will have a creative session with all these people and at the end of the weekend we will have a better idea of which direction we go first and our immediate goals," said Maxine Lapiduss, a Steeltown co-founder who lives in Los Angeles.

She calls this weekend's event "our birth announcement. We're going to try something here we think is worth our time and collective energy. Now let's see what we can really bring from this."

Pittsburgh invented the entertainment industry without knowing it, said Carl Kurlander, a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh and screenwriter ("St. Elmo's Fire"). He notes the city was home to the first movie theater, was the birthplace of such movie moguls as the Warner brothers and David O. Selznick, and gave birth to the first commercial radio station and the first public television station.

Kurlander was first to voice the ideas that formed the impetus for Steeltown. At first, he imagined nothing more than the weekend summit, followed by development of a workshop program similar to one run by the Sundance Film Festival.

Lapiduss convinced him it could be something far greater and stressed the need for a nonprofit organization and a business plan. To that end, they brought aboard Kander, a former Wall Street attorney who returned to Pittsburgh to work in the family business, the Weisshouse home furnishings store. They also recruited Lisa Frankovitch, a former executive in the technology field, which figures to be one of the major components in the Steeltown model.

Lapiduss laid out a more specific vision, which would include an education component with an actual production arm that would generate jobs, ideas and revenues.

"If one of Carl's students writes the next 'Big Fat Greek Wedding' and gets it to John Wells and he gets it to Warner Brothers and Steeltown takes a participation fee and [the movie] makes $100 million -- wouldn't it be great to get money for getting a producer good material?"

The goal, she said, is "getting the inspiration from here, getting new artists a place to workshop and refine their craft, having a hub, a conduit and a connector to artists in New York and Los Angeles, in film and TV and, hopefully, to music as well. If you generate enough projects and enough episodes, you have people working," she said.

Lapiduss thinks luring outside producers to shoot in Pittsburgh may be impractical until Pennsylvania offers some kind of tax-break legislation that would make the state competitive with other states and countries.

But she thinks Steeltown could help build the local film industry. Members of its board who still live in Pittsburgh include director George Romero, WQED's George Miles, the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center's Don Marinelli, Pittsburgh Filmmakers chief Charlie Humphrey, Pittsburgh Film Office director Dawn Keezer, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust President Kevin McMahon, city Councilman Bill Peduto and benefactors Audrey Hillman Fisher and Anne Lewis.

"We are a pipeline to all of the organizations," Kander said. "That's the idea, for us to be a large umbrella" -- one that envelops sunny Hollywood and its powerful Pittsburghers.

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