The Birth of Wilmywood: Dino De Laurentiis and the Firestarter

Transcript

A city of 55,000 people, a crumbling industrial waterfront, and zero film history. That was Wilmington, North Carolina in 1983. Then one Italian producer drove past a plantation draped in Spanish moss, and everything changed. Dino De Laurentiis was scouting locations for a Stephen King adaptation called Firestarter, starring a young Drew Barrymore. He had been looking in Georgia. He found something better. The Orton Plantation, with its Southern Gothic grandeur and sprawling grounds, gave him exactly the visual weight the story demanded. He didn't just film there. He decided to stay. Now, think of what it means to build a studio from scratch in a city that had never hosted a major production. De Laurentiis didn't just rent a warehouse. In 1984, he founded what would eventually become EUE/Screen Gems Studios, one of the most significant production facilities on the East Coast. That complex grew to include ten stages and 150,000 square feet of column-free shooting space. Column-free matters enormously on a working set. It means no structural pillars interrupting a camera move, no compromises on massive interior builds. That kind of space is rare. De Laurentiis brought it to a coastal Carolina city that most Hollywood executives couldn't have found on a map. The key idea here is scale. Wilmington didn't become a minor regional curiosity. By the mid-1980s, it had climbed to become the third-largest film production center in the United States, trailing only Los Angeles and New York City. That is a staggering leap for a city of its size. The economic ripple was immediate. Local carpenters, electricians, caterers, and drivers suddenly had a new industry feeding their households. Hotels filled. Restaurants stayed open later. A port city that had watched its industrial base shrink found a replacement economy arriving on a film truck. The studio complex also houses one of the largest special effects water tanks in North America, holding 1.2 million gallons of water. That tank alone signals the ambition of what was built here. Productions requiring massive underwater sequences, flood simulations, or large-scale practical water effects no longer had to ship those logistics to a handful of facilities worldwide. They could come to Wilmington. Remember that Firestarter was the spark, but geography kept the fire burning. Wilmington's landscape is genuinely versatile. The Cape Fear River, the Atlantic coastline, antebellum architecture, dense pine forests, and suburban neighborhoods that read as anywhere in America — all within a short drive of the studio. For example, a production needing a sleepy Midwestern town could dress Wilmington's historic district. A film needing a Southern estate could return to Orton Plantation. A thriller needing open water had the ocean minutes away. That flexibility meant producers weren't just choosing Wilmington for tax incentives or studio space. They were choosing it because the land itself performed. It could become almost anywhere a script required, and that made it indispensable to a wide range of projects across genres and budgets. Port City Ramble Podcast, here is the takeaway that matters most. Wilmington's transformation into Wilmywood was not the result of a government program or a long-term economic strategy. It started with one producer, one plantation, and one Stephen King story about a girl who could start fires with her mind. Dino De Laurentiis saw something in this city that its own residents hadn't fully recognized yet. He saw a place that could hold a camera and give it something worth filming. The infrastructure he built in 1984 became the foundation for decades of production that would follow. And Port City Ramble Podcast, that foundation — ten stages, 150,000 square feet, a 1.2-million-gallon water tank — didn't just attract films. It attracted an entire industry ecosystem that reshaped what Wilmington was and what it could become. The city didn't chase Hollywood. Hollywood came to it, planted a flag, and the name Wilmywood was eventually earned, one production at a time.