By Eleanor Ringel Cater
When I heard that George Lefont, the man who made Atlanta a movie town for over 40 years, wasn’t doing well, I went looking for some of my old articles on him. After all, I’d been writing about him since the late 1970s.
What I found wasn’t a few articles but a file folder almost two inches thick. That’s the kind of difference Lefont made to Atlanta movie lovers. I shiver to think what movie-going would’ve been here without him.
Sadly, Lefont died this week at the age of 85 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.
Lefont was the Reel Thing…. and then some. An enterprising and successful businessman who just happened to love film. And, luckily for us, shared that love with our city. He was, quite literally, the Man Who Kept Cool Movies Alive in Atlanta.
If it weren’t for George, there would’ve been no one to introduce Atlanta’s sometime recalcitrant, always unpredictable movie audiences to pictures that played Cannes, Toronto, Telluride, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and other world-class festivals.
If it weren’t for George, events like the Atlanta Film Festival, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the French Film Festival…well, the list goes on and on…may not have happened.
If it weren’t for George, Atlanta would’ve never seen movies by Truffaut, Fellini, Tarantino, Kurosawa, Bergman, Merchant/Ivory, the brothers Coen, the brothers Taviani, Jon Waters.
If it weren’t for George, Atlanta would’ve been a pretty pathetic and cinematically bereft landscape.
In 1976, George moved here from his hometown of San Francisco, switching from software, where he made a small fortune, to celluloid. He bought a tiny theater (formerly part of a doomed chain of theaters named after Jerry Lewis) in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center. He named it the…
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