During his time on the job, Arnold helped develop and promote North Carolina’s production industry, establishing the state as one of the busiest production centers outside of New York or California. During Arnold’s tenure in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the state experienced a tremendous increase in production activity. Some of the landmark films that were produced in the state during that time included “The Color Purple” (1985), “Dirty Dancing” (1987), “Bull Durham” (1988), “Days of Thunder” (1990), “Sleeping with the Enemy” (1991), “Last of the Mohicans” (1992), “The Fugitive” (1993) and “The Crow” (1994).

“Bill leaves a great legacy and will always be remembered among of the pioneers of the North Carolina Film Industry,” said current NC Film Commissioner Aaron Syrett, who succeeded Arnold in 2007.

Born May 8, 1936, in Greenville, North Carolina, Arnold was a U.S. Army veteran and a graduate of East Carolina University. He is survived by his wife Dorothy Jackson Arnold; son, Stephen Arnold of Raleigh; brother, John E. Arnold of Greenville; and several nieces and nephews. Memorials may be made in his name to the SPCA of Wake County.

PlayMakers is the professional theater in residence in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Grannemann heads the theater’s administrative departments, working in partnership with producing artistic director Joseph Haj.

LORT is the largest professional theater association of its kind, with more than 70 member theaters across the United States. The organization is a forum for sharing information about all aspects of theater, particularly management issues in the areas of development, marketing, public relations, education and technology.

LORT also administers collective bargaining agreements with Actors’ Equity Association, The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and United Scenic Artists, among other major entertainment industry labor unions. Its member theaters issue more Equity contracts to actors than Broadway and commercial tours combined.

Grannemann will serve as a governing officer of LORT alongside representatives of prestigious theaters — from New York City’s Roundabout Theatre Company and the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J., to Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park — to promote the welfare and growth of the nation’s professional theater scene.

Before coming to PlayMakers in June 2008, Grannemann held key positions with the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

For more information about PlayMakers Repertory Company, visit http://www.playmakersrep.org.

WINSTON-SALEM, NC – Four of the state’s leading film organizations are among the 325 groups tapped to receive grants from the North Carolina Arts Council in the 2011-12 fiscal year.

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham led the pack with a grant award of $38,453, with Charlotte’s Light Factory receiving $28,582, the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington getting $17,000 from two grants and the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem receiving $5,000.

Today’s announcement, held at the Hanesbrands Theatre in downtown Winston-Salem, represented $6.4 million in state funding allocated to the state’s arts organizations. This reflects a 15 percent cut in state grants funding from 2010-11. The Arts Council funds are appropriated by the N.C. General Assembly. The grants announced today also include funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Linda A. Carlisle, the Secretary of the state’s Department of Cultural Resources unveiled the awards and was joined by N.C. Arts Council Executive Director Mary B. Regan, Milton Rhodes, the president of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County and representatives from the arts industry.

“This is a good investment model for any industry in the state,” said Carlisle. “These funds are expected to leverage up to $108.8 million in matching funds from private and local sources.”

Also receiving funding were many theater organizations throughout the state, including Triad Stage in Greensboro ($57,656), the North Carolina Black Repertory Theatre in Winston-Salem ($28,582) and PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill ($10,000).

For more information, visit http://www.ncarts.org.

“Hick,” Derick Martini’s story of a Nebraska girl who sets out for Las Vegas, starring Alec Baldwin, Blake Lively and Chloe Moritz, filmed in Wilmington earlier this year. For a few key shots, however, “Hick” location manager Geoff Ryan looked to the Piedmont Triad.

“Because of scenes that required rolling hills and even mountainous regions, their location manager who I’ve worked with many years ago, reached out to me asking for very specific types of sites,” said Rebecca Clark, Executive Director of the Piedmont Triad Film Commission.

Clark, with help from location scout Randy Byers, hunted down everything from rural highways to retro hamburger stands. Locations used include Hanging Rock State Park, Highway 150 through Brown Summit and Highway 65 in Rockingham County, Budget Inn in Rockingham and Kearney’s, an old-fashioned hamburger stand in Lexington. It was “ideal and an almost exact double for the one the director had in mind,” said Clark.

According to Clark, filming went well, and she estimates that tens of thousands of dollars were spent in the Triad on securing locations, hiring local crew, permits and more.

“They filmed scenes here because they knew they could find all of the missing ingredients for their film all in the Piedmont Triad,” said Clark.

The grant will fund Zoebel’s most recent project, “Compliance.” Based on true events, “Compliance” follows a fast-food manager who is convinced by a prank caller to interrogate an innocent employee. Zoebel, a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Labs Fellow, won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director for his first feature, “Great World of Sound.” Producer Sophia Lin, a Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow, has worked with other UNCSA alumni David Gordon Green and Jeff Nichols on projects including “George Washington” and “Take Shelter.” This is her second collaboration with Zoebel.

The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute is a three-year program that supports “documentary and narrative feature film projects with themes that evoke global cultural exchange and social impact.” Filmmakers received a total of $131,000 in this series of grants.

Created by the writing team behind “24,” “Homeland” is the story of CIA agent Carrie Anderson (Danes) who suspects a fellow agent recently rescued from Iraq (Lewis) of a terrorism plot. According to the N.C. Film Commission, the production will employ an estimated 150 crew members. It will begin filming in late June and continue through the fall. Tona B. Dahlquist Casting is currently casting extras. For more information about the production, visit http://www.sho.com/site/homeland/home.sho.

Comparison to the recently expanded North Carolina film incentives reveals the severity of the cut. In the Tarheel State, an individual film has a cap of $20 million, nearly the entire budget of Michigan’s film incentive program. According to the NC Film Office, many states, including North Carolina have begun to feel the effects of Michigan’s decision, with an increase in calls from projects looking to move production to a place with a more stable and generous incentive.

Michigan has received a number of large projects in the past, with incentive packages much higher than $25 million. These changes may devastate the Michigan Film Industry and crew base, while giving other states, such as Ohio and North Carolina new projects to woo.

Best known for his role as John Givings in the 2008 screen adaptation of “Revolutionary Road,” for which he earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor, Shannon has amassed a wide range of credits during his career, including: “Groundhog Day” (his screen debut), “Pearl Harbor,” “Vanilla Sky,” “World Trade Center,” “The Runaways,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “Bug,” “Jonah Hex,” “8 Mile” and an ongoing role as a tormented federal agent in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”

Shannon’s appearance at the festival occurred literally hours after it was announced that he would play the Kryptonian arch-nemesis General Zod in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Superman reboot, which stars Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel.

Shannon was introduced at the UNCSA School of Filmmaking by RiverRun Executive Director Andrew Rodgers, who praised Shannon for “establishing himself as a really powerful performer.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever gotten anything like this,” said Shannon of the award, and he was particularly pleased that “it’s reflective of my whole body of work.”

Following a retrospective of clips from Shannon’s films, he was joined by filmmaker and UNCSA School of Filmmaking graduate Jeff Nichols, who directed Shannon in “Shotgun Stories” and the upcoming “Take Shelter,” which will be released in the fall and has already picked up steam on the festival circuit.

Director and actor, good friends, discussed Shannon’s career and their collaborations in relaxed but informative fashion, sharing anecdotes that entertained the audience on hand. “He’s kind of like a big brother to me,” Nichols said.

Like brothers, there was good-natured banter throughout. At one point, when Nichols was heaping praise on him, Shannon lifted the award above his head with mock sheepishness, delighting the crowd.

He also discussed the many acclaimed filmmakers he’s worked with thus far, including Martin Scorsese (“a great, great guy,” he said), William Friedkin, Oliver Stone, John Waters and Sidney Lumet, who died days before Shannon’s visit.

Lumet, he said, was “intimidating. He is probably one of the greatest 20 American filmmakers I can think of.”

When comparing the directors with whom he’s worked, Shannon told Nichols: “You’re nothing like John Waters.”

As much a veteran of the stage as the screen, Shannon recently completed an extended off-Broadway run in the one-man satire “Mistakes Were Made.” He’s not necessarily predisposed toward improvisation. “I respect writing a lot, because the writing is what attracts me to a project,” he said.

The characters he plays tend to be distinctive and on the edge. “Life’s a struggle and it’s hard,” Shannon observed. “The most interesting characters are those who fight the hardest.”

Born in Kentucky and raised in Chicago, Shannon honed his acting chops on stage – “I just wanted something to do after school,” he said – and, basically, went from there. Feature films beckoned, and the small roles soon became larger ones.

“For me, acting’s all about paying attention,” said Shannon. “My first agent wanted me to go to a speech therapist, so I got another agent.”

It was shortly after completing “Take Shelter,” in which he plays a man who suspects the apocalypse it at end, and his “Mistakes Were Made” stint that he received another call, literally out of the blue.

“This Superman thing came out of nowhere,” he said, recalling a preliminary “read-thru” (read: audition) with director Snyder and co-star Cavill which, Shannon related, was designed “to see if … Superman (and I) have chemistry.”

He smiled at the memory, but is very much looking forward to participating in so high-profile (and high-budgeted) a project. “That’s a hard part to play – Superman,” he observed. “I plan to luxuriate in the richness of the environment.”

Having appeared in a number of low-budget independent films, Shannon admitted that he definitely has a liking for edgy, indie-friendly material, but that he’s also a bit weary of struggling the bring the lowest-budgeted projects to fruition. “Making movies for under $1 million is … a little old,” he said.

As for his career path, “it gets muddier,” he said. “The more opportunities you have, the harder it is to figure out the right thing to do…I’d love to do as many different things as I could.”

Johnny Griffin, the Director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission, said the news that “One Tree Hill” would return to the area meant a lot for the local economy and for North Carolina’s production industry. He said the show employs roughly 115 people and spends about $1 million per episode during production.

“It’s good news,” he said. “It’s money. It’s jobs. It’s all good.”

2011 has seen a huge increase in the volume of production, said Griffin, and is shaping up to be a really positive year so far.

“We like to think we’re on a roll,” said Griffin. “And we’d like to keep going.”

“One Tree Hill” premiered in September 2003 on The WB Television Network (before it merged with UPN to form The CW). The show was created by Mark Schwahn (screenwriter of “Coach Carter” and “The Perfect Score”) and stars James Lafferty, Bethany Joy Galeotti and Sophia Bush. The story centers on a group of teenagers in a fictional North Carolina town who grow up through high school and beyond.

While Nielsen ratings for the May 17 season finale of “One Tree Hill” aren’t yet available, the show attracted 1.4 million viewers (0.9/1 rating), according to Zap2it.com.