Actor Gloria Bishop of Decatur is back on the job after seven months off work. She walked off set March 13, the day before Gov. Brian Kemp declared a public health state of emergency, and didn’t return to work until Sept. 30.
“There are hiccups where somebody will test positive and they have to step down for however long it is and remove the people that were in the proximity of the person that tested positive, and everybody has to get their two rounds of negative tests,” she said.
“But it is what it is, and we’re trying to be safe, and we’re trying to be healthy, and I would rather go through those precautions, I would rather wear a mask than not work.”
For many of Georgia’s film workers like Bishop, jobs dried up overnight when COVID-19 cases publicly appeared in the state, prompting business shutdowns and stay-home orders.
“It did drop off very quickly, and the state didn’t actually formally shut it down, but certainly the productions decided that it was risky,” said Lee Thomas, deputy commissioner of the Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment office at the Georgia Department of Economic Development. “There were a couple that kind of scrambled to finish up if they had one or two days left, get them in the can before they broke, but we had an awful lot of projects that were in pre-production. We had some that never got done, and then they came back recently, and they were the first ones out of the gate.” See more here.
