SCOVIL PRODUCTIONS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Author, Holocaust Survivor]
Job Titles:
- Head
- Producer With Gary Scovil
Job Titles:
- Members of the Youth Group at Springhill Avenue Temple
Job Titles:
- Artist, Historian]
- Dean Mosher Studio
Job Titles:
- Director of the Fairhope Museum of History
Job Titles:
- President
- Member of the Norwalk Chamber of Commerce
- Studio Owner
Scovil had the chance to come to the Gulf Coast area in 2007 when he worked with Tom McKnight on the documentary "Thunder on the Gulf." He loved the area, he said, especially Fairhope.
"Fairhope reminded me of where I grew up in Connecticut. It had such a great small-town atmosphere and was such an artsy community just like back home," he said.
He bought a house in Mobile in the spring of 2009 and started his search immediately for anyone in the production industry so he could continue his endeavors here. Scovil came into contact with Andrea Faust Holloway. Scovil and Holloway immediately hit it off and the wheels began to turn as they started looking for their first documentary they could produce together.
The state of Alabama held a kick-off campaign at the Grand Hotel to promote its 2010 project to promote small towns and downtowns as a way of promoting tourism in the state. Scovil and Holloway, along with the help of local attorney Corey Lipscomb and many others, decided the best way to promote tourism in Fairhope was to produce a documentary about the town and the people and places in it. "The Utopian Fairhope" documentary was born.
After nine months of hard work and dedication the final product was ready for release. "We are so proud of the way that we have portrayed this wonderful little town," Scovil said. "We are excited to share it with others."
"The Utopian Fairhope" has only been out for a short time but the accolades are already coming in. At the Alabama International Film Festival a few weeks ago in Troy, the "The Utopian Fairhope" won the Alabama Showcase Award. "It is truly an honor and one we are very proud of," he said.
Gary Scovil is Monroe's one-man, veteran video man. He is the founder and production guru behind Vision Media, a state-of-the-art video and audio production company.
"I have several buildings on my property. The cottage is an office and I turned my two-car garage into a studio." said Mr. Scovil, who doesn't need a lot of space now that everything is computerized. "Almost everything I shoot is on location, because I don't have a sound stage like they do in Hollywood."
Mr. Scovil had many media/entertainment gigs, including owning his own recording studio and touring as a sound-man, before finding his niche and passion was video and audio production.
"Going back to the '70s, I got started because I had a lot of friends who were musicians, guys like Brian Keane, and the one thing they needed was to find gigs so I started being their booking agent," Mr. Scovil said. He quickly learned that in order to book gigs, you needed to send the club owners a demo tape. "That led me to doing the recording for them and going to school." By 1975, Mr. Scovil had received two certificates from the Recording Institute of America, a subsidiary of New York University.
In the midst of promoting regional bands, Mr. Scovil landed his own gig as the sound-man for the Talking Heads. "I toured every major city in the United States and then some doing audio. I was the knob twiddler," he said. "I decided I hated touring so in 1978 I opened a recording studio [Scovil Productions] in Norwalk."
While op erating his recording studio, Mr. Scovil worked with many jazz artists including Larry Coryell and the Brubeck Brothers as well as artists like Vicky Sue Robinson of the famed, "Turn the Beat Around." "Back in those days my niche was working with a lot of jazz artists, simply because most of my friends were jazz artists and I met a lot of them socially," Mr. Scovil said.
As the 1980s approached, Mr. Scovil added video production to his job offerings to stay current with the latest trend and changed the name of his company to Spotlight Video. "By the mid-80s I had made the transition to doing video production since there was hardly any broadcast or cable networks back then," Mr. Scovil said.
By the early 1990s, he was fully immersed in video and audio production. That's when he changed the name of his company to Vision Media and that's when his cell phone started burning with video work. "I went back to school and took a crash course in TV and Film Production and immediately started getting offers for commercials and work from independent production companies," he said.
"The thing is there's a lot of television shows, especially news magazines like 'Current Affair' and 'ET' that are made by independent production companies that sell the show to the channel," said Mr. Scovil, who moved his business and his family to Monroe a decade or so ago. "There is a lot of syndicated programming out there, for example Oprah Winfrey owns her own show and sells it to the networks under her production company, Harpo Productions."
Over the years, Mr. Scovil's work has become quite popular among the television circuit. He's done production on a number of notable television shows, including "Entertainment Tonight (ET)," "America's Most Wanted" and "Inside Edition." However, the bulk of his TV work has come from cable television and audio production for national news clips and documentaries like the renowned, "The Battle Over Citizen Kane" in 1995, Ric Burns' epic "The Way West" and the full production of "Yale and Public Service" featuring former president George H.W. Bush and many, many more.
What happens, in most cases, is that Mr. Scovil will receive a call from an independent production company to film part of a show, say a segment of the show that has to do with Connecticut. "I'll get a call from a talk show that will say something like, Ray Romano is going to be on our show and there's a guy who has a high school buddy and lives in Connecticut - will you go and interview him," said Mr. Scovil, who then finds the guy and feeds the footage live via satellite. "I do mostly short clips for news pieces, like one time Maury Povich sent me to Donald Trump's office to get a quick piece of him saying something."
He's quite the reporter, having interviewed many celebrities like Dylan Baker, John Turturro, Mickey Rooney, Eileen Ivers, Chris Noth, Liev Schreiber and Robert Klein. But, not all of Mr. Scovil's assignments are as easy and exciting. "I've had situations where I've been sent to prisons or federal courthouses." he said.
Since all of Mr. Scovil's equipment is high tech, he can get a call (on his cell phone, which never leaves his side), shoot and edit the footage and have it streamed live.
While most of his work is short-term, spur-of-the-moment projects, Mr. Scovil was producing a weekly religious television program called, "Voice of Vision," which aired on Fox for 13 years, and a weekly cable television show called "In His Name."
"What I've been doing since I lost the Fox program last year is live concert DVDs and I've been doing them with multi-camera production," Mr. Scovil said. "Being in the music business for so many years, I still know a lot of people and I get hired to do their live videos."
Gary, who is a member of the Norwalk Chamber of Commerce, devotes his spare time to writing a book on foreign affairs.
Gary Scovil and Dan Pickering promised to have him return to the studio - soon when a recording session is in progress to experience the operations first hand.
James Philpot, a local veteran who was among the first American troops to enter Dachau, was interviewed. In April, he was officially presented with a Bronze Star he was awarded in 1962 but had never received.
Job Titles:
- Producer / Director of Seven League Productions
Jim Burroughs, a producer/director of Seven League Productions, recently put the final touch on his film, the music sound track, at Scovil Productions Recording Studio in Norwalk.
SHAFTY advisor Kimberly Zimmerman said "we hope to have the documentary used for educational purposes, perhaps included in Holocaust curriculum and use filming as a method of teaching historical events."
Job Titles:
- Director
- Producer - Director
"From what I've seen of who all they interviewed, I thought it was a good representation of Fairhope and what we're about here, from artists and writers to community volunteers," said Kant, who himself appears in the documentary.
This weekend's premiere was originally going to be a one-night event. But there was so much interest that a second showing had to be added, Holloway said.
"Of course we had to invite everybody who's in it, and then more and more people were interested," Holloway said. "There will be about 280 people coming. The Performance Center only has capacity of 140."
Holloway said she is working on a deal to distribute the movie nationally through Barnes & Noble Inc.
MacKnight, 24, is a 1978 graduate of Norwalk High School. He has played lead guitar with the Ariel Band for two years.
Today, he's a part-time video jockey, assistant recording engineer and associate producer with Scovil Productions.
Hirsch and Garfunkel will introduce the film prior to the screening. Hirsch is a pre-med major at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Garfunkel is studying astrophysics at Auburn University.