As South Carolina residents know well, the Palmetto State is home to many gorgeous locations, and over the years several Hollywood productions have swooped into town to capture its unique landscapes and bring them to life on the big screen. To celebrate the state’s history as a filming location, BetSouthCarolina.com took a break from the momentum behind South Carolina sports betting to rank the top movies filmed in the state.
In an attempt at objectivity, we began by considering all the movies shot in South Carolina that are listed on Wikipedia. To determine the order, we considered IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes Audience score, Rotten Tomatoes Critic score, and Academy Awards. Using these data points we created a scoring system.
Here are the results:
The number one film shot in South Carolina is the sprawling American tale “Forrest Gump.” Appropriately released on the Fourth of July long weekend in 1994, “Gump” earned over $675 million in worldwide box office gross and won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for its star, Tom Hanks. With that kind of resume, it’s no surprise to see “Forrest Gump” top our list. In fact, it would likely be considered the best film shot in a number of states.
The patriotic story about a simple-minded man bumbling his way through modern American history features scenes filmed in over ten different states — including Maine, Arizona, Montana, California, New York, and Louisiana.
South Carolina, however, is featured most prominently. While in the story Forrest is born and raised in Alabama, the area in and around the city of Beaufort stood in for Forrest’s hometown, and the majority of filming took place in South Carolina — including Forrest’s time in Vietnam, which was shot along the coast in the salt marshes of the state’s low country.
The second film on the list is the harrowing ’70s survival flick “Deliverance” starring Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, and Burt Reynolds as a foursome of “city folk” whose overnight canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee river goes disastrously awry.
In the movie, the calamitous water way is actually the Chattooga River, which serves as the border between Georgia and South Carolina. The stunts performed on the river were so dangerous, “Deliverance” was denied production insurance prior to filming. The movie went ahead anyway.
Ironically, given the horrific events of the film, “Deliverance” would inspire a cottage industry of white water rafting along the Chattooga and its network of tributary rivers, with several stunt people who worked on the movie opening up rafting companies in the area. “Deliverance” continues to drive tourists to South Carolina to this day.
Tied with “Deliverance” at number two is “An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life,” which is only classified as a movie in the most literal “moving image” definition of the term.
Recorded live at the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina, “An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life” is a tag-team comedic variety show featuring Steve Martin and Martin Short. Premiering on Netflix in 2018, the live stage show captures the veteran comedians signature wry sense of humor.
Number four on the list also stars Burt Reynolds. “The Longest Yard” is about a disgraced former NFL quarterback who, after getting tossed into jail, must assemble a football team made up of fellow in-mates to take on the prison guards. While many will be more familiar with the 2005 remake of “The Longest Yard” starring Adam Sandler — which also featured Reynolds in a smaller role as the coach — the 1974 original famously enlisted the support of Georgia’s Governor at the time, Jimmy Carter, in order to gain access to film on location in the Georgia State prison. So although much of the film is shot Georgia, additional filming was done on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina.
At number five is the American indie classic, “Daughters of the Dust,” which made its debut at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. The film, set in 1902 and also filmed in the South Carolina low country, is a poetic depiction of the life and culture of the African-American Gullah hailing from the Sea Islands along the south-eastern coastline. Written and directed by Julie Dash, “Daughters of the Dust” is the first film distributed theatrically in America that was directed by an African-American woman.
Further down the list at number seven is “The Notebook,” another film set and shot amongst the marshy scenery of the South Carolina low country. The irresistibly sappy romance was filmed primarily in and around Charleston. Not only did “The Notebook” vault the careers of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams to super-stardom, it’s also responsible for spilling untold number of tears onto the floors of cinemas across the world en-route to scoring over $177 million dollars at the international box office in the Summer of 2004.
The number eleven film on our list is based on the true story of a small town South Carolina football coach, played by Ed Harris in the film, who takes a disadvantaged, intellectually challenged young man (Cuba Gooding Jr., the titular “Radio”) under his wing and makes him the de-facto mascot of the T.L. Hanna High School football team in Anderson, SC.
Finally, the twelfth best film shot in South Carolina according to our list is “Magic Mike XXL” — the follow-up to the unexpected breakout hit, 2012’s “Magic Mike,” set in the world of male stripping and loosely based on the life of its star Channing Tatum. The 2015 sequel follows most of the main cast from the original film as they travel to Myrtle Beach to attend a male stripper convention.
BetSouthCarolina.com will keep you entertained with several research items such as this as we wait for mobile and online sportsbooks to launch.
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Author
Jeff Parker is an Entertainment Writer for BetSouthCarolina.com. A writer for film, television and the internet, Jeff is a life long movie buff, with an actual Masters Degree in Popular Culture. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he works full time as documentary filmmaker and producer.
