I did a video production in Greenville, South Carolina just over a decade ago and found that it was one of my favorite towns in the South. Visiting there today it’s even nicer than it was a decade ago. Greenville is artsy and outdoorsy (hiking, biking, kayaking). It’s home to Furman University and business seems good.
Forbes Magazine even listed Greenville, S.C. as one of the top downtowns in America. (And right now, someone in Los Angeles is reading this thinking, “Greenville has a downtown?” Right next to Greenville on that Forbes list is Santa Monica.)
What I learned on this trip is the man behind the downtown Greenville’s renewal was Max Heller. An unlikely character to brought to the South in an unlikely situation. While the Jewish Heller was just nineteen he fled when his hometown ofVienna, Austria when the Nazis moved in. He had a sponsor in Mary Mills, a Greenville native, who arranged for him to get a job with the Piedmont Shirt Company in Greenville.
Heller eventually became a VP at that company before starting his own shirt company which grew to 700 employees before he sold the company in 1962. From 1971—1979 he was the mayor of Greenville and set out bring revitalization to downtown Greenville and helped transform the Main St. area into version of a European village. Just like the kind he knew back home before he fled the coming Holocaust.
Heller died in 2011 at 92 and there’s now a statue of him overlooking Main St. in Greenville. Perhaps an unlikely figure to pop up on a blog on screenwriting, but this blog has always been friendly to unlikely places and unlikely people. And a great story is a great story.
P.S. I imagine someone else has written about this before, but there has to be some connecting tissue between the transformation that Heller brought to Greenville and BMW locating their sole North American vehicle manufacturing plant in nearby Spartanburg County, South Carolina. BWM employees 8,800 employees in South Carolina. If you drive a X3, X4, X5, or X6 cross-over SUV it was built in South Carolina.
P.P.S. The only film I can find that was partly shot in Greenville was the George Clooney film Leatherheads. And since that’s a football film I should mention that Clemson University (who won the NCAA Football National Championship earlier this year) is located 40 miles west of Greenville.