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ATLANTA — The president of Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios died Friday evening when the small airplane he was piloting crashed on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The studio confirmed on Saturday that Steve Mensch, its 62-year-old president and common supervisor, had died.
“We’re extremely saddened by the passing of our pricey pal Steve Mensch,” the studio stated in a press release. “Steve was a cherished member of our workforce for greater than eight years and well-beloved locally of Atlanta. It’s laborious to think about not seeing him smiling all through the halls. We are going to miss him dearly. Our coronary heart goes out to his household as all of us ship them our prayers.”
The crash occurred in Homosassa, about 60 miles north of Tampa. Pictures from the scene present the airplane having come to relaxation the other way up on a highway. The Federal Aviation Administration and the Nationwide Transportation Security Board are investigating.
The only-engine Vans RV-12IS was registered to Mensch at his residence handle within the Atlanta suburb of Fayetteville, in line with FAA data.
Mensch helped advocate for and preserve Georgia’s movie tax credit score of greater than $1 billion a yr. These lavish subsidies have made Georgia one of the vital lively locations in the USA for movie and tv manufacturing.
Mensch acquired into the film enterprise when he began working for Characteristic Techniques, which gives tools for the film business. He was employed by Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting to run its studio operations, later turning into director of strategic manufacturing partnerships. It was there that he started to foyer state authorities for extra support to film and tv manufacturing.
Ric Reitz, an actor who additionally helped create the tax credit, instructed The Atlanta Journal-Structure that Mensch helped market the state earlier than the 1996 Summer season Olympics in Atlanta and helped launch the Georgia Manufacturing Partnership, an leisure business lobbying group.
“He was attempting to formulate the imaginative and prescient for {the marketplace} earlier than the Olympics and needed a suppose tank of individuals locally to make Georgia aggressive,” Reitz stated. “He was an necessary determine within the our development to turn out to be a robust movie and TV market.”
After a yr serving to plan and construct an enormous studio in China and temporary stint serving to to open Third Rail Studios in suburban Atlanta. Perry employed Mensch to assist create and run his namesake studio in 2016. The studio sprawls throughout 330 acres of a former Military base in southern Atlanta that Perry acquired in 2015.
Mensch died on the identical day that Perry launched “The Six Triple Eight,” a warfare drama about an principally Black and all-female World Conflict II battalion. The movie was shot on the Atlanta studio.
Mensch is survived by his spouse, Danila, and three kids.
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