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1<br />
Earl Owensby Determined to Expand<br />
Filmmaking Industry in<br />
SHELBY, N.C.—The roar of the race<br />
track, the smell of the grease paint— those<br />
are the images guiding Earl Owensby's<br />
senses as a moviemaker here.<br />
For Owensby, an industrialist-tumed-filmmaker,<br />
is determined to put North Carolina<br />
on the map as a place to make films, with<br />
his product in the foreground. To do that<br />
he has turned to racecar driving, a dangerous<br />
occupation for those not acquainted<br />
with 70 mph leaps off ramps or stunt<br />
crashes into burning buildings.<br />
Owensby is determined, however, to<br />
.prove that filmmaking can be a big industry<br />
here, as a Charlotte Observer reporter<br />
discovered recently during an interview with<br />
the young, forward-looking producer and<br />
star.<br />
Parts of the interview by Wayne Nicholas<br />
follow;<br />
Earl Owensby. an industrialist-turnedmoviemaker,<br />
likes to retell Russell Conwell's<br />
lecture, entitled "Acres of Diamonds." in<br />
which a man sold his farm, left his family,<br />
and went on a futile search around the<br />
world for diamonds.<br />
Finally, the man, finding nothing, committed<br />
suicide. But the man who bought his<br />
farm simply walked out to the fountain in<br />
the back yard and spotted a fabulous diamond.<br />
Later he found out the whole farm<br />
was sitting on top of one of the world's<br />
greatest diamond mines.<br />
"That's what I hope to do," Owensby, the<br />
soft-spoken multimillianaire. says.<br />
The Diamond in Owensby's 44-acre back<br />
yard—a sparkling new movie studio complex—has<br />
its own kind of glitter. The swank<br />
complex includes a blue-carpeted office<br />
building, a two-story, A-frame house that<br />
serves as a combination guesthouse, screening<br />
room and modern studio.<br />
Owensby hopes it's just the beginning.<br />
The 39-year-old moviemaker spent his<br />
schoolboy days living with his adoptive<br />
parents in the Rutherford County mill village<br />
of Cliffside, where his afternoon and<br />
Carolinas<br />
evening hours were spent running the projector,<br />
popping corn, taking tickets and<br />
cleaning up at the local theatre.<br />
Then one morning a little over two years<br />
FINER PROJECTION -SUPER ECONOMY]