Patricia Reed Scott, who was instrumental in transforming New York into Hollywood-on-the-Hudson as the city’s film, television and theatrical production promoter under two mayors, died on May 23 in Neptune, N.J. She was 86.
The cause was a subdural hematoma sustained in a fall, her son, Matthew Scott, said.
A former singer and host of an Emmy Award-winning television series on aging, Ms. Scott played a major but invisible role in the hundreds of productions she helped lure to New York in the 1980s and ’90s.
As defunct factories were transformed into television studios and sound stages, the city was reborn as a film mecca, recapturing its early-20th-century primacy, which prevailed before the industry decamped to California to evade Thomas Edison’s motion picture patents and unpredictable East Coast weather.
Ms. Scott’s former husband, George C. Scott, won (and refused) an Oscar for playing the swaggering George S. Patton in the 1970 film about the World War II general, but it was Ms. Scott who actually did perform as a kind of real-life field general when she commandeered the Brooklyn Bridge for three hours one Sunday morning so that Bruce Willis could order Army tanks across the span to corner supposed Arab terrorist sympathizers in the 1998 thriller “The Siege.”
Ms. Scott pulled another Patton-worthy feat when she cleared Times Square of vehicles and pedestrians for two hours early one Sunday so that a panicked Tom Cruise could sprint through it during a dream sequence for the 2001 film “Vanilla Sky.”
Ms. Scott served as director of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting under Edward I. Koch from 1983 to 1989 and as commissioner of the office under Rudolph W. Giuliani from 1994 to 2002.
“There is no point in trying to reinvent something when, in fact, the original invention was the very best,” Mr. Giuliani said when he appointed her.
Her second stint was book-ended by two economic crises: a Hollywood boycott of production in New York in the early 1990s to protest what studios considered exorbitant labor costs, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which had a devastating effect on the entertainment industry.
“In her seven years in between, however,” James Sanders, the author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies” (2001), said in an email. “Pat was able to encourage and nurture growth of the film industry, and, importantly, demonstrate that New York City could flexibly accommodate truly large-scale demands for major studio productions.”
By 2000, according to a study commissioned by the city, the industry spent $5 billion in New York making feature films, television programs and commercials and employed about 70,000 people. Mr. Sanders said Ms. Scott had “successfully guided the city’s film and television production industry though a delicate and important time, setting the groundwork for its dramatic later expansion in the 2000s and 2010s.”
Alan Suna, chief executive of Silvercup Studios, a New York City-area production company, recalled working with Ms. Scott “when the industry was just building momentum” in the city. “She was one of its earliest advocates,” he said, “lobbying to bring more production work to New York.”
Shirley Patricia Reed was born on March 1, 1934, in Portsmouth, Va. Her father, Frank Stovall Reed, was a chief petty officer in the Navy. Her mother, Mary Ellen (Hudson) Reed, owned a grocery.
Pat, as she became known, performed publicly for the first time as a 5-year-old, when, accompanied by her mother, she appeared on a local radio program to read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and sing a song.
If she was smitten by the stage, she patiently waited until she graduated from George Washington University with a degree in English before pursuing a career in the performing arts.
She met Mr. Scott in Washington during a production of Luigi Pirandello’s play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” then worked with him in summer stock near Detroit, where they placed a bet on a long-shot horse named Pat Again and won $600, enough to stake them for their search for Broadway stardom.
She and Mr. Scott married and lived in a cold-water flat while he worked overnight in a bank and spent days auditioning. Ms. Scott co-founded a company called Studio Duplicating Service, which typed and copied scripts. When her husband was cast as Richard III in 1957 in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, she publicized his sudden success and found him an agent.
Their marriage ended in divorce in 1960. In addition to their son, Matt, she is survived by a daughter, Devon Scott; and a grandson. Mr. Scott died in 1999 at 71.
Ms. Scott turned to music, becoming a nightclub jazz singer who appeared, in some cases, on the same bill with Sarah Vaughan and Barbra Streisand and performed on “The Today Show.” Then, with rock superseding jazz in popularity, she shifted careers and joined the Harry Walker Agency, which represented clients for speaking engagements.
In the 1970s, Ms. Scott was hired to handle public relations for the city’s Department of the Aging. In 1976 she won two Emmys for producing the television series “Getting On” for PBS. She was a deputy press officer under Mayor Koch before he appointed her to the film office, where she initiated Early Stages, a program to familiarize young people with live theater.
To attract filmmakers, the city offered incentives like tax abatements and low-interest loans and expedited the permit approval process, provided police details for crowd control and boasted of the pool of creative talent and postproduction facilities.
“It’s always been our position that we don’t censor scripts,” Ms. Scott said, adding that her office gave a film a good review if it made money for the city.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
