Jeffrey Stepakoff is creating the rooms where TV stories happen.
Jeffrey Stepakoff spent decades writing and producing shows such as Dawson’s Creek and movies such as Disney’s Tarzan. Now he’s rewriting the story of Georgia’s entertainment industry.
“I’ve had this dream. I’ve had this vision. There’s this building momentum to create a permanent and sustainable alternative to Los Angeles,” says Stepakoff, the president of the nonprofit Trilith Institute in the same Fayetteville development as Trilith Studios.
A tax credit of up to 30% has made Georgia a destination for movie and TV production for more than a decade, with a robust infrastructure of soundstages, support services and “below-the-line” crew—the grips, set builders and other essential personnel who aren’t on marquees.
Stepakoff helped build that production corps as the founding executive director of the Georgia Film Academy from 2015 to 2022, but the above-the-line screenwriters and directors were missing.
“We’ve got to have our own community of storytellers,” he says, zooming in on the writers rooms where TV shows are conceived, developed and written. Almost every TV series, even if set in Atlanta, is written in Los Angeles.
“There’s no model to follow” to build a story ecosystem, Stepakoff says. “But this is really new territory, and I just can’t think of any work that’s more important.”
The impact is economic, cultural and even spiritual, fitting the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world, he says.
The Trilith Institute began operations in 2023 with philanthropist funding, including $1.5 million from the Trilith Foundation. Trilith developer and Chick-fil-A Chairman Dan Cathy is on the board.
The institute provides professional training for writers, directors, editors, actors and others. It offers youth classes and summer camps. A semester on-set program is launching with 10 Clemson students and plans to expand into a residential college program. It has a yearlong residency for an emerging creative to develop and produce a script while teaching part time. And it runs the Writers Room of Georgia, a filmmaker support network.
It’s all in the service of story, something Stepakoff still creates himself. The Atlanta native is polishing a TV pilot a decade after largely leaving Hollywood and an ABC Family series, Chasing Life, to run the Film Academy, teach at Kennesaw State and write novels.
He departed the academy in 2022 to start Content Talent South, an agency representing writers, though he dislikes calling storytellers “content creators.” “Content is the stuffing that goes into a sofa,” he says. “This is my soul I’m putting on the paper.”
CTS continues, but Stepakoff’s focus is the institute. He organized it in fall 2022, shortly before marrying Stellar Bodies owner Amy Selig, with whom he lives in Buckhead. Introduced by their publicist, they have between them four children in their 20s and a fifth who’s a rising high school senior.
They lead a blessed life, Stepakoff says, and to achieve a similar happily ever after, the Georgia film industry needs just six writers rooms. “Those rooms will sustain themselves and start to explode because those writers will stay, and they will train up new writers who will stay,” he says. “It’ll all start to take off.”
THE TRILITH INSTITUTE
trilithinstitute.org
@trilithinstitute
WRITERS ROOM OF GEORGIA
writersroomga.org
@writersroomga
