ATLANTA (AP) — The president of Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios died Friday night time when the small aircraft 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 are extremely saddened by the passing of our expensive buddy Steve Mensch,” the studio mentioned in a press release. “Steve was a cherished member of our crew for greater than eight years and well-beloved locally of Atlanta. It’s arduous to think about not seeing him smiling all through the halls. We will 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 (100 kilometers) north of Tampa. Photos from the scene present the aircraft having come to relaxation the wrong way up on a highway. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.
The single-engine Vans RV-12IS was registered to Mensch at his residence handle within the Atlanta suburb of Fayetteville, in response to FAA data.
Mensch helped advocate for and preserve Georgia’s movie tax credit score of greater than $1 billion a 12 months. Those lavish subsidies have made Georgia some of the lively locations within the United States for movie and tv manufacturing.
Mensch acquired into the film enterprise when he began working for Feature Systems, which offers gear for the film trade. He was employed by Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting to run its studio operations, later changing 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-Constitution that Mensch helped market the state earlier than the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and helped launch the Georgia Production Partnership, an leisure trade lobbying group.
“He was making an attempt to formulate the imaginative and prescient for {the marketplace} earlier than the Olympics and wished a assume tank of individuals locally to make Georgia aggressive,” Reitz mentioned. “He was an essential determine within the our progress to change into a powerful movie and TV market.”
After a 12 months 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 (135 hectares) of a former Army base in southern Atlanta that Perry acquired in 2015.
Mensch died on the identical day that Perry launched “The Six Triple Eight,” a battle drama about an largely Black and all-female World War II battalion. The movie was shot on the Atlanta studio.
Mensch is survived by his spouse, Danila, and three youngsters.
