The president of Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios died Friday evening when the small aircraft he used to be piloting crashed on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The studio showed on Saturday that Steve Mensch, its 62-year-old president and common supervisor, had died.
“We’re extremely saddened by way of the passing of our expensive good friend Steve Mensch,” the studio stated in a observation. “Steve used to be a liked member of our group for greater than 8 years and well-beloved locally of Atlanta. It is laborious to believe now not seeing him smiling right through the halls. We can omit him dearly. Our middle is going out to his circle of relatives as all of us ship them our prayers.”
Florida Division of Freeway Protection and Motor Cars by the use of AP
The crash came about in Homosassa, about 60 miles north of Tampa. Pictures from the scene display the aircraft having come to leisure the wrong way up on a highway. The Federal Aviation Management and the Nationwide Transportation Protection Board are investigating.
The only-engine Vehicles RV-12IS used to be registered to Mensch at his house deal with within the Atlanta suburb of Fayetteville, in keeping with FAA data.
Mensch helped suggest for and take care of Georgia’s film tax credit of greater than $1 billion a yr. The ones lavish subsidies have made Georgia some of the lively puts in america for movie and tv manufacturing.
Mensch were given into the film industry when he got to work for Function Techniques, which supplies apparatus for the film trade. He used to be employed by way of Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting to run its studio operations, later changing into director of strategic manufacturing partnerships. It used to be there that he started to foyer state govt for extra help to film and tv manufacturing.
Ric Reitz, an actor who additionally helped create the tax credit, instructed The Atlanta Magazine-Charter that Mensch helped marketplace the state prior to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and helped release the Georgia Manufacturing Partnership, an leisure trade lobbying workforce.
“He used to be looking to formulate the imaginative and prescient for {the marketplace} prior to the Olympics and sought after a assume tank of other folks locally to make Georgia aggressive,” Reitz stated. “He used to be the most important determine within the our enlargement to change into a powerful movie and TV marketplace.”
After a yr serving to plan and construct an enormous studio in China and transient stint serving to to open 3rd Rail Studios in suburban Atlanta. Perry employed Mensch to lend a hand create and run his namesake studio in 2016. The studio sprawls throughout 330 acres of a former Military base in southern Atlanta that Perry bought in 2015.
Mensch died at the identical day that Perry launched “The Six Triple 8,” a battle drama a few most commonly Black and all-female International Warfare II battalion. The movie used to be shot on the Atlanta studio.
Mensch is survived by way of his spouse, Danila, and 3 youngsters.
