Tag: 50 Who Made Atlanta
Arthur Blank

Tyler Perry
Whether you flock to Fandango to purchase advance tickets for the latest Madea movie or chortled along with last year’s lacerating parody on Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, one thing is certain: Atlanta filmmaker Perry is the only major Hollywood player dedicated to cranking out hits from his adopted hometown. Only five years after shooting his first film (for one scene, he took a chain saw to a couch inside his own house), he was directing Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg and Grammy winner Janet Jackson in last year’s film adaptation of playwright Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf—partially shot at his sprawling thirty-acre Tyler Perry Studios in southwest Atlanta. At the TPS grand-opening party in 2008, Perry surprised mentors Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Cicely Tyson by dedicating soundstages in their honor as Will Smith beamed and Oprah Winfrey cried her eyelashes off. An awed Tyson said, “I never dreamed I would witness this in my lifetime. What I’ve achieved in my career is minuscule in comparison to this.”
Carl Patton
When Patton took over as president of Georgia State University nineteen years ago, the campus was blighted with boarded buildings and classrooms full of students commuting into town for the day. Through his vision—and his ability to raise more than $1.5 billion for campus expansion, including a science center, a 2,000-bed University Commons dorm, fraternities, and sororities—he transformed Georgia State from a place where students went out of necessity into a genuine draw for the state’s best scholars. The Carnegie Foundation gave the school the prestigious ranking of research university. With three years left in his reign, Patton endorsed something he never thought would happen in his lifetime: fielding a football team.
Pano Karatassos

Tom Cousins
Tom Cousins built a skyline-shaping empire and established a national model for urban revitalization.
Outkast

Bill Lowery
Atlanta was hardly a destination for recording artists until radio DJ Lowery laid the grooves for the hot-wax scene with his Lowery Music Company publishing house and his Southern Tracks recording studio. The native Louisianan—who got his start in the city as a disc jockey and Georgia Tech football game announcer—began recording and promoting artists in the early fifties. His catalog’s hits over the years included “Be-Bop-A-Lula” and “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” from artists such as Gene Vincent, Joe South, novelty songster Ray Stevens, and the Atlanta Rhythm Section. He was a two-time president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (which hands out the Grammys). In 1999, five years before his death, Lowery sold his 7,000-song catalog to Sony. Today his son, Butch, manages Bill Lowery Music and Southern Tracks studio, which in recent years has hosted recording sessions by Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Pearl Jam.
Bobby Cox

Bill Bolling

Alston D. “Pete” Correll
Correll, former head of Georgia-Pacific, was an old-school CEO. He worked harder than anyone else (regularly clocking seventy-hour weeks), earned lots of money for his shareholders (the stock price jumped well over 35 percent when private Koch Industries bought out GP in 2005), and has served on countless nonprofit boards. He can make things happen with a single phone call. For example, when he heard that Ebenezer Baptist’s renovation had stalled for lack of funding, he got ten companies to donate $100,000 each—in one afternoon. Though outgoing Grady Health System CEO Michael Young has gotten much of the glory for the beleaguered hospital’s turnaround, it was board chair Correll who asked the Woodruff Foundation for $200 million over lunch. The funds helped finance Grady’s renovations and convince Young to take the job.