Wilmington's first family of film makes a celebrated return to the Port City

Last month, during Wilmington's 29th annual Cucalorus Film Festival, dozens of festival attendees and film industry workers showed up for an event at the new DuntonCine Studios on North 23rd Street.

Alongside tubs of beer on ice and a Southern-style buffet, the assembled throng enjoyed the display of a vintage 65mm Mitchell film camera once owned by the director Stanley Kubrick and demos of such advanced camera techniques as "rear projection," which allows actors to do a scene in a studio while, on the screen, it looks like they're in a moving vehicle.

If the gathering felt like a homecoming, or maybe a family reunion, that's because it kind of was.

The man of the hour was Lester Dunton, the English camera whiz and digital imaging technician who was bringing DuntonCine Studios back to the very same building where, more than three decades earlier, his father had opened the Joe Dunton & Co. camera shop, or JDC, in Wilmington, renting camera kits and lending expertise and support to dozens of locally filmed TV and movie productions, from "Matlock" to "One Tree Hill."

Joe Dunton, 78, is an English camera innovator who not only is a Member of the Order of the British Empire but is also a revered member of Wilmington's film community despite having moved back to the United Kingdom several years ago following his retirement.

The elder Dunton, who got his start in London's film industry in the 1960s, first came to Wilmington in the 1980s to work with late Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who built the studio here, now called CineSpace Wilmington. Initially operating out of what was then DEG Studios, Dunton eventually opened JDC at the 23rd Street location where DuntonCine Studios is now.

Joe Dunton sold JDC to Panavision around 2010, and sold the building on 23rd Street a few years later.

Lester Dunton, 51, whose big frame and affable air recalls his father, said he's been coming to Wilmington since he was about 14, when his dad would bring him and his siblings to spend summers here. He's got "lots of memories" of hanging out at Wrightsville Beach on Johnnie Mercers Fishing Pier, the old wooden one before the current-day concrete pier was built.

As a teenager, Lester helped his dad at JDC on 23rd Street before studying electronic imaging at Westminster University in London and going to work doing video playback and technical visual effects for such directors as Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino, and on such productions as "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace."

"I've always been very technical," he said.

He jokes that he didn't get into Britain's National Film and Television School, "But now they ask me to go back and teach."

First family of film

If Wilmington has a first family of film it would probably be the Duntons, even if Lester finds the designation "a bit much."

Lester's younger sister, the director Erica Dunton, has made several independent movies in Wilmington and last year directed episodes of hit Amazon show "The Summer I Turned Pretty" here. She's also directed episodes of "Ted Lasso," and will be back in the Carolinas next year to direct episodes of "Outer Banks."

Lester and Erica's younger brother Richard, a cameraman, is in the film industry as well.

During the Cucalorus Film Festival in November, Erica Dunton gave a heartfelt introduction to "Sisters," a feature she helped bring to the festival, and got choked up as she talked about what Wilmington and its film community mean to her. At the party for DuntonCine Studios, she set up a remote video link with her dad in London so that he could be part of the gathering as well.

"I love that Lester has a base here now and projects can just pull their vehicles into the stage and shoot when they need," she said. "Having Lester's equipment and experience here in Wilmington is going to be so good for this town and it's wonderful to see the Dunton name back up on North 23rd Street just next to the studio where it belongs. It feels like exciting new chapters are beginning for all."

Lester, whose girlfriend lives in Wilmington, had actually moved his business into a space on Oleander Drive about three years ago, and was going to relocate into Wilmington's new Dark Horse Studios.

"But obviously this came up and I decided this was an opportunity I couldn't really miss," Dunton said of the building on 23rd Street, cracking a smile and saying, "I was kind of mad when my dad sold it." He then added that his father was "very happy" about Lester's decision to purchase what is kind of the Duntons' ancestral Wilmington home.

Lester said he bought the building "both for sentimental reasons, and I think it was a good investment in this area."

For the past year since he bought it, Dunton has been working on getting the building back to its former glory. Parts of the sprawling 45,000-square-foot structure are still being rented out and will be for a while, although Dunton said he's got thoughts of expanding in the future.

Along with the rest of Wilmington's film industry, Dunton said, he's looking forward to getting back to work in 2024 after productions shut down for most of the last year as strikes by writers' and actors' unions were resolved.

"I think we'll get some work in February, but my gut feeling is it takes longer than that to actually get going again and actually come into production," Dunton said. "Some people think that work is gonna start flooding back in February. I'm not so sure."

When production does return, DuntonCine Studios should be well-positioned.

"There hasn't really been a bricks and mortar (camera shop here) for the past 10 years," Dunton said.

Dunton essentially does two kinds of work: the rental of camera kits and camera equipment, like speciality lenses, and also visual effects work, like rear projection. He's got a car specially outfitted with a camera to capture driving footage that can be projected behind actors doing scenes in vehicles.

"Right now, if they want to do something like that, they've got to get it from Atlanta," he said.

He'd also like to rent out the space for photo and video shoots. In London, he's still got a location that's "purely manufacturing," making dolly tracks, grip equipment and the like.

"Real core engineering," he said. "I want to bring some of that here, actually make some American product to sell. But that's a little bit down the road when I get established, get some money coming in."

He admittedly faces some challenges related to the changing film business, and says more than once that the Dunton business in Wilmington is "going to be different from what it used to be."

One thing that will be the same, however, is that when future productions are made in Wilmington you'll continue to see the Dunton name in the credits, something that's been true for nearly four decades, and will now continue for many years to come.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Lester Dunton opens DuntonCine Studios on 23rd Street in Wilmington NC