WILMINGTON — An icon to the local film industry and social justice warrior is being remembered by friends and family.
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Francine DeCoursey, 74, died Tuesday, Feb. 18, in hospice care after a prolonged battle with cancer.
Only 48 hours prior, on Sunday, Feb. 16, she was present at her living memorial, hosted at Jengo’s Playhouse — home to the Cucalorus Film Foundation. Around 100 or more friends, family and colleagues gathered to sing, share stories and lavish her in love.
“She was producing until the end,” Rhonda Bellamy said, one of DeCoursey’s closest confidantes and CEO of the Arts Council of Wilmington and New Hanover County. “I was still very surprised by her passing because she was so present and with us just days before.”
Bellamy officiated the memorial with former state representative Susi Hamilton.
Hamilton said she and DeCoursey’s friends, also including Mike and Sara De Vries, were prepared to plan a service, knowing the inevitable would come. DeCoursey received an ovarian cancer diagnosis in October and underwent treatment before moving to hospice in her final days.
However, Hamilton said she was surprised to receive a phone call on Tuesday, Feb. 11, from DeCoursey.
“She said: ‘I want to be there,’” Hamilton recalled. “I think Francine left this earth, having started a brand new trend.”
Close friends Jackie Marshall, Mike Glancy, Harper Peterson, local musician Laura McLean, local actress and singer Kim Pacheco and Nina Repeta, among others, were lined up for a proper send-off, whether reading poems or performing. DeCoursey’s brother, Ricahrd Smith, a guitarist for Earth, Wind and Fire, was also in attendance and played.
“And if we got off course, she would chime in,” Bellamy said with a laugh, noting DeCoursey held court for a few hours and had one song request, “I’ll Fly Away.”
A video shows the crowd clapping and singing along, wiping tears but also smiling. Despite the circumstances, Hamilton said it was a joyful event.
“When Laura McLean began to play ‘From the Beginning,’ by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Francine burst into tears,” Hamilton said, noting the song was popular among a group of “OGs” in the film industry, many in attendance.
DeCoursey is among a handful who helped propel Wilmington’s film industry to its modern-day growth, advocating for it in its earliest days when Dino de Laurentiis bought the land on 23rd Street and built a studio which today stands as Cinespace. DeCoursey operated businesses out of the studio, including On Location Production Services and The Telemedia Group.
A producer, writer, director, editor and often referred to as a community godmother, DeCoursey’s time on Wilmington’s film scene goes back to the early ‘80s. She moved to Wilmington after having graduated from UNCG in communications-broadcast/cinema and had plans to only stay a short time before moving to California.
However, she immersed herself into the community and ran On Location for 39 years. It cast background actors and extras, as well as facilitated location needs for productions. DeCoursey’s projects included “One Tree Hill,” “Freedom Song,” “Twilight Zone,” “Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored,” “Touched by an Angel,” and “Black Dog,”
She also produced multiple documentaries, covering a plethora of topics surrounding social justice, including racial healing, women’s issues and environmental concerns. In fact, since at least the ‘90s, DeCoursey has embraced the moniker “activist filmmaker.”
She grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, next to a Gullah Geechee community, at the height of racial segregation in the 1950s. As a young child, DeCoursey bore witness to her best friend, Dixie Lee Baker — whose family was Gullah Geechee — endure hate from other white children. DeCoursey told Rachel Lewis Hilburn on ”Coastline,” a show that once aired on WHQR, it hurt her heart and inspired her at age 6 or 7 to become a champion for others.
“I really think my activist soul was born that day,” DeCoursey said in 2022, specifying that day in her youth when a white girl called her best friend the N-word.
DeCoursey said it struck a fire within her to make it her “life’s work” welcoming voices who may not have one — or at the very least aspiring to help others.
In her lifetime, DeCoursey created numerous documentaries about racial injustices, including “Remembering 1898: Moving Forward Together” and “The Wilmington Ten: Justice Denied, Lives Interrupted.” She even served as a founding member of the 1898 Centennial Foundation, which campaigned for the 1898 Memorial installation on Third Street. She spent eight years documenting and researching events of the only coup in American history to date and her documentary aired on PBS and was used in classrooms.
“Everything that is produced today about 1898 is still reliant on a lot of Francine’s materials,” Hamilton said, noting UNCW has an archive of it.
Hamilton said DeCoursey also worked with PBS last summer as they were putting together their latest documentary, “American Coup: Wilmington 1898,” which debuted in November.
DeCoursey learned of the events at a time when barely anyone was talking about Wilmington’s harried past, much less working toward racial reconciliation. She told Hillburn on WHQR that her friendships with Bellamy, Joe Wright of the Wilmington Ten, and community activist and artist Madafo Lloyd Wilson helped inform her (she created Madafo Day after his passing last year).
DeCoursey told Hilburn she gained trust as a white woman within the Black community by showing up and making genuine connections.
Bellamy said DeCoursey’s work on the Wilmington Ten documentary was impactful toward Governor Beverly Perdue’s pardoning of the group. She added it was also one of the greatest highlights of DeCoursey’s life.
Even more important were how the relationships in filmmaking didn’t stop when the cameras turned off. Bellamy said Willie Vereen of the Wilmington Ten and his wife, Connie Tindall, became family to DeCoursey. She helped them throughout their life, whether it was visits to doctor’s appointments or stopping by with a meal, and even spoke at Tindall’s funeral in 2012.
“Once Francine latched onto you, she didn’t let go,” Bellamy said.
DeCoursey’s care for others remained apparent in almost every relationship she built. Though she never had children of her own, Hamilton said: “We were all her children.”
This was apparent in relationships she fostered as part of the Big Buddy program when she arrived in Wilmington. DeCoursey’s family lived in California and, as she detailed on “Coastline,” and she said she missed her siblings, nieces and nephews greatly. So DeCoursey signed up to mentor children in marginalized communities who didn’t have resources or opportunities to enter a field like film.
She showed them first hand what her job entailed and ended up being a part of many of their lives for 30 years or more.
“It was all about human dignity and respect for Francine,” Bellamy said, noting some of the kids she mentored spoke at her living memorial Sunday as well.
DeCoursey also became the inspiration for the N.C. Film Partnership that Hamilton started in 2021. Its goal is to train the next workforce for film and TV production in the state and break down barriers to entry, particularly introducing more women and people of color into the workforce. This aligned with DeCoursey’s work casting people not normally given the opportunity to gain access to the industry.
“The film industry often includes a trade, a skill or a craft handed down from father to a son or mother to daughter,” Hamilton said. “So unless you have those connections, it’s really difficult to break into the industry and the crew base. So the mission for the film partnership is to open a portal and make sure everybody has a chance to participate.”
Hamilton said DeCoursey was always transcending boundaries when it came to stacking the industry with varied faces — and finding unique ways to do so. Hamilton recalled the carnival scene in “Sleeping with the Enemy,” filmed in Wilmington in 1990, and starring Julia Roberts. On Location was in charge of finding large castings of extras.
“She convinced the production that if she could pull in enough volunteers to do a scene instead of paying all these extras, could they make a donation to a local charity instead,” Hamilton recalled, saying it benefitted the community overall and the production with a tax credit. “Through and through, she was just an original.”
That model was part of what local DJ Brandon “Bigg B” Hickman for Coast 97.3 witnessed firsthand. He met DeCoursey as a young child when he attended the Boys and Girls Club in downtown Wilmington. He said DeCoursey fostered a relationship with the club and pulled an entire group of kids from it for the 1994 film “The Inkwell,” starring Larenz Tate and Jada Pinkett.
“They did a Black family day out at Fort Fisher and we marched for the film,” Hickman remembered.
In return, the film made a donation to the Boys and Girls Club.
“And if Ms. Francine pulled individual kids for scenes outside of the group, they would get their first paycheck,” Hickman said, pinpointing his first time on screen in “Firestarter” as a 7-year-old first introduced to another 7-year-old — the young, budding star, Drew Barrymore.
Hickman also appeared in the TV film “Freedom Song,” due to DeCoursey.
“She was a true advocate,” he said.
Outside of casting, the two created a deeper friendship as Hickman served on the Black Arts Alliance of which DeCoursey was a founding member. Hickman said when he became president, she encouraged and supported him in the new role.
DeCoursey also served on the board of Cinema Sisters Film Festival and the N.C. Black Film Festival, the latter of which both Hickman and Bellamy have represented.
“And she used a lot of her wisdom and connections to make the Black Film Festival prosper and make it bigger and better than what it was,” Hickman said.
“We were just always in lockstep,” Bellamy added, not able to remember exactly how or where she first met DeCoursey. “She was just always there in my life — for 30 years.”
Bellamy was featured in many documentaries DeCoursey made, including “Women in the Arts,” as well as the 1898 and Wilmington Ten documentaries. Bellamy said their paths always crossed because they focused on similar causes.
“We eventually started calling ourselves sisters,” Bellamy said.
Hamilton can remember the exact day she was introduced to the 6-foot blonde, whose infectious energy and positive attitude radiated in every room she walked into.
“I met her at an impressionable age of 19,” Hamilton said, though DeCoursey’s relationship with her family went deeper.
Hamilton’s father, Jim Holladay, also worked in the film industry and in the early ‘80s was part of a group that came up with a program to digitize and edit film. Holladay eventually worked with The Telemedia Group, run by Mike De Vries and DeCoursey, on EUE/Screen Gems lot. They did video production and editing, EPK, and Screening Room Transfer and Projection.
“Francine looked across the table at my father and said: ‘Jim, we’re related,’” Hamilton said. “‘My mother’s maiden name was Holladay and all of our people are in South Carolina.’ We were able to determine, in fact, it’s true — we’re distant cousins.”
But Hamilton’s official introduction came years later during a college internship at the studio. She said The Telemedia Group were producing dailies for “Billy Bathgate,” starring Dustin Hoffmann and Bruce Willis. Hamilton recalled walking into the office upon DeCoursey taking a phone call with a reporter who had misquoted her regarding a then-new NC-17 rating.
“She wasn’t unkind, because there was not an unkind bone in Francine’s body,” Hamilton said. “But she was indignant and it was fun to watch. She never had a problem speaking the truth.”
By 2010 when Hamilton made her bid as a N.C. House of Representative for New Hanover County, she tapped DeCoursey to serve as her campaign manager. Her resourcefulness, honesty and loyalty made her the right choice, Hamilton said.
“I didn’t trust anybody more to love me and take care of me and make sure I didn’t do something really stupid — and that is the truth,” she said; Hamilton ended up winning and served from 2011 through 2017.
She said DeCoursey was always lobbying for something better, whether film incentives, human rights, women’s rights or a more equitable world for people of color.
“She was a gadfly; make no mistake,” Hamilton said. “There was nobody in the state of North Carolina in the film industry that didn’t know about Francine DeCoursey. She was constantly educating — through action.”
A scholarship in DeCoursey’s name is being set up for students who wish to study film through Cape Fear Community College’s video and film tech program; it can be accessed here. Mention the Francine DeCoursey Scholarship Fund in the comments field as her fund is not yet listed.
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