The Forrest Gump set location decisions were made with Columbia's Mary Morgan Kerlagon, as were the locations for GI Jane and

The Patriot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film set locations and house sites share similar approaches in appropriateness and availability. Both fields have practitioners always on the lookout, always scouting new locations. Kerlagon, now a residential real estate agent with Russell and Jeffcoat in Columbia, has done both.

Working with movies put Kerlagon in environments with directors like Oliver Stone and companies like DreamWorks. Shifting to residential real estate, Kerlagon stayed with the larger firm. Russell and Jeffcoat is ranked #59 out of the top 500 real estate brokers in the country.

Kerlagon was born in Alexandria, Va., across the Potomac River from the District of Columbia. Her father had two careers. He was a CPA for the nation's Bureau of Standards, and he was a jazz musician.

Her grandfather on her father's side, William Jennings Stannard, was the U.S. Army's first commissioned band leader. He composed

Morning Star March, which is played regularly at nearby Ft. Belvoir, Va., the home of the Army's engineering programs. Stannard is buried in the Arlington National Cemetery.

Kerlagon moved to live with her mother's parents in Lehigh Acres, Fla., near Ft. Myers, where her grandfather was a linotype operator at the Ft. Myers News Press and her grandmother was a nurse anesthetist.

At Alva Junior and Senior High School, Kerlagon finished seventh out of 72 senior classmates. Her peers elected her "Most Talented." She was already president of both the Art Club and the Debate Club.

She worked her way into becoming a paralegal in Portland, Me., while she lived in adjacent Cape Elizabeth.

From law firm management, Kerlagon branched into beauty pageant production, and she produced several.

From beauty pageant management, Kerlagon moved into movie location selection.

She learned to absorb the script before there was any discussion about location.

Then, as in Cast Away with Tom Hanks, she could recommend Fiji because it was the ideal location for the script. But there were times when the location was so good, the script had to adjust to fit the site.

Coming to S.C. for movie locations, Kerlagon got to know the people in the state's film office, as they were trying to lure more movies into the state for production. She was asked to run the office for Charleston's Charlie Way, the state's secretary of commerce at the time.

While in state government, Kerlagon finished the state's in- house leadership management course called the Executive Institute.

The opportunity to move to Columbia and to stay in Columbia was the ideal schedule and environment for her son Stephen's combined conventional and special needs education. Stephen did get to see five countries before he was four years old.

Kerlagon and her husband Steven, a film and theater scenic painter who grew up in North Hollywood, bought a house on Reamer Ave. near Satchel Ford Road so son Stephen could attend Satchel Ford Elementary School and also meet his afternoon appointments. He's now 13 and in the seventh grade at Crayton.

Besides succeeding among his 13- year- old contemporaries at Crayton, Stephen is an accomplished violinist. The decision to move to Columbia and especially to the Satchel Ford neighborhood was a good one.

Another son, Jonathan, runs Superior Southern Landscaping, also in Columbia. There are two more sons, Todd and Chad, both out of state and in the movie set business. Kerlagon has two daughters, Stacey and Megan, who live in Simi Valley, Calif.

The Kerlagons purchased another property close by in the Satchel Ford area for a future home. Husband Steven has been building the second house himself when there is no movie set to paint and when he's not working on his Ford F- 150 pick- up's conversion to hydrogen power.

The new house, almost finished, is 2,900 square feet with five bedrooms and four bathrooms. It has a geo- thermal heating and cooling system with pipes running 185 feet into the ground. There is an English garden in the front and a Japanese garden in the back where the pool is planned. Move- in by March sounds doable, according to Kerlagon.