Matthew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banking heir who was once invested in shoes, is now in the movie business – in Georgia.
Mellon, the ex-husband of Jimmy Choo shoe tycoon Tamara Mellon (he proposed in a helicopter while circling his family’s headquarters), just became a principal in Medient Studios. That company was founded by Bollywood producer Manu Kumaran, who is planning to build a Google-like campus of sound stages, houses and offices on 1,550 acres outside Savannah.
Mellon — who just got back from Georgia — said he was brought in to help raise the $300 million needed for construction. “They’ve already raised $40 million,” he explained.
“Georgia is the new tax-credit capital of the world,” Kumaran told me. “We’re all whores. We run to where the money is.”
Bean counters estimate that filming in Georgia will be 62 percent cheaper than filming in Los Angeles or New York City.
Donald Trump Jr. has also visited Kumaran’s site. Trump Jr. — who has a prefabricated building company in nearby Charleston, South Carolina — could build the campus.
Now remarried to fashion designer Nicole Hanley, who bore him two children, Mellon is chairman of the New York Republican Party’s Finance Committee.
He wouldn’t discuss his ex-wife Tamara’s new memoir, “In My Shoes,” in which she trashes him.
But others criticize Tamara’s book as self-serving revisionism steeped in payback. “She has a complaint about everyone,” one former associate told me. “The whole tone is negative.”