Studio, New York Style

For
an essay by the president of Hollywood Post Alliance, Leon Silverman,
click here.

An upcoming television movie about New York City Mayor Rudy
Giuliani’s handling of the Sept. 11 attacks will be shot in
(drumroll) … Montreal!

If it weren’t such a disaster, it would almost be funny. That,
in a nutshell, sums up the problem of runaway production. NYC has one
of the deepest talent pools for feature, broadcast, and commercial
production in the world, and yet, even a movie about NYC is being shot
out of the city. Indeed, out of the country. That means that NYC loses
all of the money that would have been spent shooting in the city, and
worse yet, many of the jobs and wages that would have gone to local
talent. Instead, those resources will go abroad.

But runaway production is only one of many whammies that have sent
the production industry in NYC reeling. Certainly the Sept. 11 tragedy
has had a negative impact on production, but several other key factors
have also played roles.

For one, the fear of writers’ and actors’ guild strikes
caused producers to front-load 2001 with projects, leaving the end of
that year with a production dearth, and studios with a backlog of
projects to rollout. For another, most of the NYC pilots shot for
episodic TV this past year did not make network schedules. Furthermore,
the slowdown in the U.S. economy has weakened production generally,
with New York taking a large part of that hit.

Most important, a recently commissioned research points out that
many productions would like to shoot in NYC, but are unable to do
so—not because of a minor increase in overall costs, but because
of a lack of enough first-rate production facilities, combined with the
inconvenient and expensive need to travel to multiple locations around
Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs for virtually every other
production-related task. After all, time truly is money in the
production biz.

Pat Swinney Kaufman, deputy commissioner and director of the New
York Governor's Office for Motion Picture and TV Development, put it
most succinctly in a recent The Hollywood Reporter interview: “I
can say with certainty many times that we have lost productions because
we don’t have soundstages—our soundstages have filled up,
and we were not able to provide. For us to continue to attract
[projects] as successfully as we have in the past, we need to make sure
we have excellent soundstages.”

And now (drumroll) … for the commercial:

Studio City New York (SCNY) has been created to meet the persistent
need for NY soundstages. For the first time, one of the finest one-stop
production facilities in the world will be located in mid-town
Manhattan.

Seven years in planning, SCNY will be built on 11th Avenue, between
44th and 45th streets. The facility will be a 15-story, studio-office
complex, constructed exclusively to meet the needs of the entertainment
industry. SCNY is designed as a totally self-contained pre- and
postproduction movie and television studio.

SCNY will house 140,000 square feet of film and television
production space, encompassing seven separate studios, along with
400,000 square feet of permanent production office space and
post-production facilities. In addition, SCNY includes a full-acre
outdoor rooftop backlot on the ninth floor, providing unsurpassed NY
skylines for exterior shots without ever having to leave the
building.

SCNY will be built on land acquired from the city of New York. All
of the needed permits have been secured, along with a strong financial
partner, Lehman Brothers. SCNY only lacks an anchor tenant before we
begin construction, and at press time, we were expecting a deal to be
signed shortly. Be assured, in addition to building the finest facility
of its type in the world, the SCNY team is committed to working
aggressively with everyone on a local, regional, and statewide basis to
do everything possible to insure the production scene in NYC becomes
more hospitable to American production companies.

In doing so, we hope to do our small part to help revitalize and
expand NYC’s production industry and bring runaway production
jobs and revenue back where they belong—to New York City and the
USA.

Lee Tomlinson is the managing director of Pacifica Ventures, who
along with Hines and Lehman Brothers are partners in the Studio City
New York project. Prior to his involvement with SCNY, Tomlinson held
senior positions and/or consulted with various entertainment-related
companies, including the American Film Institute, the U.S. Olympic
Committee, Norman Lear’s Act III Productions, Irvine Corporation,
and Soundelux Entertainment Group.