Despite the current production slowdown, downtown’s Los Angeles Center Studios is about to undergo an expansion with the addition of six state-of-the-art sound stages.
Investors in the 20-acre campus, which once was the corporate headquarters of Unocal Corp., said a dearth of sound-stage construction in the 80s and early 90s, as well as a demand for major digital production spaces, will keep the facility filled. Six sound stages were completed two years ago at the studios and were occupied 95 percent of the time during the first half of this year.
“The business is starting to crank back up after coming to a screeching halt at the end of June,” said Stephen D. Smith, a partner in Los Angeles Center Studios.
Production activity has been down the past few months, but much of that was the result of movies being hurried into development before the anticipated strikes this year of actors and writers. Production is expected to remain quiet for six to nine months as new projects move through development.
With that in mind, Smith and his partners have given the go-ahead for a number of projects to begin at the downtown studios.
“We’d like to attract more TV productions to our stages,” Smith said. “But with only six sound stages, we’ve been full doing features. With the new stages, we can accommodate both TV and film.”
Year-long construction
Construction on six new sound stages is scheduled to begin at the end of the year, taking a little more than a year to complete.
While there was a flurry of sound stage construction in 1998 and 1999, there is still a large demand for stages linked by high-bandwidth, fiber-optic wire for live feeds and digital technology.
Los Angeles Center Studios is banking on the demand for high-tech facilities as well as convenience to increase its business.
Next month the downtown studios will start leasing 200,000 square feet of space in the 12-story office tower once used by Unocal. The 1950s-era building, with its sleek lines and dark gray glass exterior, has been largely vacant for several years while the studio used the interior for filming. Part of the movie “Thirteen Days” with Kevin Costner was filmed there as well as “Planet of the Apes.” Scenes from “X-Files” were filmed in the 12th-story executive boardroom that has a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles’ towering skyscrapers.
Los Angeles Center Studios wants to rent its office space at about $2.50 a square foot to entertainment-related businesses such as production companies, talent agencies and Internet companies.
Already the International Stunt Association is in the building as well as Zoom Cartoons and Zen Management.
Last week, the downtown studio project began converting an old Unocal cafeteria into a commissary that will serve two meals a day to film and TV crews working on the campus.
On a recent morning, a crowd of actors dressed as firefighters and police officers gathered outside the office towers to film a segment of “That’s Life,” a CBS show. Bright red fire engines were parked to one side as well as a van marked “Bomb Squad.”
Inside Sound Stage 2, huge blocks of Styrofoam were being carved into a replica of a hillside for the filming of a video for Disney’s Cinemagique.
Few stages built over years
More sound stages for filming is good for Hollywood as long as more productions stay in town. Currently there are 405 sound stages in town, with 20 of them coming on line in 1998. That represents half of the new facilities built since 1970, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
For the past two years, more film companies have chosen to shoot their productions in Canada because of the weaker currency and generous government tax breaks. The U.S. Commerce Department estimates that runaway film productions cost the American economy $10 billion a year. But the film industry in Los Angeles is expected to see revenues grow slightly this year to $32.1 billion from $31 billion last year, according to the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., a Los Angeles-based group that promotes filming in Southern California.
The threat of runaway productions has prompted a bipartisan group of U.S. senators recently to introduce legislation that would give a tax break to companies that decide to keep their productions in the country.
In Los Angeles there were 143,400 people in 1998 working in the entertainment industry. As of July this year, that had dropped to 131,600 workers in the industry, according to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.
“The challenge up there (Canada), however, is to get good crews and access to good sound stages,” said Morrie Goldman, a spokesman for the Entertainment Industry Development Corp.
