Titanic

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By PETER BRENNAN

Orange County Business Journal

The sinking of the Titanic on celluloid, that is was another milestone for Gordon & Williams General Contractors Inc.

The Laguna Hills-based company, which built the $16 million Fox Studios Baja near Rosarito Beach where “Titanic” was filmed, also constructed the new Fox Network Center in Century City, MTV’s Western U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica, and the animation studio in Phoenix where Fox’s “Anastasia” was made.

“If someone calls us to build a grocery store in Idaho, I’d tell them we’re not the firm. But if you want a digital television studio, call us,” said Mark Williams, who founded the company seven years ago with partner Bruce Gordon.

Fox Studios Baja was built on 40 acres just south of Rosarito Beach in Mexico’s Baja California. Construction ran around the clock and involved 1,000 workers. “We built everything but the boat,” said Williams.

The centerpiece of the studio is a 17 million-gallon water tank that measures 600 feet by 600 feet, where most of the water scenes for “Titanic” were filmed. The tank’s size enabled director James Cameron to create the illusion of action on a vast ocean.

The facility also has two smaller water tanks, 9,000 square feet of permanent office space, 70,000 square feet of enclosed stage space and more than 90,000 square feet of construction workshops, storage areas and physical plant facilities.

Gary Ehrlich, senior vice president for Fox Studio Operations, gave the company high marks for its construction of the Baja California studio.

“The site was just barren dirt on a lot in June (1996),” Ehrlich said. “We were shooting by September. I’m still having trouble believing it myself.”

In addition to “Titanic,” the studio was used to film scenes for the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

The company was launched by Williams and Gordon in a spare bedroom in Williams’ home. The two partners met while working in the mid-1980s at the Irvine office of a Canadian general contractor.

They each ponied up $5,000 to launch their own shop, with Williams doing the cost estimating and Gordon overseeing construction.

Their first break came with a $40,000 renovation job at Fox’s television center in Hollywood. “It wasn’t glamorous at all. We hung doors,” Gordon said.

But as Fox Television grew to become the fourth largest network, so did the work.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake became a blessing by changing a relatively small-scale job at Fox-owned affiliate KTTV-TV Channel 11 into a $28 million contract to retrofit the building.

In 1995, Gordon and Williamson got their biggest job: building the Fox Network Center and the News Corp. Executive Building in Century City. The 460,000-square-foot Network Center was completed in November, two months ahead of schedule.

The News Corp. Executive Building is scheduled for completion in June.

On a recent workday, Gordon drove a golf cart around the Fox studios in Century City, where the “Chicago Hope” and “The Simpsons” television shows are produced.

“Hanging out with Hollywood stars is not that glamorous,” said Gordon. “We’re pretty square people.”

The company is looking to diversify. Gordon and Williams wanted to build a portion of the Getty Center in Brentwood but were turned down because, according to Gordon, “they said we’re an entertainment contractor. We don’t want to get typecast.”

Williams and Gordon wouldn’t reveal earnings, though if they collected between 3 percent and 4 percent of the cost of a project the industry norm they would have generated about $4 million last year from the $106 million the company was paid as a general contractor.

“We didn’t start the company with visions of being a $100 million company,” Gordon said. In fact, he said, the partners “were a bit naive” about what it took to run a business. He said they were surprised by the amount of time they had to spend in the office rather than on the job site.

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