Columbia Tells of Studio Expansion : Development: 15-year plan would add mostly office space, including two 11-story buildings. Corporate headquarters are moving to Culver City.
Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc. has unveiled plans for adding more than 1 million square feet of office, retail and technical space on its Culver City lot.
The renovation and construction is aimed at establishing the site as Columbia’s corporate headquarters. It is estimated that it will take 15 years to complete.
The 75-year-old movie lot at Overland Avenue and Washington Boulevard is the former home of MGM Studios. At 44 acres, it is by far the largest studio lot in Culver City, a community that likes to bill itself as “the Heart of Screenland.” Culver Studios, the second-largest studio property in the city, is less than one-third the size of Columbia.
The plans were presented, along with a public slide show, to 250 people last week at one of the lot’s stages. It was the first step of a review process that is expected to take at least a year. Environmental, traffic and fiscal impact studies have to be prepared, and the proposal has to wind its way through the city Planning Commission, Redevelopment Agency and council.
The plans call for buildings of Art Deco style in cream and other subdued colors, to complement the site’s Thalberg building. The eastern end of the lot, where the Thalberg sits, would be turned into a grand entrance way, with a park, a circular driveway and twin 11-story office buildings.
The Columbia complex now totals 1.5 million square feet, including 457,000 square feet of offices. Other structures include sound stages, production and technical facilities and storage space.
Several of the aging beige bungalows and other buildings would be demolished or renovated under the plan. The project would yield a net increase of about 1.1 million square feet--of which 1 million would be for offices.
By the project’s completion in 2005, the lot would have almost 5,000 employees. Columbia, which acquired the property from Time Warner Inc. earlier this year and is in the process of moving its corporate offices here from New York, has just a few hundred employees at the site now. In the 1980s, MGM employed about 1,500 workers there.
Ken Williams, Columbia senior vice president for finance and administration, declined to offer an estimate of the project’s cost other than to say that it would reach several hundred million dollars. Once completed, the studio would generate more than $18 million in tax revenues for the city each year, Williams said.
Columbia said the new office buildings are needed to handle projected growth and the consolidation of operations that are now in Burbank, New York and elsewhere.
Because of technological and business changes in the film industry, huge sound stages and other industrial space have become less crucial, while “creative and administrative spaces” have become more important, according to a Columbia spokeswoman.
Culver City Mayor Steven Gourley expressed some reservations about the office expansion. “We’re happy to have them redevelop it as a studio, but we have to look very seriously at any doubling of office space,” he said. “We’re looking to make movies there, not build new offices.”
Some of the offices might be built on nearby sites, Gourley said.
