Film Studio Offers Sneak Preview of Site

A husband and wife team has brought a bit of Tinseltown to the Oxnard Plain by converting former missile factory into a sprawling, high-tech film studio.

Terry Myers and Stanton Kaye on Friday gave local dignitaries a sneak preview of Bouquet Digital Studios, situated near Oxnard at the former Raytheon Co. plant just off Pacific Coast Highway near Hueneme Road.

Although the 26-acre complex is not expected to officially open until May, workers are speeding ahead with plans to set up a 15,000-square-foot sound stage, screening theater, offices and post-production facilities.

Myers said she searched up and down the Southern California coast for the perfect site, and settled on the nine-building complex at first sight.

“We looked at Long Beach and said no movie people will want to go to Long Beach,” said Myers, the studio’s CEO and co-founder of the Quarterdeck Corp., a software company. “We said, ‘Let’s go north,’ and we got off at Hueneme Road. That was it.”

The company expects to employ more than 200 when the rehabilitation--expected to cost less than $3 million--is complete in about six months. Myers said the company hopes to attract top talent for positions ranging from editing film using computers to designing interactive multimedia titles and creating Internet sites.

The company plans to rent space at the complex to high-tech, start-up companies to encourage techies to mix with creative types as a way to spark new ways of making film and video.

“We are going to focus a lot on showing young filmmakers how to use digital technology to lower the cost of making a film,” said Myers, a self-proclaimed techie.

Kaye, a filmmaker, discussed his plans for the company in decidedly more Hollywood terms. “I’d like to see the grammar of cinema advanced,” Kaye said.

Despite the work that remains, the complex is already beginning to resemble a studio with state-of-the-art editing rooms capable of producing entertainment in any format, including film, video and CD-ROM.

Thomas E. Forbes, the chief steward on former presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ plane, the “Capitalist Tool,” has been hired to oversee the kitchen and attend to VIPs.

And the studio has been linked by a special communications line to its sister company, Bouquet Multimedia LLC in Pacific Palisades, enabling employees at both sites to work on the same projects simultaneously.

“We are being able to plan an infrastructure that will enable us to have a collaboration among many artists,” said Andrew Lientz, a computer telecommunications specialist.

The tour through the new complex came about two weeks after Nabisco and Nestle USA shut down their operations in Oxnard, putting 700 people out of work. Supervisor John Flynn said he was glad to see Hollywood making inroads into Ventura County.

“It is great to see this opening, especially since we just lost Nabisco,” Flynn said.