Booming Studios Reach Space’s Final Frontier

In a cavernous hangar where B-1 bombers were once assembled, filmmakers have re-created a Midwestern town and plunged it into millions of gallons of water for the motion picture “The Flood.”

The locale is a long way from the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, but the movie’s producers say there’s no way the mammoth production could fit in the studio’s sound stages.

Nor would there be room at any other studio in Hollywood, for that matter.

As the giddy growth of the entertainment industry roars ahead--fueled by a crush of big-budget movies, television shows, commercials, music videos and CD-ROMs--studios are suddenly faced with a dilemma: They’re running out of room.

“I’ve been doing this sort of thing for 20 years. Never have I found it so difficult to get a studio,” said Ted Kaye, vice president of videotape television at the Walt Disney Co. Like every other studio, the Disney lot in Burbank is choked with production.

With nowhere left to film on studio lots, shows are being sent to outside facilities--and they’re lining up to get in.

“This year, for the first time, it’s not about money, it’s can you physically find a place?” said Kaye. “Then you just close your eyes when they tell you what they’re going to charge you.”

In fact, the demand for stage space has become so intense that empty factories and warehouses from Lancaster to Long Beach are being converted to makeshift film studios at an unprecedented rate.

Examples:

* An old tubing factory in the city of Commerce has been used for the movies “Speed,” “Waterworld” and the upcoming “Volcano.”

* A former military weapons plant in Van Nuys is now the locale for Fox TV’s “Fire Co. 132.”

* On the industrial outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, old warehouses, furniture factories and printing plants have come alive with film work.

* A former postal facility next to Union Station is being used for the new CBS series “EZ Streets.” Less than a block away, another new series, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” is underway.

The demand for space has been building for a few years, but it reached a peak in the spring when the fall TV schedules were announced. With two new broadcast networks--UPN and WB--boosting production, an increase in original programming for cable networks such as HBO and Showtime, and an abundance of syndicated fare, the need for sound stages exploded.

“There are so many more kinds of productions now than 10 years ago,” said Herman David, president of Santa Clarita Studios, where Fox’s “Melrose Place” is filmed and parts of the volcano movie “Dante’s Peak” are being produced. “Before, there was just TV, features and commercials. Now there’s music videos, CD-ROMs and interactive types of products.”

At the same time, the traditional motion picture business has been gobbling up studio space--particularly the plethora of big-budget pictures, with huge indoor sets and special effects.

“Lost World,” Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” sequel, is taking up six large sound stages at MCA’s Universal Studios in Universal City. On a giant stage at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City, a replica of Air Force One is being built for a Harrison Ford thriller. A few doors away, an alien world has been created for “Starship Troopers.” Five sound stages on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank have been consumed by “Batman and Robin” plus a gargantuan hangar in Long Beach that once housed the Spruce Goose.

“As these productions grow in terms of their technical needs, you need larger spaces,” said Howard Weitzman, MCA’s executive vice president of corporate operations.

Even the proliferation of digital effects has heightened demand for sound stages, because the actors must be filmed on an indoor set. The live footage is then blended with the computer-generated images.

The result: “There isn’t a stage in town that isn’t booked,” said Lisa Rawlins, vice president of studio and production affairs at Warner Bros.

In the past several months, every studio facility has been overwhelmed with pleas for stage space. Steve Auer, general manager of the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, recalled that a year ago he was actively seeking tenants. This year, he was deluged with requests.

The studio’s 12 stages are filled with a slew of sitcoms, including “The John Larroquette Show,” and Auer still gets about five calls a day from people in search of space.

“They’re all asking me, ‘Where can I go?’ I say, ‘I really can’t tell you. All my competitors are in the same boat. They’re all full.’ ”

Production companies used to reserve sound stages well in advance, and a handshake sealed the deal. No more. In May, Tom Treloggen, senior vice president of production at MTM Entertainment, found a sound stage in Culver City that he wanted for a new TV series, “The Pretender.”

The studio owner told Treloggen that the stage would go to whoever showed up with a check first. MTM wasted no time. It signed the contract, put its money down and moved in.

Certainly no one in the entertainment industry is complaining--after all, it’s hard to weep when business is so good.

And the demand for sound stages has created opportunities for some.

One such individual is John Warren, whose eight-sound-stage company in Santa Clarita specializes in made-for-TV movies--the “based-on-a-true-story” business, as he calls it.

Most of these productions fled the Los Angeles area earlier in the decade. Now they’re returning because of union concessions and a more cooperative regulatory climate. But TV movies typically use sound stages for only a few weeks, making it tough to get into the bigger studio facilities that are booked for months at a stretch.

As a result, many in the industry turn to Warren, who had the foresight to build permanent sets that can be used for the ubiquitous hospital and courtroom scenes. TV movies about the O.J. Simpson case, the Menendez murders and the Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuoco saga have been filmed at his studios.

The entertainment industry’s appetite for real estate has also brought a glimmer of life to the moribund aerospace business by providing downsized defense contractors with rental income on some mothballed plants.

John Vandraiss, new business manager at Rockwell International in Palmdale, recalled getting a phone call from the producers of “The Flood” late last year, asking if he’d consider renting the aerospace concern’s old B-1 hangar. They wanted a very large facility for the set they hoped to build for a bank caper movie starring Morgan Freeman. The B-1 plant, big enough to swallow five football fields, dwarfs even the largest sound stage in Hollywood.

Why not? Vandraiss figured. The giant hangar had not been used to assemble B-1s for eight years. Some modification work on 747s and C-130 gunships had been done there, but the plant would likely be empty for several months.

Paramount barely beat out two other productions that wanted the plant at the same time. Since then, Vandraiss has had calls from every major studio “and half the smaller ones.”

The producers of “The Flood” said they wouldn’t be making the same movie without the hangar. Besides its size, the building’s built-in ceiling cranes, which were used to heft airplane fuselages, were another selling point. The cranes now hold massive bars that release torrents of “rain” onto the set.

“It’s the great thing about making movies,” said co-producer Ian Bryce. “You have a problem, and you make it work.”

These days, it seems, the bigger the building, the more filmmakers want it. Howard Hughes Cos. and developer Maguire Thomas Partners have turned their complex of former aerospace plants in Playa del Rey into a buzzing hive of production, with films such as “Independence Day” and “Titanic.”

Some of the buildings will be torn down and replaced with the entertainment and technology campus that Maguire Thomas is developing for the DreamWorks SKG studio. When that project is completed, “one of our concerns is we won’t have enough” sound stages, said Tim Walker of Maguire Thomas.

The industry’s appetite for real estate has also been good business for former location manager Jim Thompson. His Van Nuys real estate brokerage, Real to Reel, rents out alternative production space--mostly buildings abandoned by defense contractors and manufacturers.

But industry insiders say the growing use of industrial buildings for filmed entertainment doesn’t solve the problem of overflowing studio lots. Not all productions can make do with warehouses--they usually aren’t soundproofed, often lack adequate parking and many have columns inside that obstruct camera views. Sitcoms and talk shows typically require the large sound stages approved for audiences that can only be found at studio and network facilities.

Jack O’Neill, NBC’s vice president of facilities, came up with the idea of fitting “Access Hollywood” and “Later With Greg Kinnear” on one sound stage. He also put in 30,000 square feet of trailers for “Access” production offices. But O’Neill complains: “You can’t continue to run a business by doubling up on studios and running production from trailers.”

Undoubtedly, some productions will disappear within the next few months as television shows are canceled. But empty studios will be sucked up in a heartbeat, executives say. “Right now I have three shows lined up for midseason replacement,” said Mike Klausman, head of CBS Studio Center in Studio City.

Still, the tight market won’t last forever. Several studios have major expansions underway. Disney, Warner Bros., MCA/Universal, NBC and independent studios could collectively add dozens of sound stages over the next several years.

And there’s no guarantee that the fast pace of production will continue. The new TV networks might fail. The syndication market could tank. Makers of TV movies might abandon Los Angeles again for cheaper locales.

If the would-be blockbusters now in production bomb come summer, studios might consider scaling back next year’s slate.

Already there are signs of a more conservative stance by studios. After a string of box-office disappointments, Disney announced in June that it will halve its motion picture production. In October, Paramount, saying that too many films were being made by Hollywood, vowed to reduce its output.

“This industry is . . . feast or famine,” said Thompson of Real to Reel. “Right now it’s feast, everyone is busy and has been for the past eight months or so. But I don’t know if I’d advise someone to go out and try to buy stage space. You just never know.”