Plan Unveiled for $150-Million Film, Television Studio

Seeking to satisfy the growing demand for studio space, a Swiss developer and a Los Angeles architecture firm plan to build a $150-million production facility in Culver City, yet another sign of the entertainment industry’s steady march to the Westside.

The plans for New Studio, on a 12.25-acre site at Slauson Avenue and the eastern end of the Marina Freeway, include 12 sound stages, production offices, craft shops, a 400-room hotel and restaurant and a rooftop movie theater.

Space in the New Studio is earmarked for independent lease, with the builders hoping to serve a growing market of film, television and advertising producers. The facility may include a large anchor tenant, a New Studio executive said.

As with the stalled proposal for a DreamWorks SKG development at Playa Vista, New Studio executives are billing their facility as a new kind of high-tech movie factory. With digitally equipped sound stages, in-house film and book libraries and state-of-the-art data and video transmission capabilities, TV and film producers would be able to work on-site with their computer support staffs, planners said.

“This is definitely something that’s exciting,” said Richard A. Marcus, chairman of Culver City’s redevelopment agency and a member of the City Council. “We look these days to encourage developments that are low-impact and high-tech, and it’s almost like this is made to order for what we’re trying to do.”

The proposal by developer LuxCore LLC--owned by RoTo Architects and the Swiss developer Kistler A.G.--will be presented to residents and the Culver City Council tonight. Construction could begin in late 1998, the developers said.

The planned studio is similar in concept to the Roy E. Disney project to build a 14 sound-stage complex in Manhattan Beach, another facility targeting the independent market.

Although New Studio will have less than half of the sound-stage space of the Disney facility, it would have its advantages, New Studio executive James Magowan said.

“We are closer to the creators of media live, closer to the Westside and we’re an easier hop from Sony or Fox or the proposed DreamWorks site,” Magowan said.

A Culver City location has another important advantage. In addition to being the home of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the onetime aerospace manufacturing center is home to a growing number of computer industry and new media firms, including Web site developers Digital Planet and W-3 Design, which are in the city’s Hayden Tract.

But the New Studio development is primarily driven by the film industry’s space crunch, which has turned everything from empty warehouses to vacant airport hangars into makeshift sound stages.

Increasingly squeezed out of spaces in the major studios, producers of feature films, and even those directing shoots for CD-ROMs, are clamoring for a place to shoot.

“Twelve sound stages is substantial, but there is a great need for it,” said Stephanie Hershey Liner, the executive vice president of the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., Los Angeles County’s film office. “Just this past week, two major studios were looking for space and were unable to find it. We were forced to go to a kind of Plan-B approach--warehouse space, which is definitely not ideal.”

As it stands, New Studio hopes to have five sound stages for the production of television series and and feature films, each about 18,000 to 20,000 square feet. It also would include seven smaller stages ranging in size from 11,000 to 5,000 square feet, Magowan said.

With these specifications, New Studio would be substantially smaller than the studio giants, such as MCA Inc., which has 32 sound stages at Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. with 28 stages at its main Burbank lot.

The new Disney facility would house 285,000 square feet of sound stages, three 25,000-square-foot stages and one 30,000-square-foot stage. Southern California’s largest sound stage, at 42,000 square feet, is on Sony’s lot.

“With the hopes of Playa Vista and DreamWorks going in, I think everyone is expecting the whole area to be revitalized,” said Liner. “It’s going to be a race to the finish--who knows if they are all going to be booked up?”