NEWARK – With the advent of television equipment, the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, climbed into an excavator earlier this year and punched the machine’s metal nails through the dilapidated brick wall of the district. The city’s first public housing. The old abandoned apartment complex, he promised, would be replaced with something better.
On Tuesday afternoon, officials are expected to unveil a grand new vision for the 15-acre site: In March 2024, mounds of rubble at the center of a ravaged neighborhood a few feet from the Park. Less than two miles away from Newark Liberty will be replaced by a $100 million TV and Film Production Center with six large sound systems and space for studio editing, post-production editing, crew vehicles and Food Service.
The project was organized primarily as an economic catalyst for Newark, a poor but growing city about 13 miles west of Midtown Manhattan. But it also provides perhaps the most visible indication of New Jersey’s emerging involvement in the film and television industries.
In recent years, companies struggling to meet growing demand for streaming content have increasingly been drawn to the area in and around New York City, an area with many actors and union workers. New facilities that opened last year in Hudson County, NJ and Westchester County, NY, are regularly booked, officials said, and many studios are operating.
One study estimates that the Newark project could bring 600 permanent jobs and a host of new business opportunities to the city, the state’s largest with a population of 312,000 and a median household income of less than $38,000.
“The bigger idea is that Newark becomes a hub for creativity,” said John Schreiber, president and chief executive officer of the New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts, a cultural house in Newark.
Great Point Studios plans to build a production center to be used primarily by Lionsgate, a company that created 26 Oscar-nominated films year after it bought Starz . Cable Operation in 2016.
Great Point president Robert Halmi Jr. said he remains confident about the future of streaming despite news last month that Netflix had failed subscribers for the first time in a decade, Dispatched stock across the industry for fear that the model’s rapid growth is unsustainable.
Original craving streaming Content, Mr. Halmi said, is here to stay. And the sound stages where shows can be shot indoors with a green screen or using LED technology are paid more.
“We couldn’t build the studios fast enough,” he said.
Several major sound stages have opened in the last year across the Hudson River from New York City in Kearny and Jersey City. Dozens of works, including award-winning films like “West Side Story,” “Joker,” and “Army of the Dead,” have recently been filmed here.
Bayonne’s board plan paved the way for a 1.5 million square foot manufacturing facility, 1888 Studios, on the site of a former Texaco refinery. Plans are being made for a studio in West Orange, where inventor Thomas Edison created first studio. And a Netflix A spokesperson confirmed that the company still intends to submit a bid next month to purchase a roughly 300-acre parcel of land at Fort Monmouth, a defunct military base on the Jersey Coast.
“We had the resources in New Jersey — the human resources,” said Andrew Muscato, a film producer who lives in Jersey City, where he has done parts of “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” war drama based on a Memoir slated to air on Apple TV+ later this year.
“The announcement of additional production facilities is like the final piece of the puzzle,” Mr. Muscato said.
It is Great Point’s second largest manufacturing center in the region; Lionsgate Yonkers, an even larger facility in Westchester County, NY, opening in January.
In 2017, before New Jersey re-authorised tax breaks for the industry, feature film directors spent $10 million statewide and TV series creators spent $38 million. Last year, feature films injected $194 million into the economy, and TV shows contributed $247 million, according to the state’s Film and Television Commission.
“The industry has exploded here,” said Steven Gorelick, executive director of the committee. “No one could have imagined such rapid progress.”
Newark’s six sound zones will be at least 20,000 square feet, a size deemed large enough to attract business from prominent manufacturing hubs in Georgia, New Mexico and California.
That has been Governor Philip D. Murphy’s goal for many years.
He went to California in 2019 to pique the interest of Hollywood leaders to New Jersey. Two years later, he signed a bill that required companies to relocate or expand in New Jersey $14 billion in tax relief; the law greatly increases tax cut group available through 2034 to studios or film builders in the state.
Last spring, after Georgia passed a laws restricting voter accessThe governor has publicly tried to spin off the manufacturing business out of Georgia as activists called on companies like Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. boycott the studios there.
More recently, Mr. Murphy noted that Georgia has potentially ban abortion if the Supreme Court, as expected, denied a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, providing even more reason for producers and directors to seek alternatives outside of that state.
Mr. Murphy said: “Georgia is going down the wrong path of values dear to so many talents and the people behind the talent.
It’s been decades since the neighborhood surrounding the housing estate, Seth Boyden Court, was considered livable. Construction officials said one challenge during demolition was relocating about 20 homeless people back to the complex’s buildings, which have been vacant nightly since 2015.
But its location – “a baseball field from the airport” and less than 15 miles from New York City – made it ideal for the actors, directors and crew members who would eventually work at Lionsgate. Newark, Mr. Halmi said.
“A lot of talent lives in Manhattan,” he said. “A lot of talent wants to sleep in Manhattan.”
In addition to the studios, the city commissioned a separate company, Boraie Development, to build 200 senior housing units on the site’s 4-acre site and approximately 200 market-rate apartments nearby. Victor Cirilo, director of Newark’s Housing Authority, said.
“We thought we would really be able to bring this neighborhood back to life,” said Mr. Cirilo.
Downtown Newark has grown tremendously over the years. But neighborhoods far from the city’s business hub, like the Dayton Street area, where the studios are planned, continue to struggle. In addition to the cash flow that is expected to be spent in Newark, the new facility, in conjunction with the performing arts center, is expected to provide internships and education programs for students at its schools. city.
Bill Good, a senior organizer of the Greater Newark HUD Tenants Union, said projects like the “shiny and brand new” Lionsgate Newark often overlook the real needs of Newark’s current residents.
Developers should be asked to multiply the number of low-income apartments lost when Seth Boyden closed: 530, he said. “Newark is in dire need of low-income housing,” said Mr. Good. “It should be a one-for-one replacement.”
He emphasized that he is not opposed to the development or the new jobs that the project may create, but said that low-income housing conservation are equally important.
An economic impact study conducted on the performing arts center estimated that Lionsgate Newark would create 500 to 600 permanent onsite jobs and bring in $800 million in economic activity. According to analysis by JLL, a real estate services company, most of the direct spending can be spent outside of New Jersey.
But Newark and Essex County, NJ, “may, over time, develop the cottage industries” necessary to retain some of that financial benefit, resulting in estimated state tax revenue of approximately $180 million over 20 years, according to the report.
At least some of the new jobs will be for production assistants – entry-level workers rushing to join a famously competitive business.
For the past two years, Jody Brockway, former vice president of film and television at NBC, who now runs PA Bootcampa job training company, has led seven weekend classes for people who will be production assistants in New Jersey, usually before the big shoots.
“This is where you start,” Ms. Brockway said. “You work your way and work your way.”
The pay is low, but could lead to more permanent jobs, either producing future shows or in a variety of ancillary businesses.
“Once you had a studio,” she said, “now you are building sets, now you are hiring carpenters. You are hiring an artist. You are hiring people to connect everything”.
