Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Baton Rouge plans big, big studio project

Look out, Louisiana. This is one megasized prospect for the state's movie industry. It includes 18 soundstages. The following is an Associated Press story.

BATON ROUGE (AP) - Developer R.W. Day is planning a $1.6 billion mixed-use development -- anchored by a $955 million movie studio -- on a 1,200-acre tract near Interstate 12 in East Baton Rouge.

While RedStick Studio Development is the name of the Day company putting the deal together, the name of the development and the studio won't be announced just yet.

Chuck Bush of F.T.E. Consulting Group, who has been in the movie business for decades, helped put the movie studio end of the deal together. Bush said the studio would actually be on three separate locations, developed over a seven-year period.

The main campus would be on the tract that runs from behind Ochsner Medical Center -- formerly Summit Hospital -- to the Amite River. That part of the studio would take up about a third of the development, with retail and residential on the northern two-thirds. It would have about 18 soundstages, ranging from 18-thousand square feet to 50-thousand square feet.

Also on site would be a $30 million educational facility that would operate as a consortium to work with LSU, Southern University and Baton Rouge Community College to train workers in film and video production.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i hope that doesnt make shreveport less desireable for movies!

fridayinla said...

Why isn't Shreveport getting these large studio development proposals?! That's where the movie industry is!

Anonymous said...

This proposal is al "vapor" and will never see the light of day. Studio complexes like this are not needed in Shreveport. Producers are fleeing Hollywood cause they won't pay top dollar prices, so why would they want to pay rents on something as overbuilt as this. Shreveport merely needs more experienced crew and it will thrive with the studio space it has.