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Albuquerque Studios is prepared to handle movie making

By Erik Siemers
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

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Inside a pristine office building in a middle-of-nowhere prairie in southern Albuquerque, Jeremy Hariton opens a door into a land of make-believe.

Behind the door is what looks like 48,000 square feet of cold, colorless warehouse. A nice place, perhaps, for nearby Kirtland Air Force Base to store a few surplus jets.

But to a film location scout, it represents opportunity. And a really big place to shoot a movie.

"This is state of the art," said a wide-eyed Granville Greene, a freelance location scout who recently completed work around Albuquerque on "In the Valley of Elah," a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron.

What Hariton is showing off is the first ready-for-use sound stages of Albuquerque Studios, the $74.8 million film production facility on the edge of what will be a Mesa del Sol town center.

Hariton, the studio's 29-year-old executive director, and Nick Smerigan, its chief operating officer, moved into their new offices last week.

And when work on a feature film begins there later this month, Albuquerque will host something Hariton and Smerigan say Hollywood doesn't have - a first-class, all-in-one supercenter for film and TV productions.

"We'll match-up our stages to any in the world," Hariton said.

Albuquerque Studios is a product of Pacifica Ventures of Santa Monica, Calif., which formerly ran the famed Culver Studios in California where "Gone With the Wind" was filmed.

But Hariton and Smerigan are careful to remind people that they don't produce films. They facilitate the production of films.

"It's like a hotel. We provide the space," Hariton said. "We want to make it so when they get off the plane, they'll have everything they need here."

The studio, as a business, rents space. The 28-acre site, for now, will have four buildings holding eight sound stages with adjacent office space. Two of the stage buildings hold two 24,000-square-foot sound stages while the others hold two 18,000-square-foot stages. In each building, the sound stages can be combined into a single larger stage by removing a sound-proof partition.

Albuquerque Studios charges $5,000 a day to shoot on a 24,000-square-foot stage, and half that to prepare the stage and build a set, Hariton said. Things like electrical costs are separate charges.

But the advantage the studio has over competitors in places like Los Angeles, Hariton and Smerigan say, is that all of the residual services often needed to produce a film will be within walking distance.

Vendors renting trailers, lighting and grip equipment and heavy machinery will have locations on-site within a 70,000-square-foot site at the studio. Representatives of Lowe's home improvement stores visited the site Friday to consider providing services at the studio.

About 78,000 square feet of office space is available to rent for use as things like production offices, wardrobe rooms and green rooms.

A separate concierge service will help productions with everything from personal assistants and security guards to Pilates classes, houses to rent and restaurant reservations.

"We're trying to bring an infrastructure here so when the people come, they have a place to get all the top services," Smerigan said. "A star comes out and says, `I need a relaxation trailer,' they would forklift one over here and bring it to the side of the stage."

The availability of those services seems to be both a way to compete with studios in Los Angeles and other parts of the world and to deal with the reality of the studio's location.

The newly extended University Boulevard offers a beautiful drive along wide open grassland with clear views of the Sandias. But unless Hollywood-types have a need for solar panels from the studio's only neighbor, Advent Solar, there isn't much else around.

Smerigan said plans call for another building with permanent office space and retail services that could include a coffee shop, restaurant, dry cleaner, medical services, a gym and a screening room.

They're also looking at building a 140-unit residential complex to serve as temporary housing for a production's staff, Smerigan said.

"We'd love to do it up here on the mesa," Smerigan said. "It adds density and doesn't make us so isolated."

Once completed, the studio will end up being a $120 million project, Smerigan said. The studio also has an option to build on an adjacent 26.5 acre area, Smerigan said.

It's the size of the sound stages that makes Albuquerque Studios stand out.

Hariton, who grew up in Los Angeles as a self-described "studio rat," said the average stage size in Los Angeles is about 15,000 square feet. Albuquerque Studios' smallest stage is 18,000 square feet.

Beyond that, the larger, 24,000-square-foot stages are 55 feet high from the floor to what's called the "grid" - a ceiling of wood boards made into a grid for crew to lower sound and lighting equipment. Studio officials said that, too, is larger than L.A. stages.

"We had the opportunity here to build from scratch, to take everything that we have learned and change and adjust it to a new facility," Hariton said.

That opportunity is expected to reap dividends for New Mexico. Lisa Strout, director of the New Mexico Film Office, said while filming on-location has been successful here, the state has lost some potentially lucrative studio work in recent years.

"We have had to turn things away that needed a 50 foot ceiling, and only the military in this state has anything that big," said Strout, who worked for about 20 years in the industry as a film location manager. "We've had situations where people say, `What's the largest thing you have?' We always were thinking, is there some building we hadn't thought of? This has been going on for the past four years."

The state's growth in the film industry has come with the help of state incentives, which include a loan program and rebates of 25 percent of a production's expenses that are subject to state taxes.

But the studio could help to further boost the local industry's profile. Industry magazine MovieMaker recently ranked Albuquerque fourth on a list of best places to live, work and make films in a report that mentioned the emergence of Albuquerque Studios.

So far, Albuquerque Studios is in talks with five productions and another three production companies looking for office space, Smerigan said. The first of those productions is expected to commence work at the studio later this month, though neither Smerigan or Hariton would identify any of the potential clients.

As Hariton walks into the large soundstage, he explains that with sound-proof partition rolled back, the area covers an acre. That's enough to cover five full residential plots - complete with yards and swimming pools.

It's blank now. But to the magicians of Hollywood, it represents a blank canvas.

"The whole idea is," Smerigan said, "they can build whatever they want."