Back in 1999, Robert De Niro was pushing to build a New York City soundstage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a project he lost to other developers who turned it into Steiner Studios, a mainstay of NYC production.
Years later, the venerable actor and co-founder of Tribeca Enterprises — who can be spotted around Manhattan these days as the Tribeca Festival unspools — is the founder of a sleek new waterfront edifice at the northwest tip of Astoria, Queens. Wildflower Studios is ready, running and set to pop this summer, said Adam Gordon, the site’s developer, managing partner and founder with De Niro and his son, Raphael De Niro.
Wildflower opened its doors last fall with the industry emerging from the long tail of Hollywood strikes and shaken by a slowdown in television production as media companies retrenched. Popular CBS series Elsbeth filmed its latest season there. Commercial shoots come and go. “It’s not a business where you can flip a switch,” Gordon told Deadline on a recent tour. Productions needed to staff up. Producers had to look around.
As they do, the timing is great for Wildflower. The latest New York State budget signed last month has significantly enhanced incentives for film and television production.
“That really was a threshold event, and it’s just sort of filtering through the system now. When that happened, at that moment, people said, great, let’s talk.” Productions will film where it’s most attractive. “Fortunately, it’s attractive to be in New York,” said Gordon.
Wildflower, a seven-story structure with over 775,000 square feet, billed as the first vertical film studio, is itself highly attractive with multi-toned earth hues, modern, open and light. It was designed by Copenhagen and New York-based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) architects.
“New Yorkers are accustomed to going up. We live in elevator buildings. And we understand how reliable that means of transportation is,” Gordon said. “LA, where the studio business originated, is a horizontal place. Land was cheap and abundant. Studios were sprawling without a lot of thought given to efficiencies, because they just didn’t need to.”
The space has 11 purpose built, combinable sound stages stacked on two floors, each 18,000 square feet, all 45’ tall. It has over 300 parking spaces, 26 loading docks and 33 truck sized or “elephant” elevators. Support space includes carpentry, dressing, hair and make-up, luxury green rooms, offices and post-production.
Paintings by Robert De Niro’s father, the late Robert De Niro Sr., an abstract artist held by collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Smithsonian, are displayed around the 224-seat dining room that stands ready to receive a rotation of top New York chefs. De Niro is a co-founder and partner in the Nobu restaurant and hotel brand. A 5,000-foot commercial kitchen can cater to sound stages and offices. A roving pair of electric three-wheel Piaggio coffee carts will provide caffeination.
“The benefit of any new studio is that you can study, ask, look at what the industry needs, and everything is exactly how you want it. The lights. The hair and makeup rooms are the right temperature. There are electrical outlets where you need them. It’s a million details that have been thought about in a very forensic way,” Gordon said. “Then, it’s staying out of people’s way. I sort of think about it almost in a Japanese hospitality sense, which is easier here.”
Wildflower is a hike from the nearest subway, Astoria-Ditmars, but as production gears up it will run a shuttle there ever ten minutes. “We wanted to find a place that was tranquil, because sound is an issue, vibration is an issue. It’s pin-drop quiet,” said Gordon. It’s also where the partners managed to find five and a half acres in New York City. They acquired the site from Steinway & Sons, the renowned piano company launched by a German cabinetmaker in the 1850s, whose factory is around the corner.
Raphael De Niro, a New York real estate broker, said he and Gordon originally looked at a site in Rockland County about 45 minutes from the city. “But we started to get the impression that the municipalities and the stakeholders in the area were not going to be able to move as quickly as we hoped, which was understandable, but they just had a lot of different stakeholders and considerations. It kind of worked out nicely for us in the end.”
“There was always an interest on my dad’s part in a studio, going back to the Giuliani administration. And it was nice that Adam and I were able to kind of pick it up so many years later.”
Robert De Niro, Raphael De Niro and Adam Gordon
Brigitte Lacombe/Michael McWeeney/Courtesy
Gordon said some of his previous projects had been building warehouses for Amazon “and people were knocking on my door to rent space for film productions. It happened four or five times.” He and Robert De Niro were friends, Gordon knew Raphael as well and they teamed up to explore. It took almost two years to pinpoint Astoria. “It’s funny because Bob is the busiest guy. I went to his office in Tribeca. I said, ‘I think we found the site’. He said, ‘Let’s go see it.’ I said, ‘Now?’ We got his car, came out here, saw it” and that was that.
“Raphael and I had over 40 meetings. We spent many, many months talking to the community, sharing our vision, learning from them, and just really helping them understand what we were thinking about and why.”
He believes the sweetened NY tax credits will spur feature film production, as they were intended in part to do. “The backbone in New York City is still going to be television. But with the new enhanced film tax credit, the above-the-line salary deductions, which drove a lot of movies traditionally to Atlanta and now to London, may come back to New York. Because the star salaries can represent an enormous part of the budget.” Above-the-line benefits are new to New York, which also added a new pot especially for independent films.
Patricia Swinney Kaufman, head of the Mayor’s Office Of Media & Entertainment, said she was overjoyed at the new incentives. “If I’d had champagne at the office, I would have been pouring it, because you do have to be competitive. We can’t just say, ‘We’re New York, come here’, right?”
Her message to producers — “Don’t ever think that you can’t do it here in New York. Ask. and we’re going to show you how you can make it work.”
Along with Wildflower, Borden Studios recently opened in Long Island City. Steiner Studios and the New York City Economic Development Corporation broke ground on a outpost in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. East End Studios is rising in Sunnyside, Queens. Construction is underway on Sunset Pier 94 on the far West Side of midtown Manhattan. New entrants will join historic Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens and Silvercup Studios – and its expansion Silvercup Studios East — in Long Island City, and Broadway Stages in Brooklyn.
There’s competition for production as more states jump in. California is pushing ahead with heftier incentives, so is Texas. Neighboring New Jersey put together a nice offering. The Garden State says it has the crews, a touchy topic. “I think that’s a fantasy,” Gordon said. “The people live here. They absolutely don’t live in New Jersey. They live in the boroughs, and then a little bit in Nassau County. So this is the most central and convenient place to film.”
Content shared from deadline.com.