Tax Credits Bring Gigantic Film Studio to Queens

Long Island City: Site of film's next golden age?

There's a whole lot happening film-wise in NYC right now, thanks to the tax credits passed in 2004. Not since before those handful of Eastern European immigrants packed their bags and headed West to build Hollywood has NYC been such a showbiz town. There are so many productions clamoring for a piece of the Big Apple that there aren't enough soundstages.

Enter Silvercup Studios, a fixture in the Queens landscape since 1983, and home to productions like "The Sopranos," "Hope & Faith," and five new pilots including "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams's new show, "Six Degrees." Silvercup plans to spend about $1.5 billion to build an extension of its existing film studio in Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood that's part industrial eyesore, part Williamsburg wannabe, and part art crowd-and-immigrant enclave. Silvercup West, as this new complex would be called, would include 8 soundstages, production offices, studio support space, stores, high-rise apartment complexes, a catering hall and some kind of cultural institution. It would be the largest film studio complex on the East Coast (though Brooklyn's Steiner Studios would still claim the largest single soundstage). The complex is expected to generate about 3,900 permanent jobs, 2,200 construction jobs and 2,500 additional related jobs.

All this thanks to a simple little thing called tax incentives--which, by the way, have been so successful in NYC, that Governor Pataki's 2006-07 executive budget seeks to increase them and make them permanent.

>> Silvercup Studios Sets $1 Billion Complex [NY Times, 2/22/06]
>> Silvercup West 'studio city' comes into focus [Hollywood Reporter/Reuters, 2/22/06]
>> Governor Pataki Announces Budget to Include Permanent Film Tax Incentive [NYS Press Release 1/13/06]

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