A school to provide training in movie and television production for Yonkers students in grades 6 through 12 had its formal ribbon-cutting Sept. 25. The school is named after the late prolific producer Robert Halmi Sr., who produced hundreds of films and TV shows.
The school is located at 463 Hawthorne Ave., on a 32-acre property that will become another movie studio campus for Great Point Studios. Great Point is headed by Robert Halmi Jr., who worked with his father and is known for making his own imprint on the industry. Great Point began the process of turning Yonkers into “Hollywood on the Hudson” when it brought the Lionsgate Studio to downtown Yonkers.
In addition to classes in basics such as math and science, students are being offered training in dance, music, production design including makeup, set design and cinematography. They’ll being given opportunities to learn about directing, editing, sound design, marketing and more.
Speaking at the ribbon-cutting formally opening the school, Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano described Halmi Jr. as a “down to earth individual who wants to make a difference and that’s why he came here to Yonkers, because he saw our potential. ‘This is a place where I can make a difference,’” he quoted Halmi as believing.
“What an exciting day for Yonkers and my family,” Halmi said. We are excited that the school board decided to name this incredible institution after my dad. He was not only a legendary film producer but he was an incredible teacher and mentor. He touched thousands of lives. He was incredibly generous with his time. Many, many young aspiring filmmakers worked under my father and became very famous filmmakers, actors, camera operators, director, writers. He was really wonderful about trying to elevate especially young people’s lives and getting into a business he was so passionate about.”
Halmi said that his father’s body of work was nominated for Emmy Awards 448 times, second only to Walt Disney. He won 133 Emmy Awards.
“It’s now your turn to go through this school and turn out Emmys of your own,” Halmi told the students who are enrolled in the school and attended the ribbon-cutting.
Halmi pointed out that so far Great Point with its partner National Resources has brought one million square feet of studio production space to Yonkers and will be building another one million square feet, making Yonkers the largest production center on the East Coast. He said that next year there will be at least seven TV series being produced in Yonkers.
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The Yonkers Public Schools officially opened a new school Wednesday aimed at educating students for the film and television industry.
The Robert Halmi Sr. Academy of Film and Television is located in a leased building formerly used by Rising Ground, a nonprofit social services agency. The school will start with grades 6 and 9 this year but will add grades until it becomes a full middle/high school for grades 6 to 12.
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The school, termed a “high level trade school,” was conceived by Robert Halmi, a producer of more than 400 film and television projects and the founder of Great Point Studios in Yonkers. Halmi, Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano and the Yonkers Board of Education agreed to name the school after Halmi’s late father, Robert Halmi Sr., a photographer for Life magazine who went on to produce movies and mini-series for TV.
The school’s curriculum was developed in partnership with Great Point Studios, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Creative Artists Agency. “The students will gain proficiency in production technologies used in film, television, and theater, while learning the business aspects of the arts,” the city said in a statement. Students will be able to study fabrication and design, social media marketing, project management, event planning, sound design, audio technology, and musical and theatrical performance.
Yonkers also debuted a brand new school building this fall, the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community School in southwest Yonkers. Justice Sotomayor attended the ribbon-cutting on Sept. 16.
Hollywood strikes and dwindling peak TV have dented U.S. studio occupancy but Lionsgate Studios Yonkers, the first purpose-built complex Stateside from Robert Halmi’s Great Point Studios and the biggest in the northeast, has been pretty much full since its early 2022 debut.
On Wednesday, Halmi cut the ribbon for a new public high school in Yonkers — the Robert Halmi Sr. Academy of Film and Television, named after his late father — aimed at training a new local crew base for the city that’s an evolving destination for film and tv production.
Halmi Sr. fought the Nazis and was jailed in World War II Hungary, emigrated to the U.S., made a mark as a photographer for Life magazine and became one of the biggest producers ever of TV movies and miniseries. “For people who knew him, it’s so fitting. Because he was, among many things, an incredible mentor to so many people, and such a good teacher, and so patient,” Halmi Jr. tells Deadline.
“He was really generous with his time for young crew members and kids that wanted to be in the industry or wanted to learn about photography, or anything. Having this school come together with his name on it is just such an incredible, wonderful thing.”
The Yonkers public school welcomed its first class of 180 students in the sixth and ninth grades a few weeks ago and will be adding more pupils and grade levels “until we’re full, from the 6th to the 12th grade” Halmi said. Formal classwork sits alongside a curriculum developed with IATSE to instruct students in camera and sound operation, editing, makeup, hair, set construction – “all the trades for film and television.” They can travel to other Great Point studios in Buffalo, Georgia and Wales and affiliated Los Angeles stages.
Lionsgate Newark in New Jersey just broke ground and should be open in about 16 months.
“We’re excited that we’re giving back to the community, and we’re really involved in the school,” he said. For a studio now to be successful, “especially one as ambitious as what we’re doing in Yonkers, we need local workers. The secret to why any of these big locations work is great tax credits and great local crews. And we want Yonkers to have an incredible local crew base, and this is the start of that.”
IATSE was a big part of the process. The union needs crew members after the run-up in production over the last five years, he continued, stressing “The other thing they really want to take seriously is diversity,” and Yonkers is very diverse.
“There’s no better way to do it. They embraced that immediately. They put all their education resources at our disposal. They help track the curriculum. We have a former IATSE member who’s heading up this effort on staff at the school.”
Lionsgate Yonkers has 2.5 million square feet of space with 16 sound stages and, Halmi says, has been “100% full since we opened” even as U.S. studio occupancy fell to a five-year low in August. “We’ve been full throughout the strike. We’re full now.”
The Lionsgate relationship gives it an edge. “Whatever the studio needs to produce, those shows will come to us first. And when Lionsgate has a hole in their schedule, we fill it with” another show.
The next season of Lionsgate/Starz Power Book III: Raising Kanan shoots in Yonkers until April. He preferred that other shows currently shooting there or coming soon not be named in print.
It has a lighting and grip company, a leading set construction company (that also serves 60% of all Broadway shows), and a post company now on site. “We have our own bakery. We have our own cafe. We have incredible commissary. It is a turnkey facility.”
New York City —
Pat Swinney Kaufman may have enough ceremonial shovels in her office to start her own small construction firm.
As commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, based above the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, Kaufman helped break ground on a number of new studios and soundstages to accommodate the TV and movie producers shooting in the region.
Next year, Sunset Pier 94 Studios will open on the West Side of Manhattan, adding six state-of-the-art soundstages blocks away from Midtown and the Theater District. In Queens, a new facility called Wildflower, backed in part by Robert De Niro, will add 775,000 square feet of stage space. And East End Studios, which has four soundstage facilities in California, is scheduled to open a new space in Sunnyside, Queens, in 2025.
“We are the creative and artistic capital of this country and we are very committed to building on that,” Kaufman said. “We want it to flourish.”
The aggressive studio expansions signal New York’s continued determination to double down on the film business and compete with its main rival, Los Angeles, for a bigger slice of the Hollywood pie — even as the industry is struggling to rebound nationwide.
Last year, the New York state legislature boosted the annual film tax credit allocation to $700 million, up from $420 million. It also raised the credit on qualified expenses (including actors’ salaries) to 30% (with an extra 10% for upstate productions) and accelerated the timeline for claiming credits — a big issue for producers.
The changes were intended to help the state better compete with other states such as neighboring New Jersey, which also is adding studio space and pulling work away from New York.
New York’s film industry grew rapidly after the state enacted its first credit in 2004. Production jobs grew at an average rate of 3% annually over the next 15 years — outpacing New York City’s overall job growth in that time and adding about 35,000 jobs, according to the mayor’s office.
But the dual strikes of the writers and actors last year brought production to a standstill at a time when the region was still recovering from the pandemic.
As in Los Angeles, work has been slow to return since the new labor deals were signed in the fall, creating some jitters in an industry that accounts for 6.5% of New York’s economy.
In a sign of the slowdown, Brooklyn-based Broadway Stages, which has been in operation since 1983, was at 50% capacity in April, the lowest level in memory according to its communications director, Barbara Leatherwood.
“Before the pandemic, everybody was just packed,” said Leatherwood in a recent interview. “We were packed. We were at 95%.”
And more studio space is coming online. Great Point Studios, which also has locations in Atlanta, Buffalo and New Jersey, recently completed a facility in Yonkers, located 15 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
Kaufman acknowledged that production work isn’t back to to the level it was before the strikes. “We’re watching with bated breath,” she said.
She pointed out that the number of permits to shoot in New York has grown steadily since the Writers Guild of America strike ended last September. The commissioner’s office counted 212 projects shooting in the city during April, up from 187 for the same month in 2023.
Still, the additional new studio space comes at a time when there is concern that television and movie production is at an inflection point in the streaming age.
While broadcast and cable TV series once provided a reliable number of episodes each season, from 13 to 22, season orders from streamers typically are shorter. One long-running New York-based hit, CBS’ “Blue Bloods,” will end this year after 14 seasons. Broadcast networks that once stocked up on such shows now rely more on reality competitions, game shows and live sports to fill their schedules.
As media companies such as Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery face headwinds, further consolidation seems likely. After a spending spree on content in recent years, media executives are talking about making fewer films and shows in an effort to reduce costs and improve profitability.
Amid the industry challenges, some veteran soundstage owners question whether there will be enough production for the new studio space to thrive long-term.
Doug Steiner, who opened Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1999 and recently broke ground on a 15-acre location in the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, believes some of the newcomers will face challenges. Steiner’s soundstages provided homes for Amazon’s hit “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as well as movies including “The Joker.”
“There is an explosion of proposed new studios both nationally and globally,” Steiner said. “People who have never done it have no idea what they are getting into, and it’ll be a disaster for most of them.”
The new studio entrants say their expansion is based on an increased demand for larger spaces that can handle the more elaborate and expensive productions.
“What we saw in 2019 is an acute shortage of modern infrastructure for how films are made today,” said Robert Halmi, founder of Great Point Studios. “The shows that are being made for the streamers are much bigger than the shows that were being made for broadcast television 10 years ago.”
Andrew Kimball, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, believes employment levels in the film and television business will be back to pre-pandemic levels within six months; the city pegs that figure at 185,000 jobs.
“The forms of content creation are evolving as technology changes,” Kimball said. “Having the talent and stages is absolutely fundamental to the industry, and we remain very bullish even with the changes.”
The corporation partnered with Vornado Realty Trust, Hudson Pacific Properties and Blackstone to develop Sunset Pier 94 Studios, the first facility built in Manhattan specifically for film and TV production. The site, with six soundstages totaling 85,000 square feet, is set to open next year.
Halmi and others attribute the slow recovery to uncertainty surrounding the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Production’s talks with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents film and TV crew members. Some productions have decided to set up in Canada, rather than risk a holdup from another possible job action.
“I think we’re just in a place where the industry is right-sizing itself,” Leatherwood said. “The thirst for good entertainment that we produce in the United States has not gone away.”
One factor that soundstage owners believe they have in their favor is the support of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who backed the 66% increase in the state tax credit last year even as some critics have questioned its effectiveness.
“The New York credit is completely competitive in all respects,” Steiner said.
Production stages are at the core of the state’s tax credit. While Hollywood-based film and TV studios own their lots, most of the New York production spaces are independently owned businesses. If a production wants to benefit from the tax credit, it must use one of the stages recognized by the state.
“You don’t get the incentive if you come here and spend three weeks shooting outside,” said Kaufman, who helped develop the first tax credit when she was executive director of the state’s film office. “You must shoot in one of our soundstages. In our opinion this is how we build an industry.”
It took decades for New York to establish itself as the largest production hub outside of Los Angeles. While feature filmmakers always sought out New York when needed for a backdrop, attracting cost-conscious TV series wasn’t easy.
New York City was a mecca for TV during the industry’s golden age of the 1950s. Playwrights and theater-trained acting talent were based in the city and provided a steady flow of talent for live original plays, which made up much of prime-time programming in those early years.
Once Hollywood became involved in TV, production headed west. Studios such as Warner Bros. and Universal had expansive lots and crews with experience on feature films, providing the scale and convenience needed for TV to grow.
Filmed TV series dwindled in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, as the city and its residents were not always cooperative. The streets became more unruly and crime-ridden.
ABC’s gritty late-1960s cop series “N.Y.P.D.” used members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang to provide security around its East Village studio space. Producers found that doing business in Los Angeles was simply more trouble-free.
As New York’s economy rebounded in the 1980s and ’90s, TV production started to trickle back in. More stars and filmmakers with roots on the East Coast wanted to work near home, which has remained the key reason for filming in the city. (When inveterate New York actor Tony Randall did the NBC sitcom “Love, Sidney” in the early 1980s, his contract guaranteed the show would be produced in the city.)
“(Filming in New York) will always be a bottom-line decision,” Steiner said. “But there is some very sought-after talent that lives here and that will only work on a project if it’s here.”
Producer Dick Wolf is the trailblazer for the current New York production scene. He was insistent about making New York his base for “Law & Order” when it launched in 1990.
Wolf even negotiated his own deal with craft unions so he could keep “Law & Order” in the city when under pressure from NBC to cut the show’s budget in the early 1990s.
When HBO became a major producer of original series in the late ’90s, the premium cable channel generated New York-based hits such as “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.” The shows became cultural touchstones that enhanced the city’s image as a place to film. (“And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” sequel on Max, now shoots in New York.)
But the enactment of the state’s film production tax credit in 2004 was the true catalyst for production growth. The credit was designed to allay the economic impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York, which jolted the entire city’s economy and led to a slump in the number of motion picture and video production jobs.
Prolific producers who set up shop in New York tend to stay put. Wolf’s three “Law & Order” shows and three FBI-themed series for CBS are in production at Broadway Stages.
Robert and Michelle King made their long-running CBS hit “The Good Wife” and its sequel “The Good Fight” in New York. Their newest series, “Elsbeth,” the quirky police-legal drama recently renewed by CBS, is New York-based, as is the fourth and final season of the Kings’ Paramount+ horror series, “Evil.”
The city wants to remove any barriers to production coming in. It has a free “Made in NY” training program for production assistants, which has seen more than 1,200 participants since its inception.
“We’re working hard to stay ahead of the game and make sure we’ve got enough workforce here,” Kaufman said.
YONKERS – As you drive into town, the banner affixed to an overpass tells you exactly where you are: “Hollywood on the Hudson.”
But Yonkers doesn’t feel like Hollywood. Not at first. With crowded streets, tightly packed brick buildings and the Hudson River rushing by, it looks like a borough of New York City – which it almost is. Yonkers borders the Bronx and is a half-hour drive from the Broadway marquees and towering billboards of midtown Manhattan.
Yonkers exists on the periphery of the glitz, until you navigate deep into the city and start winding through a busy neighborhood with workers and trucks and large buildings.
Then the block-letter sign greets you: LIONSGATE. These large buildings are soundstages and film offices, named for Lionsgate, the film and entertainment company that is the primary tenant.
Head inside to the cavernous main office and you see it again: “Hollywood on the Hudson.” This time, the words are aglow, affixed to a wall in yellow neon letters. The message is persistent: You may look around a place like Yonkers and not think you’re in a showbiz center.
But you are.
“Since we opened here, we’ve always had a show here,” said Robert Halmi Jr., CEO of Great Point Studios, which opened the Yonkers complex in 2022.
Halmi and Great Point are on a quest to build studios in strategic locations, and this week, they are opening another: this one is in Buffalo.
Great Point is unveiling a $50 million-plus studio complex on Niagara Street that includes three sound stages and enough offices, dressing rooms and production space to house an ongoing series of film projects. Those productions haven’t started yet, though the announcement of a naming-rights tenant may come by the May 16 opening celebration, if not sooner.
For now, the building is a still-unlabeled glass-and-brick complex located a short walk from the Niagara River. We may not see it called “Hollywood on the Niagara” – that doesn’t quite have the alliterative ring – but that is what the Buffalo studio is designed to be.
“Once we start shooting up there, I think people will really get it,” said Halmi, who is planning to bring a steady stream of moderately budgeted movies to Buffalo’s already-established film industry.
“We can keep Buffalo working all year long,” he said, “making TV movies.”
The Halmi legacy
You know Halmi’s work, even if you don’t recognize his name. He is the former president and CEO of Hallmark Entertainment and the founder of the Hallmark Channel.
“Robert Halmi pretty much invented the holiday movie genre,” his publicist Daniela Sapkar pointed out last week while guiding visitors on a tour of the Buffalo studio.
She is not being hyperbolic. Halmi has produced more than 400 projects, many of them with his late father, the iconic and prolific producer Robert Halmi Sr. A couple dozen of his father’s 133 Emmy awards are displayed in Halmi’s office.
Of the younger Halmi’s projects, about 200 of them were made-for-TV movies – many of which were Hallmark holiday films. So if you inhale Hallmark flicks or other made-for-TV films, you’ve either seen Halmi’s work, or watched movies that were influenced by it.
You’ve also gotten a glimpse at the type of movies most likely to be shot inside his new Buffalo film studios: Not necessarily Hallmark, and not always holiday-themed, but relatable stories that take place in everyday America.
“When you watch the kind of TV movies that we made with the Hallmark Channel, which are all small-town family stories, it’s just perfect to shoot that in Buffalo,” Halmi said. “It has that look, that feel.”
Buffalo can be a small town, an old town and, in some ways, any town. Filmmakers have appreciated that flexibility. “We have such a vast array of things here, from airports to subways to something like the Broadway Market or a vacant church,” Tim Clark, commissioner of the Buffalo Niagara Film Office, said in an interview earlier this spring. “They lend themselves very well to the camera.”
Great Point Studios founder Robert Halmi is the driving force that brought Hollywood to the Hudson. Halmi takes News 12’s senior investigative reporter Tara Rosenblum on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the largest modern-built production campus in the Northeast. It employs thousands of workers across the tri-state area.
Variety | By Carolyn Giardina
Apr 4, 2024
Goldcrest Post, an independently-owned feature and episodic postproduction facility that currently maintains bases in New York and London, plans to open a third location at Lionsgate Studios Yonkers, just outside New York City.
Goldcrest plans to open in September as a full service facility that will include a theater equipped with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision for screenings, color grading sessions and sound mixing. For launch, Goldcrest is also constructing an ADR room and offices for needs such as dailies, editing and visual effects. The site will be networked to Goldcrest’s base in Manhattan.
It’s part of an agreement with Great Point Studios, which owns and operates Lionsgate Studios. In all, the $500 million studio complex encompasses 1 million square feet of space that includes stages, offices and backlots. Tenants include production/distribution company Mediapro and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication.
Goldcrest Post managing director Domenic Rom describes the venture as an opportunity to be part of a “new era” in film and TV production in New York. “When I toured Lionsgate Studios, I was impressed by its design, scope and concept,” he says.
Goldcrest has worked on features such as Celine Song’s Oscar winning drama “Past Lives” and series such as “Severance,” “Tokyo Vice,” “And Just Like That” and “Billions.”
The team reasons that its presence at the Studio could benefit productions seeking to take advantage of New York State’s tax credit program, which Goldcrest suggests could go as high as 45% for qualifying productions based in certain parts of Upstate New York as well as Buffalo in Western New York where Great Point Studios also has stages.
Real Estate In-Depth | November 7, 2023
YONKERS—Mediapro North America, a leader in the world of media and entertainment held a groundbreaking ceremony on Nov. 6 for the Mediapro Studios at Great Point Studios project. The event took place at 1500 North Broadway in Yonkers with Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano in attendance as well as key executives and stakeholders from Mediapro and Great Point Studios.
Mediapro’s collaboration with Robert Halmi’s Great Point Studios will add another world-class hub for film and television production in the heart of Yonkers, further strengthening the region’s role as a premier destination for the entertainment industry, city officials stated. Great Point Studios, already one of the country’s largest owners of television and film production facilities in the Northeast, has existing long-term partnerships with Lionsgate and Syracuse University.
The groundbreaking ceremony, hosted by Yonkers Mayor Spano, was attended by key executives and stakeholders from Mediapro, Great Point Studios, and local dignitaries.
Yonkers Mayor Spano said, “The addition of Mediapro to Yonkers’ growing film and production landscape further demonstrates our city’s reimagined approach to redevelopment, creating local jobs and economic vitality. We are thankful to Mediapro at Great Point Studios for investing in Yonkers and expanding its footprint here, truly making us Hollywood on Hudson.”
The new Mediapro Studios at Great Point Studios facility will offer cutting-edge production space and will offer soundstages, post-production facilities and other amenities that Mediapro officials said will attract filmmakers, content creators, and production companies from around the world.
“This groundbreaking is a testament to our commitment to innovation and excellence in the world of media and entertainment,” said Irantzu Diez-Gamboa CEO, MEDIAPRO North America. “We are excited to be part of this expansion that will not only bolster our industry but also contribute to the growth and prosperity of Yonkers and the entire region.”
“We’re thrilled to partner with Mediapro and expand our production facility footprint in Yonkers. Mayor Spano and the entire Yonkers community has been incredibly supportive and welcoming as they share in our vision for regional economic growth.” said Robert Halmi, Founder & CEO of Great Point Studios.
When open in the fall of 2024, the facility will feature three stages encompassing 20,000 square feet, providing ample space for large-scale productions. In addition, one of the three stages, a 10,000-square-foot facility, will be ideal for more intimate projects, ensuring that the studios are equipped to accommodate a wide range of production needs, Mediapro stated.