Villa Muse development could be Utopia, or a mess

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 19, 2007

You could hear the drum roll hours before they arrived, a held breath of anticipation coiled with the promise of smashing big news, the wonderfulness of which would trigger gasps of joy and spontaneous dancing.

A crew of publicists, supporters and dreamers arrived at the American-Statesman last week bearing tidings that might redefine filmmaking, recording and concert-going in Austin, a city that a frustrated consensus believes has yet to tap and exploit its full creative reserves.

Villa Muse, they call it. Beaming like new parents, the team unveiled plans and blueprints of this massive $1.5 billion artists' village to be hatched on 681 acres in eastern Travis County during the next half decade or so.

What it is: a self-contained mini-city with residential housing for about 8,500 people, retail outlets and, the project's crown jewel and raison d'être, the $125 million, 200-acre Villa Muse Studios, where filmmakers, special-effects artists, musicians, advertisers and gamers can forge their work at state-of-the-art facilities rivaling those in Los Angeles, New York and London. It includes a 50,000-square-foot soundstage and recording studios, not to mention an outdoor amphitheater with capacity for more than 70,000 people.

Sounds great, truly, even mind-bending.

Until it sounds somewhat strange. The exteriors of the planned condos will be a jumble of regional architectural styles, say, a Brooklyn brownstone here and a taste of Italy there. This way the dwellings can double as facades for film shoots. In other words, these living, breathing neighborhoods would constitute a giant studio backlot and could conceivably become working movie sets.

Hearing the news of Villa Muse firsthand from its backers and imagineers was fascinating, even stunning. A couple of pressing questions jiggled out of my state of odd shock — because the whole concept is naggingly odd. So I asked: Will "Friday Night Lights: The Ride" be too scary for children? And second: How frequently will the guided tram tours run?

Of course, neither of these things, rides nor tram tours, is part of the Villa Muse prototype, and its backers assure us tourism is not a part of the picture. But the artist renderings of this grand, manufactured suburbia, which includes klieg-light beams knifing the night sky, are uneasily redolent of such movie-backlot-theme-park destinations as Disney MGM Studios in Florida and Universal Studios in California.

Sexy, fun, alive. But think: Would you really want to live there? Novelties, note, carry expiration dates.

And what about that name?

"Villa Muse." The backers explain the project as a hive of creativity, yet that name reeks of high-concept preciousness, suggesting upscale exclusivity and a whiff of abstract luxury.

There is certainly a market for prefab fantasy worlds such as Villa Muse, so its lodging should fill up apace. Just scan the constellation of sparkling subdivisions and "lifestyle" communities springing up like so many ersatz Utopias.

One of those is the Domain, which opened last month in North Austin and shares parallels with Villa Muse, including a dreamy idealism and total lack of irony. (And an unfortunate name, which is equal halves imperial pomp and fratboy grunt.)

Self-described as an "open-air lifestyle center" — a line perhaps plucked from a cautionary sci-fi novel about unthinkable futures — the Domain is a mix of ritzy retail shops and gourmet eateries, apartments, condos and parking garages built from whole cloth as a shopper's la-la land. It teems with well-heeled consumers who weave through stores and stroll stubby, spotless streets that offer the sort of plastic simulation of real life found on Disneyland's Main Street, USA.

Self-contained in its own vaguely xenophobic bubble, the place is hideous. Residents literally live inside a shopping mall. Save for Disney's bizarre planned community Celebration Florida, where fake snow falls at Christmas, there can hardly be a more sterilized living environment offering such a canned personality free of danger, prickles and, well, reality. The Domain makes the fashionable, mostly organic grunge-funk of SoCo feel like the Bronx.

But maybe, hopefully, the Domain can serve as a model for Villa Muse of what not to do.

Still, if you imagine waking up day after day to an unobstructed vista of Neiman Marcus and Victoria's Secret, consider waking up to a hundred-person movie crew working outside your window at Villa Muse.

About Villa Muse, there's a slew of questions begging answers — such as: How will they contend with amphitheater noise, traffic and parking for a football-stadium's worth of people? — but the practicality of making movies where you live is the most interesting here.

Villa Muse promoters brush off any logistical concerns with glib ripostes about how fun it is to have a film crew operating on your street. Yet movie shoots are bustling, bumbling things of semi-controlled chaos, with many bodies and masses of equipment spread wide — think of how Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" disrupted life on South Congress for weeks on end. Though you might, if very lucky, catch a glimpse of Luke Wilson or Reese Witherspoon working or, more likely, standing around, you will quickly learn that movie sets are shorn of glamor and about the most stifling, static, boring places on the planet.

But enough with the downside which is, at this point, just cranky speculation. It's easy to pick apart high-flying dreams. By rights, Villa Muse has the potential to be a powerhouse, an industrial supernova of creative thriving that will hoist and cement Austin's standing on the world's arts and entertainment totem pole.

If it works as planned and dreamed — and how excellent would that be? — Villa Muse will be an astonishment — more than a marvel, way beyond magic, but a glittering miracle.