MOVIES

Come film with Austin

In its first few years,moviemaking has taken offat the old airport's leftover hangars

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

July 6, 2003 —

Kevin Spacey bared his rump on Stage 4.

Soldiers died in the chaos of war on Stage 3.

The Dixie Chicks took it all (all!) off on Stage 2.

Sandra Bullock fell on her face sashaying out of Stage 1.

Austin Studios: Where anything can happen, and often, weirdly, does.

In 2 1/2 busy years, Austin Studios has not only hosted a world of faces — sun-baked ball players in "The Rookie," flittering beauty queens in "Miss Congeniality," wartime Nazis in "Master of the Game," real-life country divas posin' au naturel for the cover of Entertainment Weekly — it's portrayed the world as well. The five former airplane hangars on 20 acres at the old Robert Mueller Airport in northeast Austin have housed an Arabian harem and dungeon, a Texas ranch house, the Huntsville prison, New York City hotel rooms and an abandoned cabin somewhere in 1940s Europe.

Hollywood hocus-pocus happens in these hangars — now officially "stages" — former small-aircraft garages that, when strolled about on a lazy day, look like yawning shells of . . . nothing. Walls and a roof, enormous steel rinds with the pulp scraped out. But most of all, the containers are cavernous blank slates ready to be filled with the imaginations of filmmakers, famous and obscure.

They've been filled a lot since the summer of 2000, when Bullock brought her Warner Bros. comedy "Miss Congeniality" to Austin and used two stages for filming, set construction and the wardrobe department. The production was there for five months.

At that time, the Austin Film Society, the nonprofit group that manages the studios, was still negotiating a lease with the City of Austin, which owns the property. By November 2000, the lease was inked and Austin Studios was rolling, in partnership with the city. The city gave the studios a sweetheart deal: a 10-year lease at the price of $100 a year. Pleased with the results, the city is negotiating a new lease that might run as long as 30 years, studios director Suzanne Quinn says.

Since then, 16 feature films, three documentaries, seven commercials, two music videos and numerous photo shoots (including the Dixie Chicks' notorious magazine cover) have employed the studios for everything from filming, special effects and set construction to parking, office space and equipment rentals.

(Those empty boxes have proven prime party spaces, too. This year's Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards unfurled in the engulfing vastness of Stage 2. One can picture a three-day rave colonizing the 100,000 square feet of total stage space and five acres of parking lot, but perish the thought.)

Most recently, Austinite Robert Rodriguez used the studios for set construction and special effects for his family romp "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over," the finale of the director's enormously successful "Spy Kids" trilogy. "Game Over," which features Sylvester Stallone as the villain, will have its world premiere July 13 at the Paramount Theatre. It opens nationwide July 18.

The buzz is that Luke Wilson's $7 million directorial debut, "The Wendell Baker Story," starring brother Owen, will begin shooting at the studios in September. (The studios won't comment.) And hopes are high that the $35 million Tommy Lee Jones project "Cheer Up" will set up there in the fall, according to Tom Copeland, director of the Texas Film Commission.

So far, so good. In its first year alone, the studios created 700 local jobs and brought in $41.5 million to the city. To date, the studios have generated 1,600 jobs and $110 million. As landlord, Austin Studios takes the rents it receives, an annual low six-figure average, and funnels the money back into facility maintenance and improvements.

According to Gary Bond, director of the Austin Film Office, half of the production budget of a film made in Austin goes straight to the city. That means gold when it's a project like "Alamo," which finished filming last month in the Dripping Springs area at a cost of $90 million. ("Alamo" was shot entirely on location and didn't require stages, though it rented parking space at the studios.) From January to June of this year, all films shot in Austin have brought $129 million to the city. Last year's total was $51.7 million, down from 2001's $118.3 million.

"This is a lesson to any city out there that has any sort of reclamation of an airport or a big factory," Copeland says. "If you can put motion pictures (there) and not spend a lot of money doing it, provided you have the crew base and other allures that Austin has, these things will make money."

Besides stages and sparkling two-story production offices left behind by previous tenant Austin Aero — space that veteran director Alan Parker, who filmed "The Life of David Gale" here, crowned "far and away the best production offices I've ever had in the world" — Austin Studios is home to 11 full-time tenants that either maintain offices and workshops or merely rent parking space.

On a normal day about 100,000 square feet of parking is rented to location companies, such as Locations Catering's mobile kitchens and McTrucks' flotilla of toilets on wheels. The vehicles live there between movie shoots.

On-site vendors such as Chapman-Leonard Studio Equipment, which rents dolly tracks and cranes, and Great FX, which provides special effects such as wind machines, rain towers and pyrotechnics, make gear rental for productions a short stroll away. It's a major money saver for filmmakers. (Fifteen percent of the studios' income derives from on-site vendors and parking rental, says Quinn.)

Still, all involved admit the facility is a work in progress and has a long way to go before it can go head-to-head with technically advanced studios in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and Orlando. Those cities have the fabled "soundstages" one hears about in Hollywood lore, in the same breath as "backlots" and Louis B. Mayer's tyrannical streak. For starters, a proper soundstage is soundproofed ( Austin's are not), contains complete lighting rigs (negative) and air conditioning (nope). All of that and more are in the long-term plans, Quinn says.

"These are not studios, these are hangars, and they're slowly developing," Copeland says. "Filmmakers know they're not going to find state-of-the-art studios everywhere they go. And besides, most of them don't want to pay those prices if they can help it."

"Raw spaces" is how Elizabeth Avellan characterizes them. "You can't compare them to L.A., but they're also not charging L.A. prices," says Avellan, who produced the "Spy Kids" movies with husband Rodriguez.

A studio was born

When local filmmakers heard that Robert Mueller was closing, all they could do was moon at the soon-to-be empty hangars — all that room — and drool.

"You can't give enough credit to whoever had the foresight to turn the airport into a film facility. That's a huge attraction," "David Gale" director Parker told the American-Statesman in February.

It was Rodriguez and Avellan, noted projectionist Stan Ginsel, Austin Film Society founder Richard Linklater and society executive director Rebecca Campbell who in 1999 took their proposal to the Austin City Council and the Mueller Neighborhood Coalition. It went something like this: Austin has become a serious filmmaking hot spot, luring millions of dollars into the local economy. Thanks to the high-tech explosion, office and warehouse space is as rare as a chilly summer day and we need more in order to make movies here. The old hangars are perfect, not only for us but for other artists looking at Austin as a place to shoot.

"I saw the evidence of how quickly money brought to Austin by films trickled to the local level," says Mayor Will Wynn, who as a council member in 1999 championed the studios. "The immediate diffusion of real dollars into the local small-business community, from limo drivers to lumber shops, is amazing."

The timing of the studio proposal could not have been more felicitous. Real estate was rare and prices were preposterous.

"When the dot-com stuff was booming it had become impossible to find places in this town, either warehouses or office space," Copeland says. "The cost for square footage had gotten absolutely ridiculous. There's probably nothing worse for a motion picture company than to come into a booming area. Everything they need — short-term leases, space, hotels — were next to impossible."

Rodriguez and Avellan proved it could be done. To shoot 1998's "The Faculty" and part of the first "Spy Kids," they secured a warehouse and cramped office space in East Austin. It was far too small for their growing needs.

They kept an eye on the old State Aircraft Pooling Board at Mueller, where the governor's plane was once housed. They made a deal to lease it from the State of Texas. The airport closed May 1, 1999; they moved in May 3. They've used the hangars ever since for making movies, proving that old airports make good studios. Their example helped grease the way to Austin Studios.

"What we can provide here that's never been available is warehouse space, parking, which is always impossible to find, and offices all in one spot," Quinn says. "You used to have all of that scattered across town. Now it's behind one fence."

Curious things have happened behind that fence: war and heavy rains ("Master of the Game"), suicide, marital infidelity and Spacey's exposed buttocks ("Life of David Gale"), an elaborate fantasy sequence in a sheik's palace ("Secondhand Lions"), actor Jessica Biel pitching L'oreal products.

"Secondhand Lions" writer-director Tim McCanlies filmed almost all of the film's interior scenes, with Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment, in Stage 1 last fall. The part-time Austinite wanted to film in the area. Having convenient studios "really helped me make the case (to the producers) to shoot in Austin.

"I don't think anyone would come to Austin just to use the stages there, but if you're shooting in Austin, it's a huge asset to have stages to go to," McCanlies says. "Secondhand Lions" will be released Sept. 26.

Director Jeff Stolhand of Austin shot nearly all of "Master of the Game," a $300,000 psychological thriller set during World War II, in Stage 3. The film played at South by Southwest and won the audience award for best feature at the Austin Film Festival last year. Though Quinn wouldn't say what the studios charge filmmakers, she and Stolhand said productions are charged varying prices based on their size, and local shoots are given special favor.

"For a low-budget production like this you really need a studio in which to put your sets," Stolhand says. "It makes things so much easier. We had all of our departments and offices there. Everything was within walking distance.

"Without the studio we would not have been able to make the same film, period," he continues. "If we were forced to use an actual location as opposed to a set we can control it would have been a much, much different film. Because it's a very dialogue-driven film we had to shoot from as many different and unusual angles as we could. And without being able to move walls and the ceiling we couldn't have done that."

The saga of Austin Studios is still in its first reel. Quinn dreams of a second complex of production offices and calls soundproofing the stages a "top priority" that will "definitely be in the six figures." A screening room will be ready in the fall, she says.

Quinn hopes that in five years the studios will be "where we could house two $20 million-plus features at once." She admits they won't be seeing any $100 million productions for many, many years to come.

The idea, she says, is to think long-term.

"We haven't had a production walk away because our competitive edge is the low cost. They're here looking for a bargain, and they realize there are issues they have to deal with because of that. Certain productions would never even look at us. They know what we have," Quinn says. "But it hasn't slowed us down."