Second Line Stages to triple in size as local film business booms | Business News

Second Line Stages, one of the largest television and film studio operators in Louisiana, is tripling the size of its Lower Garden District space as movie production again booms in New Orleans.

The sound stage operator and its Culver City, California-based financial backers, Hackman Capital Partners, began construction this month on space that will add two city blocks to the company’s existing premises on Richard Street, a few blocks from the Market Street Power Plant.

The new space will triple Second Line’s operating space in the neighborhood, where it will have seven production studios and supporting workshop and warehouse space for lease to movie production companies.

The expansion reflects the scramble by both traditional production companies, like Paramount and NBC Universal, as well as emerging streaming services like Amazon and Apple, to produce original content. There are currently 26 films or series in production in Louisiana, 22 of which are being made in New Orleans, according to Louisiana Economic Development’s film division.

Movies in production in the city include “Heart of a Lion,” a biopic about boxer George Foreman, and “Renfield,” a vampire-themed offering featuring Nicholas Cage.

Second Line’s expansion also reflects a big shift over the last few years whereby financial operators like Hackman and Blackstone Group have been scooping up studios around the world, often buying them from the big production players and then signing long-term lease deals with those companies.

The movie-making companies are freed up to concentrate on production and can be more flexible about where they shoot, according to industry analysts.

Demand ‘off the charts’

Trey Burvant, co-founder and vice president of studio operations at Second Line, said the local movie-making ecosystem is currently thriving as producers try to make up ground lost during the pandemic.

“In New Orleans, the demand for content creation right now is off the charts,” Burvant said Thursday, speaking on the sidelines of a University of New Orleans real estate conference.

Second Line Stages was founded a year after Hurricane Katrina by Burvant and Susan Brennan to take advantage of the renewed interest in the Louisiana film industry. Their operation rode the local industry’s boom and boost cycles, which have been driven largely by sentiment toward the state’s generous and controversial film tax breaks.

Companies like Second Line do not directly receive the film incentive tax credits. But their business depends on demand from production companies, which have been quick to go elsewhere when subsidies disappear.

A previous $32 million expansion project by Second Line was completed in 2015, just before former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal reined in the tax incentive program, which led to a sharp slump in the state’s film production in subsequent years.

A debate over film subsidies

Chris Stelly, executive director of Louisiana Economic Development’s entertainment and digital media unit, said the industry has become more stable in the last few years since production has shifted toward making episodic series, which can result in years-long leasing contracts for studios and longer-term employment opportunities. LED estimates that there are currently about 10,000 Louisianans employed directly in the film and television industry. That’s still down from a peak of 13,000 before the tax program was curbed.

“Investment like you’re seeing from the Hackman group and those folks is happening naturally because they see long-term opportunity here,” Stelly said.

The debate over film subsidies continues even as policymakers tweak it to curb abuses. The state only gets back about 30 cents on the dollar in terms of the direct return on the taxpayer subsidy, but LED reckons the true return in 2020 was more like $2.55 for every dollar spent when jobs created and money spent on things like catering, period clothing and furniture, and all the other elements of movie-making are taken into account.

The New Orleans expansion will put Second Line on a par with some of Hackman Capital’s bigger studio operations in terms of square footage. Second Line is one of 18 facilities Hackman now owns in California, New York, Toronto, and the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The company’s acquisition binge in the last few years included the historic Culver City Studios, for which it has signed a long-term lease deal with Amazon. Just before the pandemic in Dec. 2019 Hackman bought the 25-acre CBS Television City campus for $25 million.

The purchase price for the two blocks in the Lower Garden District was not disclosed but together the acreage was valued at about $6 million by the Orleans Parish Assessor.

The warehouse that abuts Religious Street was previously owned by a company controlled by Barry Kern and used as a space for floats from his Mardi Gras World operations. That has now been converted to mill shops and other facilities that will support production companies leasing the stages, said Nick Moldaner, chief operating officer of consturction company Impetus (formerly Palmisano), the firm designing and building the project.

The four new stages under construction next door are costing roughly $25 million. That project has involved hoisting 56-foot tall precast concrete slabs into place, each weighing 80,000 pounds. A large crane on the site is putting into place 160-foot custom-made steel beams that comprise the new stage’s roof.

Modlaner said that the demanding timeline to get the studio space online was possible because the concrete slabs were made in Mississippi and the steel beams in Alabama, which allowed them to overcome the supply chain bottlenecks that have been holding up construction projects for months.

“Half the structure will be in place within the next two weeks and completely erected before the summer,” Moldaner said. “Then we’ll be working to fit it out with all the programming requirements for the movie stages to get it into production six months after getting the green light. That’s a very accelerated schedule.”