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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.”
