Shows Like ‘Maisel,’ ‘And Just Like That’ Push New York City Production Into Post-COVID Expansion
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No one ever said filming in New York City was easy, especially during a pandemic. Just ask the showrunners behind Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” or the producer of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming HBO Max limited series “Full Circle.”
“We had an incident yesterday on our set in Queens: a crazy person grabbed a grip by the hair and was trying to take a swing at her. Thank God she got away and he ran off,” “Circle” producer Jonathan Filley said in late September. “And we just had a car rear-end another car, which ran into our electric truck. … There’s a lot of mental instability in the city these days.”
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This wouldn’t be a shock to “Maisel” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino or her fellow showrunner, Daniel Palladino. who had a hazardous Washington Square Park shoot in spring 2021. “There had been a lot of anti-police protests, and weirdos were encroaching on our set,” Palladino says. “There were no police, and we finally bolted. We had our own security, but there was a group of film students who were keeping an eye on us.” (“And our purses!” Sherman-Palladino chimes in.) “They were chasing some people off, and we realized our de facto security was a bunch of 18-year-olds at NYU.”
Fortunately, more experienced help is on the way as productions flock to the city. Since 2016, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) has grown to oversee advertising, digital content, music, theater and nightlife, leaving its staff stretched a bit thin to monitor film and television production. In July, with the support of new mayor Eric Adams, MOME commissioner Anne del Castillo recruited the director of the Chicago Film Office, Kwame Amoaku, as New York City’s new deputy commissioner in MOME’s film office and principal adviser on production policy.
Adams also established the Film and Television Production Industry Council, co-chaired by the Directors Guild of America’s Neil Dudich and the New York COVID Protection Response Alliance’s April Taylor. Its 21-member board of industry professionals, set to meet in a private session this month for the first time, will try to solve issues ranging from ensuring safety to changing COVID protocols to navigating permits to clearing cars off streets to not over-filming in certain “hot spot” areas. And Adams signed Executive Order 21, creating film office liaisons with each city agency to help facilitate shoots.
“All of the pandemic changes that occurred — Open Streets [a program that closed roads to cars and, often, filming], outdoor dining sheds, parking on both sides of the street in certain situations — definitely had an effect on the viability of production,” Amoaku says. “There’ll be some public hearings on them soon.”
One of his first orders of business will be a great source of relief to crews. “The NYPD’s vehicle towing unit has been down for a while and is being reconstituted. We’re trying to reorganize and figure out how to implement that right now.”
While Sherman-Palladino says the “Maisel” incident was one of only two in her five years of production, they weren’t total anomalies. On July 19, NBC’s “Law & Order: Organized Crime” crew member Johnny Pizarro was shot and killed in Brooklyn while saving a parking space, just days before a shooting incident and vehicle crash near the Chicago set of FX’s “Justified: City Primeval.” (Filming on both projects resumed with increased security). A city spokesperson turned down Variety’s request to interview an NYPD film industry liaison and disclose the number of security incidents on sets over the past few years, saying their “data is not kept to that level of specificity.” A MOME spokesperson says they take “safety protocols on all productions very seriously. We always work closely with city agencies and local communities to ensure that cast and crew are working on safe sets in secure locations.”
The good news is that New York City filming is back to pre-pandemic levels, led by episodic series. From January to August 2019, there were 1,880 permitted city productions. That number dropped to just 477 during the same period in 2020, but rose to 1,454 during January-August of this year. This comes on the heels of an unprecedented amount of filming. Episodic TV productions in New York jumped from 29 in the 2013-14 season to nearly 80 in the 2019-20 season. Series are back to pre-pandemic levels, with around 80 filming this year and some 35 projects on the ground at any given time.
And for those avoiding the occasionally mean streets of New York, there’ve never been more stages to choose from. Alongside well-established outfits like Kaufman Astoria Studios, Steiner Studios, Silvercup Studios, York Studios and Broadway Stages, Netflix Studio Brooklyn opened in the borough’s Bushwick neighborhood in summer 2021.
“In New York, you have great crews, good incentives and places people want to locate their projects,” says Amy Lemish, director of studio affairs for Netflix and a member of the Film and Television Production Industry Council. “We found a developer who could build in a time frame that worked for us, and we’re excited to be in a part of the city that’s a little more up-and-coming than places studios have operated in the past.”
The 170,000-sq.-ft. facility, which includes six soundstages, a mill and office space, can house up to one series and one feature at a time, most recently Bradley Cooper’s biopic “Maestro” and Season 2 of “Next in Fashion.” Netflix VP of production facilities management and operations Anne Kelly says they have projects filming at other places, but “you don’t always have the availability of purpose-built stages in the marketplace, so having that is the big thing for us.”
A subway ride away, Steiner Studios boasts 30 soundstages on 780,000 square-feet in the Brooklyn Navy Yards. It now houses seven features and series, including “Maisel” and “Gossip Girl.” In December, says owner Doug Steiner, they’ll begin a 100,000-sq.-ft. gut renovation to build two new stages and support space, set for completion in mid-2024, followed by a 160,000-sq.-ft. parking structure. He’s excited about joining the new council, and how liaisons at the NYPD and other agencies will help “cut through red tape,” he says. “This was one of the first industries to come back after the pandemic started. With the downturn on Wall Street and interest rates going up, that points out how important this industry is to our economic future.”
Over in Queens, Kaufman Astoria Studios has been chugging along since 1920 and is now hosting shoots for “American Horror Story,” “Succession” and “Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens” on its 11 stages. Like Steiner, it has an open-air backlot for exterior shoots, located on a gated block.
“It creates security, and we also use it to help corral production vehicles if they’re not using it to shoot,” says president Hal Rosenbluth, another member of MOME’s new council. His studio had one of the first post-pandemic productions in August 2020, and he noted how far things have come since then, when a crew member was isolated with caution tape around her chair because her husband had been near someone who tested positive (neither ended up having COVID).
Many in the industry say COVID safety guidelines are still strictly enforced, but as government rules around mask mandates and other measures have fallen by the wayside, strict adherence to outdoor masking on set has as well.
One of Rosenbluth’s neighbors is York Studios, which has a campus in Queens (where Soderbergh’s “Full Circle” films on its one soundstage) and the Bronx (where Apple TV+’s “Severance” increased its footprint from three to all five stages on the 175,000-sq.-ft. campus for its second season). Executive VP John Battista plans to double the footprint of both locations, adding a second stage in Queens (plus a six-story building) and five higher stages in the Bronx by around 2025.
“People are looking to hold onto stages for longer periods of time,” he says. “With the increase in prices, they don’t want to take sets down and store or rebuild them. With lumber, the two-by-fours that were $2 each are now $8 each. It’s crazy.”
“Maisel” creator Sherman-Palladino estimates that COVID compliance alone has added about 30% to her show’s budget. All of this makes New York state’s 25% film production tax credit an even more powerful draw, but the New Jersey Film & Digital Media Tax Credit Program’s 30%-35% credit (plus a 2% or 4% additional incentive to productions that meet certain diversity criteria), revived in 2018, is luring more productions across the Hudson.
Yet some are shooting in both states, and not all studios with New York City-set productions are based in the city. The new Lionsgate Studios in Yonkers, which falls within the local production zone set by NYC unions and guilds, opened its doors last December. Three stages are now online, two more are coming in January and another pair open in March.
“In the next 16 months or so, we’ll have 20 stages plus a large backlot and be fully operational,” says CEO Robert A. Halmi. “We’ve had at least one show a week approach us, and we’ve had to turn them down because we don’t have the space yet.”
Not to fear: more stages are on the way. Robert De Niro’s Wildflower Studios broke ground on the Astoria, Queens, waterfront late last year, and is set to be completed by spring 2024.
“We wanted to address the future of storytelling in all forms: AR, VR and gaming, as well as episodic,” says managing partner Adam Gordon, who also serves as managing partner of Wildflower Ltd., a real estate development company funding the $600 million project. De Niro, working with his son, high-powered Douglas Elliman real estate broker Raphael De Niro, consulted with them and the Bjarke Ingels Group design team on the 775,000-sq.-ft. facility, which will boast 11 soundstages, advanced stage and lighting design, and more than four acres of on-site parking.
Nils Widboom, co-producer of the Starz drama “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” now filming at Lionsgate, has seen New York City production multiply exponentially over the past two decades.
“It’s great, but it’s difficult to find decent crews at times, because there are so many positions to fill and a lot of younger people you kind of have to train,” he says.
MOME is addressing this with workforce development programs, including MediaMKRS — teaming with employers and unions to create a credentialing system for media skills — and several Made in N.Y. initiatives: training programs for post-production and PA jobs, a project that teaches 3D computer animation and arranges paid internships, a fellowship program for TV writers from diverse backgrounds and free career panels featuring industry leaders.
“The biggest developments are what we’ve announced this year: Kwame’s arrival and the mayor’s executive order,” says MOME commissioner del Castillo, citing a fall 2021 Film and Television Economic Impact study revealing that the industry supported around 185,000 jobs, $18.1 billion in wages and $81.6 billion in total economic output in 2019 alone.
“It’s partly in response to what we were seeing last year, but more a recognition of the importance of this industry to our economy, and the need for government to be coordinated in responding to the needs of production in the city.”
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