Hollywood East?
Well, not exactly, but close enough to whet the appetites of officials in Fayette County, who are on the verge of a deal that would see the construction of two soundstages and a back-lot for exterior shots — all at a facility in the mountains east of Uniontown whose history is more like "Ishtar" than "Gone with the Wind."
Officials led by county Commissioner Ron Nehls have expressed enthusiasm for a movie-production project at the site of Great Meadows Amphitheater. Its construction in the early 1970s was widely hailed, but its subsequent spotty history turned the facility into a prototypical white-elephant disappointment.
Fayette Films, a group spearheaded by Jason Thomas, a writer, and Doris Keating-Schlesinger, a Los Angeles-based producer whose credits include the 1985 made-for-TV movie "My Wicked, Wicked Ways - The Legend of Errol Flynn," expects to sign a lease agreement with the county worth $540,000 for five years, with an option for an additional five-year lease or outright purchase.
"We were stunned by the beauty of the area," said Keating-Schlesinger, who visited the amphitheater, along Route 40, a mile from Fort Necessity National Battlefield, for the first time a week-and-a-half ago. In addition, Keating-Schlesinger, who telephoned from Florida where she was vacationing, said Uniontown "has a wonderful urban 'look'...a New York (City) type setting."
According to Keating-Schlesinger, the project will be largely devoted not to Hollywood-style, big-budget film-making but to tourism. Tourists, she said, will be drawn to the movie lot/amphitheater to see how movies are made.
Thomas, who will serve as president of the film group, said in an interview from his residence in Wyoming that he expects tourism but that he also expects that movies, mostly the made-for-TV variety, will be produced at the site.
He said Fayette Films expects to produce four films a year along with documentaries. He also predicted other filmmakers would shoot movies there. "They're already asking me about it," Thomas said.
The principals in the group, which also includes Keating-Schlesinger's husband, Los Angeles-based fund manager Barry Schlesinger, of Kennedy-Wilson International, and Uniontown attorney Ira Coldren, will seek other investors, Thomas and Coldren said.
"We would like to have investors," Coldren said. "We think it will be a good opportunity for them."
Without providing specifics, Coldren said the cost of shares or "units" for the firm will be "substantial."
"I suppose there are some risks" for investors, Coldren said, adding that he sees "no risk for the people of Fayette County or the county commissioners."
The amphitheater has hosted numerous events, most notably an outdoor drama called "Young Washington" in the early 1980s, but few and fewer things since.
The film group expects to use the amphitheater for "melodramas" replete with sinister bad guys and damsels in distress. The amphitheater will be part of an entertainment complex that will include the soundstages and the back-lot. Keating-Schlesinger said the back-lot would probably replicate a Western frontier town.
Thomas said the movie industry needs more soundstage space. Besides southern California, the area of the country with the largest concentration of soundstages and other buildings devoted to filmmaking is Wilmington, N.C.
The head of the Wilmington film office, Johnny Griffin, said the Screen Gems studio in Wilmington is running at about 20 percent capacity, but the hope is it will be up to 60 percent capacity by the end of the year.
"Everybody has the misconception that if you build it they will come," Griffin said.
The industry is cyclical in nature, Griffin said, with some flush times and some not-so-flush times.
As a result, it can be financially risky: Screen Gems is the third outfit to be in charge of the Wilmington complex. The other two, including one headed by famed producer Dino DeLaurentiis, went bankrupt. Scores of theatrical movies, including "Firestarter," "Sleeping with the Enemy," "Conan the Destroyer" and "Lolita," plus dozens of television shows and commercials, have been shot in Wilmington since the first production in 1984.
"We're always looking for work," Griffin said, adding that films, in the end, need to make money in order to sustain production facilities.
"The way we avoid the Wilmington problems is by doing the work with tourists," Keating-Schlesinger said.
According to Thomas, Wilmington's recent difficulties can be traced to higher and higher production costs — the same factor that has bedeviled Hollywood in recent years and resulted in more films being shot in Canada and elsewhere.
Both Thomas and Keating-Schlesinger cited potential lower production costs in their decision to set up shop in Fayette County. Keating-Schlesinger said the group is interested in working with local universities to develop training programs for persons interested in working in the film industry.
Keating-Schlesinger is coming off a failed attempt to establish a movie production facility in Henderson, Nev., a suburb of Las Vegas. Black Mountain Studios would have gone up in an industrial park. In April 2000, the city of Henderson bought back the 20 acres set aside for the facility for $3.2 million. Keating-Schlesinger had purchased the site for $1.2 million in 1998.
Keating-Schlesinger, whose father, the late Jackson Mahon, marketed U.S. films overseas, blamed the mayor of Henderson, James Gibson, for the failure. "It was a political issue," she said.
On April 21, 2000, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Henderson officials "said Keating failed to meet deadlines to develop the land and the city council denied a deadline extension."
Keating-Schlesinger declined to comment for the Review-Journal at the time, the paper said.
She told the Tribune-Review last week the buy-back covered only her expenses. She denied making money on the deal. At one point, she filed suit against Henderson in an attempt to continue with the $200 million Black Mountain Studios project.
Fayette County Redevelopment Director Raymond Polaski expressed one school of thought about the impending deal with the Fayette Films group: "It is a win-win situation. We've got a fallow piece of ground these people are going to lease from us."
Commissioners are reviewing the language of the proposed lease agreement and could vote on the matter within a month, if not sooner.
