It’s been a few years since the Ryerson steel plant on the west side has really hummed, but there’s been a Hollywood buzz around it since New Line Cinema’s A Nightmare on Elm Street set up shop there for two months last summer. And early this month came the intoxicating word that the mammoth, mostly empty factory campus was being purchased by investors and would become a film studio by January.
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This week the deal was still in the discussion stage, and the Canadian investor, Toronto-based Cinespace Film Studios, was looking to our desperately cash-strapped city and state governments for assistance over and above the $5 million grant the Illinois legislature has already approved. Cinespace owner Nick Mirkopoulos (whose Chicago partners are members of his extended family, according to his nephew, real estate broker Alex Pissios) told PerformInk‘s Carrie Kaufman that he’s looking for government grants to cover 40 to 50 percent of the project cost. According to Kaufman’s report, Mirkopoulos wants a more level playing field with Toronto, which offers generous subsidies.
A couple of insults Cinespace recently suffered in its hometown might be factors. The Mirkopoulos family got into the studio facilities business at an opportune moment, when Canada launched the film subsidies that sent moviemakers north, helping to create the “runaway production” phenomenon that California’s still battling. Cinespace hosted a lot of films—including, much to the Windy City’s chagrin, Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002)—and expanded to four separate spaces. But in 2007, on only two months’ notice, the economic development arm of the city of Toronto booted Cinespace from a 140,000-square-foot city-owned waterfront facility the company had operated for 12 years. Nick Mirkopoulos lamented to a sympathetic Toronto Star columnist that he’d invested $11 million in the building, and an online petition asking the city to give Cinespace at least 18 months to move drew more than 5,000 signatures—but to no avail.
Christopherson writes that while states clamber over one another in a mad rush to supply ever more generous subsidies for a nomadic industry, “the fiscal impacts of the subsidies are overwhelmingly negative.” More tax money is paid out than comes back to the state. And as for public investment in studios like the one proposed for the Ryerson site, it’s “a high-risk proposition in an industry organized around short-term projects.”
