There's no hyperbole in this statement: my guest, native New Yorker and founder and managing principal at East End Capital, Jonathon Yormak, influences independent filmmaking more than any other guest I've had on the podcast. East End will have over 2.5 million square feet of studio space under management at the opening of his fifth studio in Los Angeles.
So not only does that space support a number of studio-level productions, the talent that works there is your next audio engineer, gaffer, cinematographer, or director...if New York and California remain friendly to U.S.-based production.
A big if...and a big topic in this extraordinarily special -- and important -- episode of the podcast.
In this episode, Jonathon and I talk about:
Memorable Quotes:
"if you really look back the intersection...between real estate and film and TV production, it really began with Netflix and their explosion into digital content distribution and then spending an enormous amount of money directly on content creation."
"And so by 2018, 2019, you also had Apple and Amazon that had both started to get into the game. And in a couple of instances, Amazon in particular had leased some space for ten year terms. And so what you started to see was that occupancy was well north of 90% in almost every sound stage in the United States. And on top of that, there really had been no new development, with the exception of Atlanta, of new best in class film and television sound stages in the US for 25 years."
"To build anything in California takes forever."
"What happened is, the strikes hit and at the same time, Wall Street was putting pressure on all of the streamers to figure out how they were making money."
"So they started to go to places...that had very favorable tax incentive regimes. So those would be...the UK, Ireland, Canada in particular."
"Our view of [AR/VR/AI], it actually is supportive of higher stage occupancy."
"So if you wanted to film in Times Square, you had to actually go to Times Square. You wanted to film in front of the Eiffel Tower, you had to go in front of the Eiffel Tower. In facilities like ours, where you can get the height and the distance away from them, you can film that in a sound stage."
"From AI...being able to make a movie. I still think that, the human element...it's not from everything I'm seeing, it's just not able to capture that well."
