"PALM SPRINGS — At a time when Florida is struggling to attract filmmakers, a local charter school is looking to the future and building a multimillion-dollar movie studio.
G-Star School of the Arts is about halfway through construction of a new, 50,000-square-foot soundstage — in filmmaking terms, a medium-sized facility — on its property along Congress Avenue. When completed in late May, it will be able to shoot all kinds of movie scenes, even those involving water and fire.
The price tag is about $5 million, coming from federal dollars earmarked to build or renovate school structures. At the same time, G-Star founder and CEO Greg Hauptner is looking to buy other contiguous properties, because his charter school can handle only 1,000 students and he's already got 860 after seven years of operation.
'The primary goal is to provide an education, but the secondary goal is to give kids hands-on experience in filmmaking,' Hauptner said.
This is all coming at a time when Florida's position as a filmmaking center is in rapid decline. Once the third most popular state for filmmaking, after California and New York, Florida has fallen out of the Top 10. Orlando's studio facilities now do production only for their indigenous theme parks."
