By GARY PERILLOUX
Advocate business writer
Published: Nov 15, 2009 - Page: 1F

The gray walls rise 29 feet.

As four visitors walk the huge concrete room, nothing stirs.

Nothing until Patrick Mulhearn punches a button on the far wall.

Quietly, a 15-ton beast begins moving, gliding with uncommon grace.

It’s a rare sight, indeed.

“This is the only elephant door in the state of Louisiana,” Mulhearn says.

That’s movie industry lingo for a door so thick, so well-insulated that no sound enters the soundstage from outdoors so long as it’s shut.

Once opened on rails, the door admits the whir of heating and cooling equipment outside the Celtic Media Centre stage.

It’s been a long four years since the late Brendan O’Connor bought this reclamation project, then an abandoned concrete shell of what rap music recording star Master P once envisioned as a gymnasium, music studio, party place and hangout for friends and family.

Thirty million dollars and 17 raccoons later, Hollywood has spied the house that Brendan built.

And Hollywood is here.

In July, Mayor-President Kip Holden beamed while announcing the arrival of “Battle: Los Angeles,” a film bringing the biggest movie budget in Baton Rouge history to the 23-acre Celtic Media Centre.

In a real sense, “Battle: Los Angeles” is Baton Rouge’s battle for respectability in the movie business. Though Louisiana has logged nearly $500 million in film production annually in recent years, most of that business focused on New Orleans and, after Hurricane Katrina, Shreveport.

“Battle: Los Angeles,” which will film through mid-December, estimates spending $25 million directly in Baton Rouge, Holden and producer Jeffrey Chernov announced. Metro Councilwoman Alison Cascio, also a city film commissioner, confirmed the film’s total budget would approach $60 million.

Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. took the gamble on Baton Rouge, choosing to bypass Georgia in bringing its Columbia Pictures film to Louisiana, said Chernov, who confessed the choice wasn’t an easy one. Much of Louisiana’s film crew base is deployed in New Orleans and Shreveport, and questions lingered about the ability to staff a feature film requiring hundreds of workers in Baton Rouge.
It’s a question O’Connor began answering when he bought the property in 2005. An Irish-born maritime magnate, O’Connor pioneered third-party shipping services in Louisiana for barges and oceangoing vessels. He parlayed some of his wealth and much of his zeal into the movie studio before his death in January.

One answer to lingering doubts about Baton Rouge came when O’Connor secured a management agreement with Raleigh Studios, the biggest independent studio in the movie industry, to operate Celtic Media Centre.

Though most early film and TV projects based at Celtic carried budgets of less than $1 million — or not much more — the studio slowly gained tenants in the movie industry: independent film production companies, equipment companies, payroll firms to track wages due union members, cast and extras.

“I think the vision behind the whole campus was to be able to service a multitude of movies,” said Celtic executive Michael O’Connor, Brendan’s son, who also operates The Celtic Group’s maritime business. The permanent Celtic tenants can help support productions in the million-dollar range, in the $5 million to $10 million sector and in the $20 million and higher sphere, O’Connor said.

Today, there are a dozen tenants at Celtic, said Mulhearn, a former associate film director for the state who now directs studio operations at Celtic for Raleigh. Each tenant plays a role in the bigger purpose of being able to play host to movie productions, which are nomadic projects by nature and

In early fall, “Battle: Los Angeles” filmed freeway action scenes in Shreveport and switched to more pyrotechnics in Baton Rouge neighborhoods in October, including Interstate 110 areas downtown, the Perkins Overpass District and the Garden District and City Lake area, where filming under banks of lights lasted into the wee hours of the morning.

By November, the soundstages at Celtic were set with a mock neighborhood, back-lot imitations of Los Angeles municipal buildings and Mission-style architecture, along with plans for an indoor set of simulated underground sewers, where battles between U.S. Marines and alien invaders would take place in the imitation city of angels at Celtic.

Tax credit gumbo

It’s the fulfillment of what studio entrepreneurs throughout Louisiana hoped to create when the state offered a 40 percent tax credit on studio facilities, a credit expiring this year that was intended to jump-start the mostly converted-warehouse and location filming into a more permanent industry.

Though others proposed studios costing as much as $800 million, the model has worked best at Celtic, which had spent $26.4 million on the studio through October and expects to spend about $30 million by year’s end, when the credit expires. That’s the largest investment in the state so far.

Another Baton Rouge studio, Red Stick Studio Development LLC, has appealed the tax credit expiration, successfully so far, through the state’s appellate court system. If the appeal ultimately succeeds, studios like Celtic and Red Stick, which has construction under way, could continue collecting 40 percent tax credits through a multiyear schedule established with the state’s Division of Administration.

Only nine studio projects met an August 2007 deadline to avoid a $25 million state cap on studio credits. So far, only Celtic has spent beyond the cap. And should the Red Stick legal challenge prevail, those studios would need to spend $10 million by the end of 2009 to continue collecting 40 percent tax credits.

With a 30,000-square-foot mill shop under construction that could double as Celtic’s fifth soundstage, O’Connor said future building phases on about eight remaining acres would be “market-driven,” not speculative like the studio’s first construction. That means 100 percent of the cost would be based on demonstrable economic returns.

Beyond “Battle: Los Angeles,” there are grounds for believing the market has arrived in Baton Rouge, he said.

“We’re bringing in a lot of projects next year,” O’Connor said, with as little as two projects potentially selling out the studio because of their unusually large size.

Word could come as swiftly as December on one project that would be considerably larger than “Battle: Los Angeles,” said Mulhearn, who said studios have placed five nonbinding “holds,” or reservations, on use of the Celtic Media Centre.

“I believe we could probably do four medium-sized or two large productions a year and have the place fully occupied,” said Bob Bayham, chief financial officer of The Celtic Group.

Measuring up

On a recent Friday morning, the art deco lettering of a Celtic Media Centre sign loomed over the boulevard entrance to the movie lot, lending a Hollywood-like presence to the place.

Uniformed security guards manned a guardhouse gate, cementing that presence.

And down a short drive to the main O’Connor Building, film production trailers filled much of the parking lot near a soundstage with 70-foot-high ceilings in which an entire Santa Monica, Calif., neighborhood had been created.

Caterers unveiled food in buffet-serving dishes in another building, while outside a faded green military Humvee swept through the lot, a reminder of the rough action being shot on the studio lot and throughout the city.

A shiny black “people-mover,” industry jargon for a small passenger bus, pulled up to the O’Connor Building entrance. Soon, a Sony Pictures executive and his small entourage emerged in a hallway lined with intermittent spotlights and black-and-white still shots of long-ago films made in Louisiana.

In the latest effort to establish Louisiana as Hollywood South, to give the state some permanency in the movie business, Celtic is succeeding, said Andy Given, who’s the senior vice president of physical production at Sony.

He described the company’s experience in Baton Rouge and at Celtic as “phenomenal.”

“I think this has been a great location for the film, and it’s going to put Baton Rouge on the map,” Given said.

“Our experience in Baton Rouge has been extremely good,” agreed Steve Elzer, Sony’s senior vice president for medial relations. “The facilities are terrific, the crews are good and we will continue to film in the region in the future.”

Not that life has been simple for Celtic officials. On a recent morning, Bayham ran interference with a caravan of 10 cement trucks waiting to pour driveways and other foundations around the 30,000-square-foot mill shop under construction at the studio. The filming schedule had changed, so the construction schedule had to change in concert.

“This was a tough construction project,” O’Connor said of the multi-phase development.

Construction, though, has been paramount to Celtic’s success, Bayham said. The soundstages have more than $1 million invested both in special wiring and dozens of tons of whisper-quiet air conditioning. Special ceiling joists must carry 1,500 pounds each to support lighting and rigging hung from the ceiling. In addition to the 30,000-pound elephant door, built-up wooden floors, extra sound-dampening sand and floating slabs were necessary in other areas.

That all came after the raccoons. In the shell of the original building inherited from Master P, partially installed duct work provided enough cover for a potential La-Z-Boy furniture commercial crew.

“There were 17 raccoons living in the building,” Bayham said.

Now, on a slow day, more than 100 people work on the Celtic Media Centre lot. On a busy day, with “Battle: Los Angeles” filming, that number swells to 400.

The learning curve to reach that critical mass was steep, but Celtic officials say their studio development plan was predicated on business moves that make sense.

“The reason this (studio) is like it is and others haven’t gone anywhere is this is realistic,” said Mulhearn, who added that more studio space from competitors in Baton Rouge would be welcomed, given the level of business headed the city’s way.

“We’re a very young industry,” Bayham said, describing the state’s growth from $10 million a year in film business to a possible $1 billion within one decade as an uncommon opportunity that Brendan O’Connor recognized. “There are not a lot of industries, from my point-of-view, that can do that. We’re very confident about our project and about the future.”