Film role planned for GM facility

Is the film business Michigan's last-gasp stab at a gold rush, or a smart way to secure a future for thousands of displaced workers?

The state's generous tax credits have turned Michigan into Hollywood on the Lakes for as long as economic incentives hold. That's the gold rush part.

And in a sleek Pontiac building that was only three years ago a workspace for 3,000 General Motors engineers, 85-year-old A. Alfred Taubman and Linden Nelson, 48, a Birmingham-based developer and CEO of Nelson Ventures Inc., are trying to outdo competitor projects in Allen Park and Detroit with powerful connections, mega-bucks and a philanthropic bent.

Two weeks ago, they formally closed on a 22-acre site in GM's Centerpoint complex, a giant step in their $75 million plan: a training ground for downsized, displaced, laid-off, bought-out workers who will be able to work onsite at a professional film studio while Hollywood film producers make movies in Michigan. Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Raleigh Studios is teaming up with the group and helping lay out the studio specifications.

It's the philanthropic side that now motivates Taubman, shopping mall pioneer, former Sotheby's owner, patron of the arts, shrewd real estate investor. Last year, he gave the University of Michigan $40 million for cutting-edge medical research, then helped fund a campaign to lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Still natty in three-piece custom suits and eye-catching shirt-and-tie combinations, Taubman also wears a hearing aid. But if his hearing isn't quite as robust as it once was, he clearly still has the vision thing -- the ability to see what might lie next.

Nelson, the CEO of the new venture and an established developer with his own fortune, plays the protégé to Taubman, lauding his advice and keen architectural eye.

Their company, Motown Motion Pictures LLC, is working on a name for the studio complex that will feature its Centerpoint location.

On Monday, Taubman and Nelson took me through the existing building, where the neon signs in the cafeteria are still lit and hundreds of thousands of square feet of pristine carpeting remain.

With 36 conference rooms that came with remote-controlled projection screens, Nelson says: "It's as if this building was waiting for us, was meant for this purpose."

The project may sound dreamy, especially in Michigan, but it isn't vapor: They've closed on the deal with GM and await some dotted-line signing before moving forward with the next phase. Detailed plans, including two new studio buildings with 10 sound stages and the capacity for a 90,000-square-foot studio, are well under way.

From the expanse of the windows, you can imagine today's industrial Pompeii as tomorrow's hub of activity: Here the campus for student gaffers, grips, writers, producers, animators and costumers. There, where parking lots sprawl, two new studios, built to the exact specifications of their Hollywood partner, Raleigh Studios. "You've heard of teaching hospitals? This is going to be a teaching studio," says Nelson.

This is a project the Wall Street Journal labeled as "audacious" -- because if it's built and operated as planned, it will be a hub of professional work and training, a place where an animation student can get an internship onsite, while real movies are being staged and filmed. Hollywood movies, staffed by Michigan technicians, made in Pontiac, the way cars used to be.

It sounds fanciful, overblown, wildly ambitious.

"Is there risk? Of course there's risk but I've taken risks all my life," says Taubman, saying he wants to reverse the state's creative brain drain. Taubman remains, says Nelson, a taskmaster "who loves to teach but expects you to get all As." They expect the project to be successful. They're investing energy, time, reputations and hard cash in this project.

From the north windows of the building, there's a view of the Pontiac truck plant, one of the few operating buildings on this sprawling GM Centerpoint Campus, and one soon destined to close.

"You look out at these spaces and wonder what happened to the people who worked here," says Taubman, standing in a 120,000-square-foot-office, stripped of its worker cubicles and the 3,000 men and women who worked in this building not long ago.

"Do they have jobs?" he asks, out loud, as if he was trying to find a way to get them all work, and soon.

Laura Berman's column appears in print on Tuesdays and Thursdays and online on Sundays.