Internet stalking Wildflower Studios
For some reason my husband and I have been kind of obsessed with the idea of Robert DeNiro's bizarre vertical production studio in Astoria, Queens, NY.
You really have to look at the facility's website. It's bizarre. There's a video on that page which I can't embed here but which I consider a must-watch for anyone who owned those Stephen Biesty cross-section books as a kid.
It's a film production facility which can accept large box trucks, which will I guess fully drive inside the building like it's a parking garage, and then get turned around and lifted between floors by a variety of turntables and gigantic elevators. The building contains internal parking lots which can access 11?? different soundstages. The whole inside of this thing is gonna smell like diesel, I bet.
Gawking at the layer-by-layer interior diagrams of this place for the first time was both impressive and stupid. On one hand: damn, they built a big turntable to put box trucks on. I love a machine like that. On the other hand: if you gotta do ALL this to do film production in NYC... that seems like a lot of work?? It seems kind of expensive to do this instead of just... buying some FLAT place large enough to film in, somewhere else? Isn't that what most companies do?
I don't know anything at all about film production or this studio or really whether it's actually a good idea to do anything like this, but sometimes we will just look up Youtube videos of the place, or look at the blueprints for the facility, and talk about what it must be like to ride in those elevators. I will admit: sometimes I do a Youtube search for "Wildflower Studios Astoria elevator" because I really want to see a video of a car going into a big elevator. I haven't seen such a video, yet. I'm not sure the facility is even fully open yet. But... someday! Someday I'll get some dashcam footage of the big elevator. I know it.