By James Aitchison

When Hollywood was simply a dusty backwater of fledgling studios and orchards, and Los Angeles an uncultured outpost, America’s film capital was New York City.  The great Broadway theatrical stars were simply a taxi ride away.  Even the early silent movie stars such as Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino hankered for the sophistication of New York; early Hollywood was a place they despised.

By 1920, the epicentre of New York filmmaking was Astoria, a residential neighbourhood in the New York borough of Queens.  There, on the corner of 35th Avenue and 36th Street, Paramount Pictures combined its four film laboratories and five stages across New York and New Jersey into a new US$2,500,000 movie complex. 

Today, Kaufman Astoria Studios covers five acres in the heart of Queens, including seven sound stages and New York’s only movie backlot.  Among its most famous recent productions are the musical Hair, films such as Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Scent of a Woman and The Bourne Ultimatum, and the television show Sesame Street.

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Paramount was originally Famous Players-Lasky, founded in the silent era by pioneering movie moguls Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky.  Under Zukor’s leadership, Paramount had studios on both coasts and also owned cinemas. 

They were heady days at Astoria.  Stars rode in the freight elevator with electricians and lights.  The management stayed in their Fifth Avenue office and never came on set.  Writers and directors hailed from Princeton and Yale.  Creativity had a free hand.

The transition to sound in 1928 gave Paramount’s Astoria an even greater advantage: access to Broadway stars who could be heard as well as seen.  Western Electric completed the first sound stage.  By 1929, Astoria boasted both sound-on-film and sound-on-disc recording systems, new soundproof sound stages, as well as a multi-lingual production centre for foreign exports (which could draw on New York’s unique pool of immigrant voices).

The Marx Brothers, Claudette Colbert, Maurice Chevalier, Fanny Brice, Helen Morgan and Burns & Allen were just some of the first talkie stars to work on Astoria’s sound stages.  As Adolph Zukor observed, “Certain types of stories can best be made here in the East on account of the availability of particular types of talent.”  The Marx Brothers, who performed on Broadway by night and filmed at Astoria by day, were a classic example.

However, the arrival of the Great Depression saw Paramount consolidate its operations in Hollywood.  By 1932, Astoria was under the management of Western Electric.  The studios were rented to independent producers who agreed to use the company’s sound equipment in exchange for financing.

The 1930s saw Hollywood emerge as the world’s film capital.  Astoria’s production output declined.  With the outbreak of war, the US Army Signal Corps moved in, producing hundreds of training and propaganda films.  The Army stayed on until 1970.  By the mid-70s, though, Astoria was a derelict shell.  Only intervention by union officials and city officials saved the building.  The New York State Council helped support the renovation of the main sound stage and attract major movie productions.  By the decade’s end, the Astoria Studio complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Developer George S. Kaufman took over the management of the studio site in 1980, expanding and modernising the facility.  In 1988, the Museum of the Moving Image moved into one of the US Army’s old buildings to permanently showcase the studio’s history.

Kaufman Astoria Studios entered a new golden age.  Television production soon became an Astoria mainstay.  Streaming service giants such as Netflix (Orange is the New Black) and Apple (Dickinson) filmed at Astoria not Hollywood.  Meanwhile, major motion pictures have continued to roll out, directed by a who’s-who of filmmaking: Francis Ford Coppola, Jodie Foster, Woody Allen, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese and Mike Nichols.  And across the road, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, founded by Tony Bennett in 2001, offers high school diplomas in fine art, dance, vocal and instrumental music, dance and drama.

More than ever before, the streets of Astoria are paved with creativity.