The clock is once more about to strike midnight at Harbor Island Studios, Washington’s only county-owned sound stage. Given a six-month funding extension by the King County Council last year, local film and TV workers worried it would close forever.
But sources say there is hope that the county and a yet-to-be-named organization will keep it open for at least one more year, though it isn’t a sure thing or a permanent solution. Veteran film industry and county sources say they may need a new space as maintaining Harbor Island would be too challenging and costly in the long term.
According to a statement shared with The Stranger, and posted on the Harbor Island Studios Instagram Wednesday morning, the King County Film Advisory Board and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay have been crafting the short-term solution since April, and are still finding a “long-term strategy to retain and expand sound stage facilities in the region.”
The negotiations to keep Harbor Island open for another year are incomplete, so the studio isn’t bookable past July 1 for now, “but [requests] will be kept in queue and responded to as soon as we have new information.” Sources with knowledge of the process, including King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who sponsored an amendment to waive six months of rent for the production facility and provide $30,000 in funding to supplement the $90,000 already set aside for ongoing maintenance, were cautiously optimistic that the deal would come together.
Balducci saysthe studio is set to “avert the shutdown” and allow production planning to resume.
“The reprieve is just that: it’s a reprieve,” Balducci says. “It’s a ‘try not to shut it down immediately.’ Then we make a plan and the plan has to include the elements of ‘What’s the long-range location and how do we keep this location going until we can legitimately open up the long-range location?’”
Local production advocates and film workers who spoke to The Stranger are actively looking for other spaces on their own, but that can be a long process and they’ll have to balance that with keeping Harbor Island operating for as long as possible.
But why not stick with Harbor Island? Balducci says it would need extensive, infeasible investments, including a potentially costly fix to the pilings the facility is built on. Looking into the future, sources say that no option is without challenge and everything has tradeoffs.
Ensuring that the current studio can stay in business while also determining a plan for the future without much time will be tricky, Balducci says. “It’s still a very steep uphill climb is the way I would put it. But there’s a lot of people who care and a lot of people fighting for this, so I want to hold hope because of that.”
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