Allen Park movie jobs draw thousands who want to learn

Nathan Hurst / The Detroit News

Allen Park

The jobs won't be easy, Unity Studios founder Jimmy Lifton told the gathering, but they'll provide something many in the eager crowd haven't seen in a while: a career with a solid paycheck.

More than 1,900 job seekers packed Allen Park's circa-1960s City Hall on Wednesday to hear about the opportunities coming to Unity Studios, a full-service media-making complex that will take the place of a former Visteon Corp. facility at the interchange of Southfield and I-94.

Another 3,000 watched an online telecast of the event, a spokesman said. The hopefuls were invited from a pool of nearly 15,000 applicants seeking a job at what will be just one of Michigan's upcoming movie studio projects.

The state has pushed film production as a cornerstone of its economic diversification efforts by offering one of the nation's most aggressive tax incentive programs. Dozens of films and television programs have been attracted as a result, but only now are plans for permanent production facilities taking root.

Announced to great fanfare earlier this year, the Unity Studios complex is expected to bring more than 3,000 unionized jobs to the city, where workers will produce short and full-length films, television shows and new media projects.

A date for groundbreaking hasn't yet been set, but the first phase of construction is expected to be completed by this fall.

It's then that one key component of the studio project, the Lifton Institute for Media Skills, will open and begin training thousands of workers on so-called "below the line" positions, which include everything from sound technicians to video editors -- the people who take raw film footage and perfect it into cinematic art.

"This is akin to joining the Army," said Lifton, the Michigan native behind the project. "It's going to be a lot of hard work."

Lifton and his team have partnered with state agencies like Michigan Works! to provide tuition assistance for the training programs that are expected to graduate thousands of students within the first year into new moviemaking careers.

Lifton, who currently runs a successful post-production company in California called Oracle Post, said students will first work on short films financed by Unity, eventually moving on to larger, bigger budget projects such as feature-length movies and television series.

To many of the attendees -- former auto workers formed a strong contingent -- the jobs are poised to be more exciting than life on an assembly line.

"This sounds like a lot more fun than pushing pistons all day," said Ray Richards, a laid-off autoworker from Melvindale.

Officials with the studio warned the crowd that the work won't be easy, even if it does have a dose of glitz not present behind factory gates.

"This is a different way of life than what you're used to," said Jim Presnal, interim director of the Lifton Institute and former head of the film school at the University of California Los Angeles.

He noted that Hollywood productions demand long hours and inconsistent schedules, in addition to frequent travel to off-site locations for some positions.

"It's not a job at the plant," he said.

nhurst@detnews.com (313) 222-2293