from PRX.

I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.

As a New Yorker, I've always loved that New York was actually the first movie-making capital of America and sort of the world.

That changed as soon as filmmakers figured out it was cheaper and sunnier to make movies out in Los Angeles.

But over the last few decades, the New York film business, along with

television, has undergone a renaissance. Film crews on the street are more than ever a part of

city life these days. And in the neighborhood of Astoria, Queen stands a hundred-year-old

movie studio, a great artifact of that arc of New York moviemaking.

The mogul Adolf Zucor built what was known as the Big House in the silent film heyday.

It was almost torn down, but it is buzzing now thanks to some visionary strange bedfellows

who thought that New York could be the center of big-time filmmaking once again.

For our latest New York icons feature, Rosalind Tortacilius brings us the story of the Astoria Studios.

In 1978, the film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Whiz opened in movie theaters.

I'm on my way to find the Wiz. He's going to get me back home.

That's nice. Universal Pictures poured $24 million into the production, about 95 million today.

The film's all-black cast included huge stars like Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

The movie seemed poised to make magic at the box office.

But the movie bombed. A review and TV guide called it a bungled mess.

But even if the movie was a flop in the conventional sense, when it came to the film industry in New York, it was just the opposite.

It helped revive a movie studio in Queens,

the crumbling former home of Paramount Pictures that's now known as Kaufman-Estoria Studios.

The show will resume very, very shortly, but first, I wanted to take this opportunity to remind you to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Studio 360

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