Historic Hollywood film studio where ‘I Love Lucy’ was shot being acquired by Hudson Pacific
One of Hollywood’s oldest film studios is being acquired by Los Angeles real estate company Hudson Pacific Properties Inc., which already owns two other historic studios in the area.
Hudson Pacific will pay $200 million for Hollywood Center Studios, according to a document filed Monday with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
The independent studio on Las Palmas Avenue was founded in 1919 and was used to shoot such television shows as “I Love Lucy,” “The Addams Family” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
Movies including “The Karate Kid,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “Misery” were filmed on the lot, which still rents out soundstages and other production facilities.
Director Francis Ford Coppola owned the lot in the early 1980s but sold it to Canadian real estate developers — the Singer family — after encountering financial difficulties.
Hollywood Center Studios has about 369,000 square feet of facilities on 15 acres. Hudson Pacific estimated in its filing that it could develop an additional 575,000 square feet on the lot.
Hudson Pacific has already developed parts of its other studios in Hollywood: Sunset Gower Studios and Sunset Bronson Studios. The largest addition so far was a recently completed 14-story, 323,000-square-foot office building on the Sunset Bronson lot that has been leased to Netflix Inc.
The seller of Hollywood Center Studios is Studio Management Services Inc. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
Hudson Pacific, a publicly traded real estate investment trust, also filed documents Monday for a public offering of 8.5 million shares of stock intended to raise much as $338 million, some of which would be used to fund acquisitions.
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