Rotwitt left Obermayer just as his $85 million plan to convert Sunoco's old recreation center, with its Grand Hotel ballroom and league-sized gym, into movie soundstages, meeting rooms, shops, and theater-and-wedding venues, was coming together. The development is fueled by a banquet-menu financial package of taxpayer subsidy, Hollywood investor Hal Katersky's Pacifica Ventures, bank loans, Carpenters' Union pension investment, and tax breaks from the cash-strapped Chester Upland School District and other local governments.
In April, Sun Center was host to a Pennsylvania Lottery commercial. Next, Rotwitt wants to land a feature film, which he says will let him double his staff of 12, host and feed hundreds of movie pros, and gain the Hollywood cachet to make Sun Studios a stop in the Center City-Brandywine Valley-Dutch Country tourist circuit. At, say, $19 a head, a QVC- or Camden Aquarium-style crowd of a few hundred thousand visitors a year, plus filming, feeding, hotel and event income, starts to look like real cash flow.
Movies, in suburban Chester? Rotwitt says "top people" from Sony Pictures, Comcast's NBC Universal, the group headed by Indiana Jones and Bourne Identity producer Frank Marshall, and local-hero director M. Night Shyamalan, among others, have motored over the gritty Highland Avenue exit from I-95 to talk about making a picture here. Hotel and restaurant chains, New York, London, and L.A. investors have called on him.
One at a time, Rotwitt says he tells the movie men. He'll cut a deal "any day now." Maybe next week.
Rotwitt's Hollywood disease has infected the state's top officials.
