Film and television production facility Upriver Studios has closed up shop just four years after opening in Saugerties. The company left its 101,000-square-foot studio at the end of July.
Opened by actor-producer Mary Stuart Masterson and transmedia strategist and filmmaker Beth Davenport, Upriver was touted in a May 2020 article by industry trade website Deadline as a safer alternative destination for New York City productions shut down by Covid. Its first client was the popular HBO Max series “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin,” which just finished airing its second season in June of this year. The program shot at Upriver during its first season yielding an estimated $6 million in local wages.
While the pandemic was seen as an opportunity for Upriver, the film industry was slow to recover. It was again rocked in 2023 by twin labor strikes: The Writers Guild of America strike lasted from May until September 2023; and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which ran from July to November 2023. Both unions were seeking assurances from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in the face of technological impacts on the industry, including streaming residuals and artificial intelligence.
Representatives from Upriver Studios could not be reached for comment. In an interview with the Albany Times-Union last week, Masterson said they were unable to work for over half of the four years Upriver was in operation.
In the same interview, Masterson said Stockade Works, a Kingston-based non-profit dedicated to furthering the film and TV industry in the Hudson Valley she and Davenport co-founded in 2016, would not be impacted by the closure of Upriver Studios.
According to a June 2020 article in Building Design + Construction, Upriver had long-term plans in Saugerties, with the hopes of making the studios run on 100-percent clean, renewable energy by 2030.
The Hudson Valley remains a film-production destination, with an estimated $30 million spent by the industry in the first half of 2024. The 2023 state budget increased the industry tax-break cap for eligible productions to 30 percent, with an extra ten percent available for those produced upstate. In the state budget, the $700-million tax-credit plan is New York’s largest industry-specific program.
A state Department of Taxation and Finance report published on December 30, 2023 found that for every dollar given in tax breaks between 2018 and 2022, just 15 cents were generated in direct tax revenue. Adding indirect and induced jobs bumps the return up to 31 cents per dollar.
A separate study sponsored by Empire State Development and conducted by Regional Economic Models, Inc. estimated that $1.70 in state and local tax revenue was generated by the film tax credit in 2021 and 2022.
With the closure of Upriver Studios, Umbra Sound Stages in Newburgh is the sole large-scale film production studio in the Hudson Valley. Umbra, founded in 2011 by Ted Doering, has welcomed numerous high-profile productions to its over 250,000 square feet of infrastructure.
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