Entertainment company to build film studio in Chaffee Crossing

A Los Angeles-based film company, TGE Global Entertainment, Inc.,  plans to build a $30 million film studio in Chaffee Crossing. 

The 92,000-square-foot facility will include 45,000-square-feet of film and television studio space. MAHG Architecture is designing the space, which will be called TGE Spark Studios. 

“One of the challenges that we gave them was to basically try to combine the elements of Arkansas so you feel like you’re here right with native stone and wood and things like that but throw that into a modern major motion and television film studio,” said J. Michael Smith, the TGE chief financial officer, at Thursday’s Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority meeting. 

TGE bought the approximately 19 acres and four buildings from the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority. 

The land for the studio is made up of two parcels that TGE bought from the redevelopment authority. The first encompasses about 4 acres and the four buildings, which were purchased for $299,000. TGE bought the remaining 15 acres for $40,000 an acre. 

The four buildings are World War II-era barracks from back when Chaffee Crossing was a bustling military base. 

For its first production, the company is considering filming its movie about Bass Reeves, the famous Fort Smith lawman, on its backlot, where filmmakers can shoot their films outside. 

Besides the back lot, the studio will include six sound stages, a screening room, editing suites, office space, cafeteria and an amphitheater. 

“So really the point here is to be able to be malleable and for us to kind of be able to be agile in renting out this space and for it to be utilized by either a major production or something even smaller potentially even commercials right,” Smith said. 

The studio should create between 100 to 150 jobs in the area, said Daniel Mann, the Fort Chaffee Redevelopment Authority executive director and chief executive officer.