Mr. Suna, 59, is chief executive of Silvercup Studios, a TV and film production studio with two shooting locations in Long Island City. Silvercup has been home to several series, including “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos,” “30 Rock” and “Gossip Girl.” Mr. Suna’s brother, Stuart, is the president.
Interview conducted and condensed by
VIVIAN MARINO
Q. How do you divide up responsibilities with Stuart?
A. Stuart deals primarily with physical things. Our two buildings are basically machines that have to be tuned all the time and it’s a big undertaking, and Stuart oversees all the activities associated with that.
My role is a little more on the client relations/sales side.
Q. What’s going on at your studios now?
A. We have “30 Rock” in its final season. We have “Gossip Girl” also entering its final season. We have one show that just wrapped production, called “Unforgettable.” The series moving into the “Unforgettable” space is ABC’s “Zero Hour,” starring Anthony Edwards.
In addition to that, over at the Silvercup East lot, we have a continuing series for the USA channel called “White Collar.” Then we have “Person of Interest,” which is continuing again. And they just started a new series for CBS called “Elementary,” which is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes based here in New York with Lucy Liu in the role of Watson.
Q. Sounds like business is brisk.
A. We’re essentially full. Every once in a while something will free up, and we’ll get some commercials in. But our capacity — if you picked a particular point in time — would be six dramatic or comedy series.
Q. Do you ever watch these shows at home?
A. I’ll usually watch the first episode or two so I have an idea of what’s going on. Beyond that — I got to tell you I’ve got so many other things I’ve got to do, it’s really hard. It’s hard for me to get hooked into anything that’s serialized.
Q. Silvercup also has played host to a number of movies, like “Sex and the City” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” but nothing recently.
A. We haven’t done — to the best of my knowledge — a feature film in the last year. The last movies that we did at Silvercup were “The Sitter” with Jonah Hill, and “New Year’s Eve,” which was directed by Garry Marshall. We did those films in the winter/spring of a year and change ago. Then TV continued to expand.
Q. So you’re moving away from films.
A. The giant blockbusters are not for us. Kaufman and Steiner studios have some spaces that are really large and really tall. And those really large and tall spaces lend themselves far better than our spaces do to large feature films. Our spaces tend to be somewhat smaller: the typical stage size is up to 16,000 to 18,000 square feet at Silvercup East. If somebody comes to us with a project and if we are not appropriate for their needs, we’ll recommend another facility.
Q. Do you have plans to expand?
A. Yes, actually. We’ve been looking around at sites for some time in Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and even in Yonkers. We’re seriously looking at a site in Queens right now. We’d like to add another 200,000 to 300,000 square feet, and that includes studio and support space.
Some folks say, “Why don’t you expand to California?” You know what? I don’t like commuting.
Q. You were an architect before running Silvercup. How did you decide to get into the studio business?
A. Back around 1979 our father, Harry, saw the Silvercup bakery building. It was about to be taken over by the city from an estate that owned it; it had been vacant since ’75 for nonpayment of taxes. I was a practicing architect up in Boston at the time, and he asked me to help him figure out what to do with the building — he actually signed a contract to buy it. But there was a subtext in it: He was trying to get me to come back to New York.
I told my father I’d help him part time. And I did it while I was still working at the firm up in Boston. At the end of six months I knew I had to go one way or the other. So we looked into different uses — from industrial space to the wackiest thing, which was the film and television studio. We test-marketed it. We started on June 15, 1983, with a Cool Whip commercial.
Q. Silvercup has also branched out into residential development with the Industry condominium in Long Island City. How are sales going there?
A. We’re pretty close to 90 percent sold. We started selling in September 2010, and it was very quiet through the end of the summer of ’11; 2012 has just taken off. We were selling apartments probably in the mid- to high-$600s per square foot and now it’s $725, $735. However, we have sold units as much as $850 a square foot.
We’ve been in the housing business for a great many years — we did a lot of affordable housing in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. And separately we have a real estate management company that we are majority shareholders in, Metro Management Development.
Q. One last question: Have you ever appeared in any of the productions filmed at your studios?
A. It’s a funny question.
I’m not one who wants to be in front of a camera. For many, many years we did the Dave Thomas Wendy’s campaign and Dave became a really good friend. They did a pro bono commercial for Amnesty International, and they needed an extra person to hold a candle. That was me.
