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New Jersey, the home of the world’s first film studio, is reasserting its status as the country’s first Hollywood.
And Newark educators, students, and industry professionals are getting ready to meet the moment.
In November, Newark Public Schools officials announced plans to open New Media High School, which will be geared toward film and TV careers and digital creator roles. Students with stars in their eyes no longer have to move to Los Angeles to make their dreams come true.
“They don’t even have to travel into New York across the Hudson River,” said Desireè Hadley, director of the Newark Office of Film and TV.
The New Media High School website promises a September 2026 opening and a school that will prepare a new generation of “content creators, filmmakers, and digital entrepreneurs to shape the evolving landscape of entertainment and new media.” A mission statement defines part of that preparation as “industry experiences” that will be key to building student portfolios.
Superintendent Roger León declined to comment through a spokesman.
But in public statements, León has said the school is already recruiting new teachers and eighth grade students interested in attending New Media High School and becoming part of the school’s first ninth grade class can apply through Newark Enrolls.
A career pipeline is ready and waiting: Investment in film and TV production is surging in New Jersey, having hit a record high of $833 million in 2024, and a major movie studio is moving into Newark, bringing the promise of hundreds of jobs.
These days, Hadley marvels at the massive “now enrolling” New Media High School billboard in downtown Newark.
“I’m Newark born and raised, and I wish that these opportunities were around when I was in high school,” she told Chalkbeat. “It would have been amazing to be able to attend a New Media High School or to even have exposure to what a production set is like.”
Film production grows in Newark and New Jersey
The growth of New Jersey production, fostered by the 2018 restoration of state film tax credits, stands in contrast to flagging production in Los Angeles. In the next two years, Lionsgate, Paramount Skydance and streaming giant Netflix will open Garden State studios. This bustling vision channels the 1910s, when studios like Fox, Universal, and Goldwyn Pictures called Fort Lee home before the industry moved to Hollywood.
Lionsgate Studios Newark is scheduled for a spring 2027 debut at Great Point Studios in the city’s South Ward. Mayor Ras Baraka, then-Gov. Phil Murphy, and city officials marked the groundbreaking in December. The $125 million, 270,000-square-foot studio will occupy the 12-acre site of the former Seth Boyden housing complex.
New Media High School, set to move into the former Dayton Street School, will be its neighbor.
The Dayton Street school, which closed in 2012, has another industry connection: It was a filming location for Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore 2,” Netflix’s biggest U.S. movie opening, which spent a record $152.5 million in New Jersey.
Young people in Newark are already getting their start in the industry.
Aspiring cinematographer Nia Foote, 18, interned as a Newark locations production assistant on the set of Kevin Kline and Laura Linney’s new MGM+ series “American Classic” and was a PA on “72 Hours,” Kevin Hart’s upcoming Netflix movie.
“I was considering going out west to California,” Foote said. But Hollywood’s production decline and New Jersey’s surge persuaded her to study film and TV production at New York University instead.
Zoe Williams, 20, is eyeing a career in set design.
“I thought I would have to be going to New York for the jobs, but they’ve all been in New Jersey — in specifically Newark, a lot of them,” she said.
Williams has been an intern or PA on a number of productions, including Timothée Chalamet’s “A Complete Unknown” and the upcoming “Paper Tiger” with Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller.
Newark is taking measures to add even more locals to film sets. Last year, the state Economic Development Authority awarded a $750,000 NJ Film Works grant to Invest Newark, the city’s economic development corporation, to fund workforce training for people 18 and older.
“Some of the students will be matriculating on to an apprenticeship program, which is great because that means they’re putting in the hours to get their union cards, and that translates as a career,” said Jon Crowley, executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission. As part of that program, Rutgers Newark’s Community Media Center will host grip training at Express Newark, where Newark Film School will also run PA training, Hadley said.
“We will have all these huge movie stars come into our community, but the city of Newark is making sure it covers the ground of just helping our residents, educating our residents on the industry,” she said.
Newark and Essex County have played important roles in the history of film. Newark’s Rev. Hannibal Goodwin patented transparent flexible nitrocellulose roll film in 1898 and Thomas Edison opened the very first film studio, Black Maria, in West Orange in 1893.
“We’re just taking back our birthright,” said Diane Raver, executive director of the New Jersey Film Academy, which runs certificate programs at 13 colleges, including Essex County College.
And future New Media students could find work at other Jersey studios.
Netflix is accepting applications to work at its soon-to-be $1 billion studio at the former Fort Monmouth, and Paramount Skydance signed on for a minimum of 10 years at Bayonne’s 1888 Studios. Recently announced: the $250 million Filmology Labs, headed to Paterson.
“Now we see a direct pipeline to the studios who are moving in,” said Keith Strudler, dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. “We’ve looked at the kinds of roles that they’re going to be hiring for, and really, we teach all of those skill sets.”
New Media High School could be ‘a filmmaker’s dream come true’
Director Nicole L. Thompson, a Malcolm X Shabazz High School alum and founder of the Newark Film School, said New Media High School will be “a filmmaker’s dream come true.”
Thompson, 33, began studying filmmaking at 13, in a pre-college summer program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She continued with video production at Shabazz and went on to study at The College of New Jersey, the University of Southern California, and Harvard.
“A lot of people wake up one day and want to become a filmmaker but they don’t know how,” said Thompson, whose 2022 Lifetime TV directorial debut, New Jersey true crime movie “Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story,” recently spent two weeks in Netflix’s top 10.
At New Media High School, curriculum plans include classes in narrative filmmaking, short documentaries and short-form videos for social media and commercials, along with editing, cinematography, postproduction, podcasting and streaming. Capstone projects will cover feature-length films, animation, 3D effects, pitching and marketing.
“It almost replicates the model of Arts High School,” said Hadley, director of the Newark Office of Film and TV. “The school is going to train young people who are interested right out of middle school.”
The New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Great Point Studios will also partner with local schools to develop a film and TV production curriculum, said John Schreiber, CEO of NJPAC. He’s a stakeholder in a community benefits agreement between Lionsgate Newark, Great Point, and the arts center. (NJPAC is a redeveloper of the Seth Boyden housing site.)
“We started very early talking about what a new studio like this could mean to the community at large, and then more specifically to young people,” Schreiber told Chalkbeat. He noted that the studio agreed to hire 70% of its onsite employees from the local area, likening the “transformational” potential of the film hub to how Steiner Studios changed Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“We will work with Newark Public Schools and with Great Point Lionsgate to create an apprenticeship and an internship program for high school students, the goal of which is eventually that they learn enough so that they can get a union card and go to work on a set,” Schreiber said. “One needn’t go to college in order to get that card … Those jobs can pay over $80,000 a year and more for a young person.”
Schreiber aspired to be an actor when he was younger. After realizing he’d be “broke for 10 years,” he became a PA.
“There are 50 different jobs that somebody can have in our business that support the work of a performing artist,” he said.
“It’s not just about acting and directing,” said Nick Day, president of the Screen Alliance of New Jersey, an industry group, and co-CEO of Newark’s Edge Auto Rental, which supplies trucks and cars for productions. “There’s electricians, carpenters, rental truck companies … lumber companies, stages, postproduction … Whatever your passion might be, the film industry could be a way to take advantage of your passion.”
That doesn’t just mean people starting their first careers. East Orange’s Jessica Sledge, 38, works in education and is a student in one of the first New Jersey Film Academy classes at Essex County College. She was studying industrial design in New York when a field trip to a professor’s set design workshop made an impression.
“I’ve always been a fan of watching all the behind-the-scenes stuff,” she said. With the intro film class at ECC, it “clicked,” she said. “I was like ‘OK, so this could be my way into doing something like that.’”
Jon Crowley, director of the state film commission, got his start as a PA for the Academy Awards. After an editor fell ill, Crowley, a film school graduate with an editing reel, subbed in and was promoted to editor. It all started with his high school TV production class.
“To actually be working with your friends on projects that we were scripting, we were directing, we were acting in and then we were editing was really exciting because it felt like you had some skin in the game,” he said.
Crowley said the commission would be excited to work with future New Media High School students.
“It’s phenomenal that kids at the high school age are going to be able to experience all these different areas of expertise and skill sets and find out what really gets them fired up, for sure,” he said.
