Will Austin's 'creative village' work?

September 28, 2007 Villa Muse looks like a fantastic concept on paper: a $2.5 billion mixed-use development 12 miles east of downtown Austin, anchored by a $300 million, 200-acre studio with state-of-the-art production and postproduction facilities for film, television, commercials, music and video games, including ten soundstages (one measuring 65,000 square feet), a water tank and scoring and mixing stages. [...] what makes it truly revolutionary is that the residential community surrounding the studio will not only serve as a home for locals and visiting crews and creatives alike, it also will be a living backlot for filmmakers, with neighborhoods built in a variety of styles and sizes suitable for portraying locations around the globe. Texas Film Commission director Bob Hudgins believes that Villa Muse will be the missing piece of the film-production puzzle for the state, which has a surfeit of diverse locations and a strong crew base but lacks big soundstages fully equipped to accommodate large studio productions.

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