DreamWorks narrows its list of possible studio locations to four.

Ever since Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen teamed up last October to form DreamWorks SKG, the movie industry's newest studio, the Los Angeles real estate world has awaited news on where the trio will set up shop. The field of potential sites now appears to be down to four - Santa Monica, the Playa Vista area of Los Angeles, Burbank and Universal City.

Two of these, Santa Monica and Playa Vista, are on the Westside, which is rapidly emerging as a location of choice for many youthful, innovative entertainment companies.

A growing number of young, expanding entertainment-related companies have recently been moving out of such longtime industry strongholds as Hollywood and into new Westside locations in Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, Marina del Rey, Culver City and Beverly Hills.

Several factors have fueled their decisions to move, according to entertainment and real estate sources. A greater supply of horizontal office space and newer buildings on the Westside head up the list of reasons, while other factors, such as cleaner air, closer proximity to the homes of industry executives and a developing synergy between entertainment industry companies setting up near each other, were also cited.

"We've been here in Marina del Rey since 1983, but it's good that other people from our field are coming this way, because it creates more of a community atmosphere between us and other companies from our industry," said Bob Mazza, a spokesman for Boss Film Studios, a visual effects production company. Mazza explained that one of Boss' competitors, Digital Domain, set up shop in nearby Venice in 1993, while another competitor, Rhythm & Hues Inc., has plans to move from Hollywood to Marina del Rey later this year.

Space, space and more space

Suzanne Datz, advertising publicity manager at Rhythm & Hues, said her company would have preferred to stay at its present Hollywood location. But that does not have enough space to accommodate the company's expanded needs, and Los Angeles city officials were doing little if anything to keep the company from leaving, she explained.

"We needed 70,000 square feet of space, which was available in Marina del Rey for about the same price as the 14,000 square feet we now occupy in Hollywood," she said. Datz added that the Marina del Rey site was chosen over office space in Museum Square in the Miracle Mile District because Rhythm & Hues didn't want to end up in a high-rise building with "that corporate feel."

The relative abundance of wide-open, horizontal building spaces, which are often favored by entertainment companies, seems to be a major Westside attraction for entertainment tenants. One such large space in Playa Vista - a former airplane hangar owned by Hughes Aircraft Co. - when combined with the abundance of undeveloped land surrounding it, is a leading contender for the future DreamWorks studio site.

Rosey Miller, senior vice president at the West L.A. office of commercial brokerage firm Grubb & Ellis Co., said a large amount of uninhabited, low-rise industrial space in Culver City and Marina del Rey should also attract entertainment companies in the next few years. "We should see many of the old warehouses in the area being renovated to make way for them (entertainment companies)," he said.

Firming market

There are currently numerous large, vacant and available office spaces on the Westside, though Miller warned that the Westside office market softness will only persist for another year or so. As an example of the firming trend, the office vacancy rate in Santa Monica was down to 7.9 percent at the end of the first quarter, compared with 10.1 percent a year earlier, according to Grubb & Ellis.

Within Santa Monica, two particular developments on Colorado Avenue - the Arboretum and the second phase of the Water Garden, located directly across Cloverfield Boulevard from each other have been getting some interest from prospective tenants, particularly entertainment tenants, according to the brokers marketing these projects.

Mike Catalano, assistant director at the Westwood office of Julien J. Studley Inc., a New York City-based commercial brokerage firm marketing the Arboretum, said 80 percent of prospective-tenant activity for commercial space to be developed on the Arboretum's seven-acre site has come from entertainment-related companies. The Arboretum is already home to Sony Music Entertainment, a unit of Tokyo-based Sony Corp.

Miller of Grubb & Ellis said another large Westside project is Conjunctive Points, a project located on a site off Hayden Place near National Boulevard in Culver City. Like the Arboretum, Conjunctive Points is being targeted for use by companies from entertainment-related industries.

"Conjunctive Points is a series of industrial buildings being renovated for use by creative companies," said Miller. He noted that, among other things, the buildings being renovated at Conjunctive Points will retain such "creative-type" features as bow-truss ceilings and skylights.