The Palisades once hummed with the exhilarating beginnings of the American film industry.

A century before Bridgegate and years before the George Washington Bridge spanned the Hudson, major film studios like Paramount and Fox hadn’t yet heard the siren call of Hollywood. For them, Fort Lee was home.

And Alice Guy-Blaché was at the center of it all.

In 1912, the pioneering woman director opened Solax Studios in the Bergen County borough with her then-husband Herbert Blaché-Bolton and made the equivalent of $1.5 million each year as its head.

Today women are sorely underrepresented behind the camera. But like the New Jersey film business — which brought in more than $500 million to the state economy in 2021, according to the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission — there are encouraging signs of growth.

Just two miles down the road from where Guy-Blaché's studio used to be, movie producers Molly Conners and Jane Sinisi are celebrating the opening of Phiphen Studios in Englewood Cliffs.

NJ Advance Media recently toured the women-owned studio, which aims to cater to the needs of producers, directors and film editors with a “boutique” approach. The 10,000-square-foot postproduction facility offers film editing rooms, a 25-seat 4K theater and office space.

“It’s essentially everything you need to finish your movie after the movie is shot, including dailies and archival processing,” says Conners, 42, referring to raw footage in need of editing.

And it was built by two producers with formidable Hollywood credits, including Conners’ work on the Alejandro G. Iñárritu film “Birdman” (2014), starring Michael Keaton and Emma Stone, which won the Oscar for best picture.

The local neighborhood’s place in film history isn’t lost on Conners and Sinisi.

“That’s a less than 5-minute drive from here,” says Sinisi, 39, who has a distinctly Jersey lilt in her voice — she’s the local of the producing pair, having grown up in Englewood.

“Taking that legacy and bringing that to the 2020s after COVID, bringing it back strong, people are excited,” she says. “We don’t need New York. That’s great for the commuters, but we want to establish that New Jersey itself has its own identity to make amazing films. We have great creators, workers, environments, infrastructure. It’s all here.”

The Jersey phenomenon

Conners, chief operating officer of Phiphen Studios, says the facility, with its gleaming white floors and new office chairs — tags still attached — is already being used to provide dailies for a few large films.

“We’ve mostly been talking to a lot of studio executives in all the major studios, because they’re all working in New Jersey and need a place to finish their film and television shows,” she says.

Phiphen, the production company founded by Conners (formerly Phiphen Pictures), was at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month to support one of its films — “Butcher’s Crossing,” Gabe Polsky’s frontier film starring Nicolas Cage. Conners and Sinisi produced the movie with Amanda Bowers, vice president of Phiphen. (The movie is an adaptation of the 1960 novel from John Edward Williams.)

The production company is named for the “phi phenomenon.” It’s a term describing the illusion of movement that happens when still images are shown in rapid succession — like a flip book, or when individual light bulbs flash one after another on a movie theater marquee.

New Jersey’s influx of film and TV production over the last few years has been no illusion.

The rapid succession of major studio films and series, lured by restored and improved state film tax credits, has also attracted film and TV studios like Lionsgate (Newark) to put down roots in Jersey, where production studios are multiplying.

The expense of filming in New York has certainly played a role in boosting the movie and TV scene across the Hudson, Conners says.

“As I sat in meetings in Cannes (the Cannes Film Festival, which took place in May), almost every single meeting I went into, everybody was budgeting something in the state of New Jersey, and a lot of foreign producers, too, because the word is out that the tax credit in New York is backed up,” says Conners, an Albany native who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida.

“Financiers kind of look at it not as favorably anymore, because they’re gonna wait forever to get their money back.”

Jersey is increasingly being viewed as a destination for filmmakers. Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and Todd Phillips’ “Joker,” both Oscar winners, and “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” filmed here. So have upcoming movies like the drama “Armageddon Time,” in theaters Oct. 28; the romantic comedy “Bros” and horror film “Smile,” both out Sept. 30.

Women of film

Conners has a particularly distinguished film resume.

Her credits over the past 15 years include the 2013 James Gray film “The Immigrant,” starring Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix; the 2013 David Gordon Green film “Joe,” starring Nicolas Cage; and the William Friedkin movie “Killer Joe” (2011), starring Matthew McConaughey.

Conners and Sinisi, chief executive officer of Phiphen Studios, met in 2016 when they were both producing the movie “Brighton Beach” starring FKA Twigs. After that, they started co-producing more projects together.

In 2019, Conners and Bowers, the vice president of Phiphen who grew up in Montclair, were among the recipients of an Emmy nomination for their role as producers of Solvan “Slick” Naim’s short-form Netflix comedy series “It’s Bruno.”

Phiphen also produced the 2021 Netflix sci-fi movie “Stowaway,” starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson and Toni Collette; the Kristen Bell Netflix film “Like Father” (2018), directed by Lauren Miller Rogen and co-starring her husband, Seth Rogen; and the IFC Midnight thriller “Centigrade” (2020).

Conners splits her time between Jersey and the Portland area of Maine — when she’s not on a film set in any number of places across the globe. Sinisi lives in Bergen County. They started mapping out plans to move their production base from New York to New Jersey in 2020.

Both producers saw a need for facilities to support the expanding film industry, especially the postproduction side, including color correction and sound mixing.

Phiphen Studios is positioned in the so-called Trillion-Dollar Mile (formerly known as the Billion-Dollar Mile) on Sylvan Avenue/Route 9W, a stretch of Englewood Cliffs dotted with corporate campuses.

Conners and Sinisi cite the studio’s central location to all local highways, the George Washington Bridge and New York as the ultimate amenities for locals as well as reverse commuters from the city.

Groups of 15 to 30 filmmakers and film editors can spend anywhere from three months to a year in the facility’s open-plan common working area, with private offices available for people like line producers and accountants and conference rooms for meetings. Directors and filmmakers can work for up to 16 weeks in private edit rooms or use the studio to send footage to local editors working remotely or staff across the country.

Sinisi and her family own the Englewood Cliffs real estate company Oster Management in the same building as their new studio, which was a big help in making it happen.

As the Jersey film industry has grown over the past few years, the subjects of access and opportunity for women in film have come to the fore along with diversity and representation in movies and TV.

In 2021, women comprised 25% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films, up from 23% in 2020, according to the Celluloid Ceiling study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

But women working in the top 100 grossing films remained the same — 21%. The same year, the percentage of women working as directors declined — from 18% of the top 250 films in 2020 to 17% in 2021, and from 16% of the top 100 films to 12%.

“It is still an uphill battle,” Conners says. “But I am hopeful in terms of just the projects that I’ve been in involved in. We’re lucky at Phiphen. There’s a lot of women that we get to work with.”

A foundation for growth

Conners and Sinisi may find inspiration in the example of Alice Guy-Blaché, a woman firmly embedded in film history. Back when movies filmed on the cliffs of the Palisades — advancing the term “cliffhanger” — she was making as many as three films per week and employing 150.

But Conners and Sinisi are now literally in the bedrock of the Palisades.

To build Phiphen Studios, construction workers had to drill six feet down into that very hard rock. Breaking through was a long process of trial and error, says Aldey Sanchez, managing director of the studio.

He has a film reference just for the occasion.

“It’s like a scene out of ‘Armageddon,’” Sanchez says.

Sinisi says they had to put the building on stilts just to construct the studio’s theater, which filmmakers can use to evaluate and color-grade their projects. But they feel all the careful planning will be worth it.

“The timing was ideal with the revamp of the tax credit,” Sanchez says. “It basically gave a lot of opportunity for everybody.”

New Jersey tax credits for filmmakers run from 30% to 35%, with a potential 2% to 4% bonus for productions that meet diversity criteria.

Conners and Sinisi worked with David Schoner, associate director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission, to plan the studio. More in-state production creates potential for the next stage of the filmmaking process to stay here, too, he says.

“It just means more people in New Jersey are going to be working in those fields,” Schoner tells NJ Advance Media.

“Historically, postproduction is done in California,” he says.

But the aim is for directors and film editors working with varying budgets to be able to make a whole movie in New Jersey, from preproduction through post.

“I’m really excited about this ‘boutique’ label that they’re using, because that is nurturing the next generation of filmmakers,” Schoner says of Phiphen, which says it cannot “provide specifics about (the) costs involved” in building the studio.

Sinisi and Conners hope to work with that new generation, whether that means interns or young directors, film editors or producers.

Schoner says with the boom in local production, Jersey residents who work on film crews now say they actually get to go home at night and have dinner with their families.

“I’m not paying all these tolls,” they tell him with relief.

Sinisi frames the Englewood Cliffs location as a less cramped alternative to film production in the city — and a little greenery doesn’t hurt.

“You can look outside and see trees and sit outside if you want and kind of get the creativity from the outside world, too,” she says.

Most of all, they’re hoping to offer some permanence in a business where filmmakers are always on the move to the next location.

“There’s other creators who come and go with their films, but we have an established building,” Sinisi says. “We’re not going anywhere where the production wraps, so people are coming to us, because we’ve got our feet in the concrete, literally.”

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.