Black Western Star Hasn’t Given Up On Studio Plan

The scene: an out-of-the way mining town ruled by a notorious land baron. The situation: a cowboy-turned-outlaw seeking to avenge the death of his father with a bullet bearing the name of his nemesis. The upshot: posing as preacher, he learns the power of community. 

It’s ​“Outlaw Johnny Black,” the latest release of action star Michael Jai White, otherwise known as the visionary behind Jaigantic Studios, the major movie studio seemingly poised to rise on a desolate stretch of River Street in Fair Haven before vanishing over the last year. 

White’s message on ​“Outlaw Johnny Black,” which is now screening at Criterion Cinemas: tune in. On Jaigantic Studios: stay tuned. 

The Bridgeport-raised martial artist, who wrote, directed, and starred in the project, said the inspiration for his latest film came from movies he used to watch in the 1970s. 

“They had a morality and a message to them, and I felt like that’s something we’ve been missing nowadays and that’s what I wanted to do,” he said of his Spaghetti Western comedy, described on rogerebert.com as ​“well-crafted and funny … with a refreshing goofiness and a delightful lead.”

Of particular significance, White said, was ​“Buck and the Preacher,” the 1972 film starring Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ruby Dee, that’s generally credited with bringing Black heroes to a genre in which they had always been underrepresented.

His hope, he said, is that ​“youngsters see this movie and feel uplifted and also understand that the person who did this movie came from the same place. If I can do it, they can do it.”

That impulse was no different back in July 2021, when he and his team introduced Jaigantic’s plans for a complex of 25 soundstages and an array of production facilities, starting with a 50,000 square-foot building to be built on city-owned land on River Street and thousands of jobs in the offing.

“Think about what you see at the end of a movie or a TV show,” White said at a lavish ​“meet and greet” hosted by the legislature’s Black & Hispanic Caucus, among the efforts to drum up support for the state-of-the-art Hollywood-style ​“mini-major” studio, as he and his team described it, in that summer and fall.

White: Studio Is "Definitely Happening. We Just Have To Regroup"

“Start counting all the names that go up and keep going and going and going. Those are human beings. Those are all jobs that are going to be here for them.” 

That would include, he said at the time, not just jobs, but apprenticeships and on-the-job training opportunities that range from grip and electric to directing and producing to set design and makeup design to catering in the hospitality and food service department.

In March 2022, Jaigantic CEO Donovan De Boer and business consultant Donna Lecky presented a detailed update and overview of their plan to the city’s Development Commission. 

That plan called for them to spend $200 million transforming the empty lots and abandoned factory buildings on River Street into a self-described ​“Creators District,” complete with the first virtual production hub in the U.S. and up to $3.1 billion in studio production revenues as well as 10,000 jobs.

“We’re really focusing on local recruitment, building a workforce here in Connecticut, keeping the youth here, training them, and putting them into very high paying union jobs,” De Boer said around that time. 

City officials said they were close to finalizing a development and land disposition agreement with Jaigantic. Development Commissioner John Martin expressed enthusiasm.

“We want this to be a project that makes you excited and that helps lift up the neighborhood and the city at large with a lot of jobs that could be pathways for people to grow in the industry,” he said.

Later that month, though, the company’s memorandum of understanding signed with the city in 2021 expired with no deal in place, New Haven BIZ reported.

Then came a series of delays. ​“We got to a point in June where there were a couple of outstanding deal points,” City Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana told the Independent in April of this year. The city’s efforts to check back with Jaigantic in September and December 2022 went unanswered. 

Meanwhile, De Boer’s LinkedIn Page stated that he left his role as Jaigantic’s CEO in October 2022. Lecky told the Independent in April 2023 that she was no longer affiliated with Jaigantic. Attempts by the Independent to reach other representatives of the Jaigantic team proved fruitless.

For his part, White sounded unfazed during a recent interview.

“It’s definitely happening,” he told this reporter. ​“We just have to regroup a bit.”

The intention, he said, ​“was to shoot some movies in Connecticut. I wanted to reach into the infrastructure here. I could have brought in Hollywood backers and producers, but then it wouldn’t be a Connecticut thing. It would just be something people knew about.”

He compared it to a movie shooting on location in a particular town.

“They come in as a full entity,” he said. ​“Local people don’t know much about it. They just know a movie came in and left. I really wanted to get the city — the cities I grew up and knew — and the people involved and to have the pride that it was something home-grown.”

While White allowed that he ​“may have to find other ways to get this done,” the hope remains for a movie studio with production facilities to give young people a sense of what they can be.

“I can’t wait to show our kids that there’s an alternate route to honor and respect and success,” said White, a former special education teacher. ​“It’s almost like how can we blame them if we’re not showing them anything else.”

Whether that means a ​“Jaigantic” studio, or one on a smaller scale, remains to be seen.