JACKSON, Mississippi – The long-awaited dream of Monte and Charlotte Reeves, Mill Street Studios (MSS), is getting closer to reality as more movie makers and distributors join up for the waitlist.
Future home of a brand-new, cutting-edge media and motion picture production facility, Mill Street Studios (MSS) has been developed by Arnold Hernandez, a Dallas-based architect, who transformed the enormous silos and grain storage bunkers on the original 5.5-acre MSS property into two 17,000-square-foot sound stages and two 6,000-square-foot studios. In early 2023, it is planned to build over 40 office suites, a commissary, a café, and host businesses where people may rent disposable items and equipment, screening rooms, and set fabrication mills. With demand for accommodation from visiting productions, an on-site boutique hotel is also being proposed.
It is difficult to imagine that this former cottonseed oil factory, which the Reeves bought, formerly employed hundreds of people less than a mile from the State Capitol of Mississippi. Downtown Jackson was once a bustling, upwardly mobile hub of Black entrepreneurship and industry at the start of the 20th century, much like Memphis, Tennessee, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Those times, according to the Reeves, are going to return.
The Mill Street Movie Ranch is being developed on 20 acres of undeveloped ground in a federally designated Opportunity Zone for outdoor production sites, less than two miles from the MSS campus.
