12/10/2025
On the banks of the Kill Van Kull in New Jersey, a dashing French financier intends to build one of the largest film studios in the Northeast. “It will be like a little city,” Arpad “Arki” Busson said. His site plan calls for 23 state-of-the-art soundstages, around a half-million square feet of office and workshop space, a ferry dock, and a helipad. A water tower will bear the name of the development, 1888 Studios, which commemorates the year that Thomas Edison filed for a patent for the movie camera invented in his New Jersey laboratory.
Busson’s waterfront renewal is also something of a personal reinvention. He previously made his career in global finance, raising money from European families and institutions and reinvesting it mostly with American hedge-fund managers. That made Busson rich; his romantic life made him famous. At the age of 19, he had a fling with Farrah Fawcett, then 35 and at the height of her fame. Relationships with Elle Macpherson and Uma Thurman produced three children and tabloid items about extravagant engagement rings, breakups, makeups, and philanthropic flourishes.
Flynn Busson, the elder of his sons with Macpherson, is now working on the studio. Some of Busson’s old hedge-fund connections are helping, too. The Rothschild family was an early investor. “Everything is built based on relationships,” he says. Busson’s friend Jon Bon Jovi helped make the introduction to Phil Murphy, who has been supportive of subsidies to attract the film and TV industry to his state. The tax credits in turn enticed Paramount, whose new owner, tech heir David Ellison, was familiar with the studio plan. Paramount has since agreed to lease a quarter of the facility.
Read Andrew Rice’s full Encounter with Busson: https://nymag.visitlink.me/ENgj0Z
