Plans for a massive indoor movie studio are underway in Long Beach, where the buyers of a former aerospace plant say they will build a $500-million soundstage facility that would rival the largest established Hollywood studios in scope.

A group of investors led by character actor Jack O'Halloran has already secured financing to convert a closed former Boeing site next to the Long Beach Airport into an elaborate self-contained production facility with 40 soundstages, a water tank stage, offices, commissary, bungalows, a private hotel and an indoor set of a New York street.

The group is already in escrow to buy the facility, a 1.1-million-square-foot behemoth created in the 1950s to build jetliners.

The proposal has won the enthusiastic approval of Long Beach officials, who had fretted that in the troubled economy they would be unable to put anything other than a parking lot on the site.

The builders hope to attract producers who need big stages but don't want to have to shoot out of state. Such a massive investment might be a gamble, considering that a number of new studios have come on line in recent years, but production executives have long complained that Southern California needs more large, indoor soundstages.

Successful new studios have been built in the last decade or so in Manhattan Beach, Santa Clarita and downtown Los Angeles, but they are smaller than the ambitious spread envisioned in Long Beach, which would be more on the scale of Warner Bros. or Universal Studios.

"You can walk on the lot and never leave it," said O'Halloran, who has been entranced with the idea for such a studio for years, since a trip to England to play the villain Non in "Superman II."

Superman's Fortress of Solitude was created on a huge indoor stage, and O'Halloran concluded that there was a need for something similar in Southern California. A few years ago he set out to see if he could get one built. He joined forces with Jay Samit, a former executive at Sony Corp. of America and EMI, and a local real estate developer to hatch a plan.

Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster remembers when O'Halloran, a former heavyweight boxer who played thuggish Moose Malloy in the 1975 film "Farewell, My Lovely," walked into City Hall more than a year ago and pitched the idea for a full-scale movie studio in Long Beach.

Boeing, long one of the pillars of the city's economy, in 2006 stopped making its 717 airliner, and closed operations at the sprawling Long Beach complex.