Beneath the Bayonne Bridge, 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 says one chilly morning as he picks at a croissant in an underheated construction trailer. “That was one of the things that seduced me the most.” On the wall hangs a blowup of his site plan, which 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. Busson picked it to commemorate the year that Thomas Edison filed for a patent for the movie camera invented in his New Jersey laboratory. Edison’s overly aggressive enforcement of his intellectual-property rights ultimately drove the nascent movie business to the West Coast; after that, it was all downhill for the Garden State. Bayonne’s most notable movie moment in this century was a brief appearance in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds (it was annihilated by aliens).