Productions have been steadily leaving California for more than a decade as costs have made filing in Los Angeles or elsewhere in California prohibitive, and the recent devastating fires in L.A. have only made matters worse.
Locations elsewhere in the U.S. have been the happy recipient of entertainment productions as Las Vegas, Chicago, and the states of Georgia and New Mexico, among many others, have benefited greatly from the influx of filmmakers. But productions outside the U.S. have also been reaping the rewards.
As the New York Times recently reported, actor Rob Lowe moved the production of his game show, The Floor, from L.A. to Dublin, Ireland, because, in his words, it is “cheaper to bring a hundred American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox, right past the soundstages and do it there.”
Lowe also blasted California and L.A. for the situation, saying, “it’s criminal what California and LA have let happen. It’s criminal. Everybody should be fired.”
As a result, filmmakers have streamed to Australia, Ireland, Hungary, and a growing list of other countries. Meanwhile, the industry’s footprint in Los Angeles continues to dwindle.
“Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data,” the Times reported.
Further, as Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, pointed out to the paper, about 18,000 full-time jobs in the film industry have disappeared in L.A. over the last three years alone.
L.A’s loss is others’ gain. Film producer Aaron Ryder added that in Budapest, Hungary, he sees a growing number of publicists, producers, and other members of the film industry there.
“You can walk into the bar in the lobby in the Four Seasons and probably see more colleagues or actors and directors and agents and people you know there than you can at the Four Seasons in L.A.,” Ryder told the paper.
Another industry insider, producer Amy Baer, told the Times that after the wildfires ripped through the area, she wanted to move the production of her film from Canada back to L.A. But when she ran the numbers to see if she could meet her allotted $10 million budget, she found it was “impossible” to make it in L.A.
“The idea was, ‘Can we take a run at keeping this in Los Angeles?’ And the answer was no,” Baer said. “We’ve reached a tipping point where we run the risk of losing the ability to make movies here for good.”
It has gotten so bad in L.A. that ProdPro, an industry tracker, now ranks L.A. in sixth place among the most desirable places to produce a film or TV show. L.A. lags behind Toronto, Britain, Vancouver, Central Europe, and Australia, all because of the extremely high costs that California imposes on labor, materials, taxes, and other costs the industry confronts on a daily basis.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has tried to float new incentives for the film industry, but his efforts have just been too weak to entice productions to stay in L.A.
Worse, many Democrats in the state legislature insist that the restrictions that have been loaded onto the industry are good things, not things to be shed. And their solution is for federal government to do “something” about the issue, though they don’t say exactly what the feds should do.
The Times contrasted the costs by looking at how much a set crewman — called a “grip” — is paid in L.A. compared to what the same positions cost in Budapest, Hungary. In Hungary, it costs a production $59,000 for a team of seven of these operatives for a 30-day shoot. By comparison, in L.A. it costs $53,000 for just one grip for that same shooting schedule.
Consequently, the spiral continues. And it isn’t a sudden development.
Last year, the L.A. Times reported that even three years after the worst of the COVID pandemic, Hollywood’s film industry jobs had still not made a come back, and were, instead, still falling. And Deadline reported that the film industry is experiencing a “full-scale depression.”
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