Is Hollywood Finished?

California kills yet another industry

At the Academy Awards last week host Conan O’Brien joked that there was a rival Oscar awards show being hosted by Kid Rock at some location down the street. Big laugh from the audience. This was, of course, a reference to the Kid Rock-hosted Super Bowl halftime show that Turning Point USA sponsored as a rival to the main halftime show in which some artist named Malevolent Rabbit or something sang in Esperanto or something.

Guess what: The ratings are in, and Kid Rock’s alternative Super Bowl halftime show had more viewers than the Oscars.

You can list Hollywood as yet another industry that is collapsing in California. The latest jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor, which was disappointing overall, included the startling loss of 7,500 jobs in film production. It is likely most of those lost jobs were here in California, for a simple reason.

“The real number of lost film production jobs is probably four times that amount,” former Hollywood writer/producerRob Long told me when I sent him the numbers. He points out that most film and TV production jobs are temporary piecework—the lighting techs, sound men, assistant directors, key grippers, etc., who are poorly tracked in the monthly jobs reports. The lost job numbers in the formal monthly jobs report were likely from the ranks of salaried executives and their staffs in the major studios, as most of the major studios are based in LA. It’s becoming to expensive to make films and TV shows here.

Even The Guardian has noticed:

When Adam Scott was working on the hit TV show Parks and Recreation in the early 2010s, the Los Angeles studio where the show was filmed was packed – “every stage was filled and working”.

These days, he told his former co-star Rob Lowe in a much-discussed recent podcast conversation, “it’s quiet over there” – in part because “it’s just too expensive to shoot here”.

“Nothing shoots in Los Angeles,” Scott said.

“Nothing!” Lowe replied. . .

The number of productions shot on location in Los Angeles has dropped more than 30% in the past five years, with 2024 recording one of the lowest number of total shoot days in decades, second only to 2020, during the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. According to Film LA, a non-profit that tracks local production, only 20% of shows for North American audiences are now filmed in California.

The Guardian story goes on to relate how the high costs of LA’s predatory government has rendered film production uncompetitive with other locations. Even New York City is easier and cheaper to operate:

Pechman said she was shocked to find that it was much easier to do a small shoot on the streets of New York City than in Los Angeles – even though virtually every part of Los Angeles sees much less foot traffic than the packed avenues of Manhattan.

In many public areas of New York City, it’s possible to film without a permit as long as the crew and the gear are limited, she said: “You cannot do that in LA.”

Here’s some data, showing production activity has fallen to COVID-shutdown era levels:

You find lots of chatter about the spreading gloom on social media:

But you know who’s chirpy and upbeat about things? Yeah, you knew it would be this guy:

The proposed answer: More government subsidies. Let that sink in; one of California’s most iconic wealth-generating industries will now require more government subsidies (they get plenty already) to survive. Detroit is entitled to an extra heaping of Schadenfreude right now.