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Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Season of Strikes plunges LA filming to near lowest-ever levels
Reel 360 News: Not great, but somewhat expected news for the Los Angeles Film community. FilmLA has released its 2023 Q4 Year-to-Date Film Production Report, revealing a stark decline in regional filming activity.
2 comments:
Jojo G.
said...
The title is a little misleading. To say it was the strikes that caused these low levels doesn’t really paint the full picture, which would be fine for a title had it elaborated at least a little in the article. However, it simply notes that they went on too long and it hurt production a lot with almost entirely small films with separate union contracts being the ones to continue. These are the only ones that continued because they agreed to treat their workers fairly from the start and didn’t try and force them to settle for something worse. I understand that the point of this article isn’t anti-strike or pro-strike it’s simply trying to be informative but when making titles such as that you have an obligation to provide clarification for those who will simply read it and say that “the strikes caused the all-time low and so the strikes are getting out of hand”.
This article almost makes it feel like this downturn in filming activity was unexpected, despite them saying that it was expected due to the strikes. While not everything stopped filming, a lot of stuff did, and if there hadn’t been a dramatic decline in filming activity, I would have questioned how the strikes were even effective. While I understand that in no point in recent history (outside the pandemic) that there has been this sharp of a decline in filming activity, it still brings my back to the point of why would there be when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes lasted over three months. The unmentioned expectation that everything would return back to normal after that amount of time is ridiculous, especially since what that normal is has changed after the resolution of both strikes. It’s also still changing with the DGA renegotiating their contract with the AMPTP to closely match that of the WGA.
2 comments:
The title is a little misleading. To say it was the strikes that caused these low levels doesn’t really paint the full picture, which would be fine for a title had it elaborated at least a little in the article. However, it simply notes that they went on too long and it hurt production a lot with almost entirely small films with separate union contracts being the ones to continue. These are the only ones that continued because they agreed to treat their workers fairly from the start and didn’t try and force them to settle for something worse. I understand that the point of this article isn’t anti-strike or pro-strike it’s simply trying to be informative but when making titles such as that you have an obligation to provide clarification for those who will simply read it and say that “the strikes caused the all-time low and so the strikes are getting out of hand”.
This article almost makes it feel like this downturn in filming activity was unexpected, despite them saying that it was expected due to the strikes. While not everything stopped filming, a lot of stuff did, and if there hadn’t been a dramatic decline in filming activity, I would have questioned how the strikes were even effective. While I understand that in no point in recent history (outside the pandemic) that there has been this sharp of a decline in filming activity, it still brings my back to the point of why would there be when both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes lasted over three months. The unmentioned expectation that everything would return back to normal after that amount of time is ridiculous, especially since what that normal is has changed after the resolution of both strikes. It’s also still changing with the DGA renegotiating their contract with the AMPTP to closely match that of the WGA.
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