variety.com: Survive till 2025, they said.
They didn’t say what would come next.
A week into the new year, wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Altadena, causing an estimated $250 billion in damage. For the entertainment industry, they also disrupted production schedules, destroyed filming locations and left many workers without homes.
4 comments:
it would be a very wise decision for Governor Gavin Newsom to consider increasing California’s film incentive to $700 million. The additional funding could be used to rebuild production sites and warehouses that have been impacted by the wildfires, or rehabilitate old spaces that havent been used since the pandemic. An investment like this could really help improve wages for crew members and tech staff, ensuring they are better compensated for their hard work and not overworked. While this is indeed very wishful thinking, it's really important to recognize how crucial the film and television industry is to California’s economy. I really do hope that los angeles will recover from the fires and pandemic but fire prevention technology and action will need to be far improved for california's overall future. t's also incredibly disheartening to see the rush to resume production when the health and safety risks are still so prevalent. The need for better protections and long term investment in the industry is more urgent than ever.
Reading about the state of production in L.A. makes me wonder about the priorities of large production companies in the area when it comes to being back to earlier levels of production in that the focus of the larger community is to rebuild the parts of L.A. that have been lost, yet for these companies, it is more about getting people back to work and continuing progress on production. While this is an important step in the recovery of L.A. from these fires, I wonder if it is potentially distracting the attention of local and state officials from doing everything they can to restore damaged areas in meaningful ways, and if it could potentially be diverting some funds away from where they are more urgently needed. This is primarily due to the fact that these larger production companies likely have some headroom in their budget to better support the recovery of their work in L.A. yet are looking for opportunities to take less of the cost of these fires. This of course makes sense, but regardless I just wonder how the math all plays out for the rebuilding of L.A. and if certain areas will receive much more significant support because of the entertainment industry pushing for it in particular.
While I have been keeping up with the LA fires a lot, I have not heard much about things like film production being paused. I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the film industry. I remember reading in an article a little while back that some film studios are filming in foreign countries like England, they just have to contribute a certain amount to the English economy to justify their being there. Perhaps that could be a solution to this? I know there were a lot of adjustments that had to be made, and are still being made, after the Maui fires. Many, many people died because of inept people sending out notifications that it was safe to go back into Lahaina right before the entire town got burned down. People died because of that decision. I wonder what these film companies are going to do and how they are going to react.
Even without the fires, L.A. was seeming to lose its grasp on the film industry. Spreading out filming hubs across the country will provide more jobs and the ability to get away from the expensive L.A. housing market for actors and crew members alike. The question shouldn't be how can we bring the industry back to L.A. but should we continue to bottleneck the creativity forcing those outside of the L.A. bubble to be stifled. The thought that the industry we know may not be around for much longer is good. If the film industry stays in the past, it will be unable to take advantage of new technology and ideas. I think a more spread-out and less centralized industry will be a gift for everyone working on TV and movies. We need to move forward instead of clinging to the past, and advance instead of regress.
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