www.hollywoodreporter.com: L.A. saw a nearly 5 percent drop in shoot days from June to September compared to the same period last year and an 11 percent drop compared to the previous quarter, according to the latest report from permitting office FilmLA issued on Wednesday. The total is 36 percent below the five-year average, highlighting the fierce competition between states and other countries to host Hollywood.
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I have been following the articles posted to this blog about the federal tax incentive on the Congress floor for film productions for a while now, and I am wondering if this incentive will help California regain some of its shoot days. This article argues that California itself need to do more with its state incentives to regain productions that have moved to other locations such as New York. The author mentioned a “uncapped” incentive that would allow more types of productions to qualify. However, this article also mentions the federal tax incentive as a potential solution to this problem. Would this incentive be enough to attract film productions back to LA, or would this incentive just encourage less productions to film in LA because it can be used in any part of America, not just California? I still support the federal incentive, and I hope it gets passed soon, but I wonder how LA will change because of it.
This is certainly alarming for many people who have established careers and their livelihoods on the business in Hollywood, as its supreme leadership as the movie making capital of the world may be slipping. Large studios can react by shifting their locations and while expensive, would most likely not be catastrophic to any of the large scale studios, and many smaller studios may already operate outside of L.A., but grips, operators, script writers and supervisors, and people who work at those studios will certainly be impacted if these studios decide that keeping the bulk of their projects in Hollywood just isn’t viable. It's an interesting example of why an economy centralized around such a specific industry can be so volatile, and this isn’t to say L.A. doesn’t have a large amount of variety in its economy, but film and “Hollywood” has been so essential to the cultural identity of L.A. for a long time that losing that would be a significant loss beyond the economic impact. I do believe that that cultural identity means that it’s unlikely that it will lose that industry entirely, at least for at least a couple decades, because of the filming infrastructure there. Even if the large studios shift, then maybe the extremely large studio parks would become home to multiple small studios, especially if mayor Bass is able to achieve what she has set out to do with getting approval for tax credits in the area, that may be more financially enticing to smaller studios than large-scale operations that may not see the same benefits. All speculation from a non-film industry worker, but I’m really curious to see how this develops over the coming years.
The statistics presented in this article are scary to see for someone who is working in the live entertainment industry. Especially considering that I had thought about working on a film crew in LA at one point or another in my professional career. I have thought that it would be cool to be on the technical crew for a film, but based on this article maybe LA is not the right place to do try this out. Especially considering how many people are already in LA are already doing the exact thing I just described. Regardless the graph that is shown in this article is alarming to look at with the somewhat consistent decrease in shot days in LA films as a whole. Though if I am being honest I am not surprised. The cost of living and the cost to do things is just so high in LA that it makes sense for films to be filmed in other cheaper easier to work in locations that don't come with the price tag of Hollywood.
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