There’s a Feeling We’re Not in Hollywood Anymore

NY Times ^ | Apr 2025 | Matt Stevens and Nicole Sperling

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“This is an existential crisis — it’s an extinction event,” said Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like “San Andreas,” which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. “These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I’m in the drama field.”

Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, who oversees film and television production for the union, said that roughly 18,000 full-time jobs have evaporated in the past three years, primarily in California.

“We are allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,” Miller said.

That is bad news for people like Josh Viers, a concept artist for more than 25 years. He said he latched on to three major movie projects in the past six months but was cut prematurely on each one when the productions moved to England, Australia and Hungary.

“I more or less have given my career, my life, to this industry,” said Viers, a 48-year-old father of two whose family lost its house in Altadena, Calif., during this year’s wildfires. “It just really hurts.”

One budget document viewed by The New York Times showed the cost of a seven-person set operations team — positions known as “grips” — to be roughly $59,000 for a 30-day shoot in Budapest…Because of health care, pension and other expenses, it costs about $53,000 to employ just one senior-level grip in Los Angeles for the same time frame…

“It’s criminal what California and L.A. have let happen — it’s criminal,” Lowe, the host of “The Floor,” recently quipped on his podcast. “Everybody should be fired.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed to more than double the available funding for the state’s tax incentive program.

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End of an era indeed.

[dfwgator]

Die Hollywood, Die!