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ACCORDING TO LIZ - More of what makes money for Hollywood studios needs to be made in LA. The City that birthed the motion picture industry and built the infrastructure that allowed it to flourish deserves better than abandonment in the wake of the pandemic, strikes and fires.
Donald Trump stomped down hard with his hob-nailed tariffs in his attempt to Make Production American Again. But would this latest escapade to bring production back to Tinseltown have helped?
Nah. The Wall Street owners of the storied studios – Warners, Universal, Disney, United Artists, Paramount and MGM (some now mangled out of existence by corporate mergers & acquisitions measures) – would continue to steal Hollywood’s quintessential jobs and lay waste to the support infrastructure from whence the industry began.
“It’s not personal, it’s just business.”
Double nah. It’s about the murder of imaginative vision and the creative community that beats at the very heart of Hollywood in the hunt for 90-day stock values.
Anyways, corporate America knew better than to be swayed by the erratic pronunciations of a president who seems intent on crashing Wall Street in the name of improving the economy.
Too many had funded his trips to the White House.
The Yo-yo Yodeler was sure to pull back his pronunciation. It wasn’t if, but when.
And the next day – blink, the White House said, “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made.” As close as the Prez gets to acknowledging that some of his brainstorms are just a tempest-in-a-teapot.
Backing off from asserting that icky foreign countries like Canada and the U.K. might inculcate their foreign values into films and TV series forever damaging American viewers.
Something definitely threatening to his lawless rule.
Not in studio productions by executives anxious to curry favorable treatment by the White House, but that the few foreign shows creeping across the border might actually educate Americans as to what they are missing under his autocratic rule – democracy, an economy and taxation not rigged for the rich, healthcare for all and a government that – mostly – works for everyone.
And what would have happened when American voters realized the cost of their daily doses of mindless entertainment are not going to double… but quadruple and quintuple as the expense of American production spiraled out of control due to the heavy tariffs on equipment and internal competition for labor and facilities.
Instead of declaring films not shot in the United States a national security risk to justify his government’s grab for more gelt in the wake of tumbling economic indices, La Donald would have been wiser to have recommended federal financial incentives for shooting domestically.
Governor Gavin Newsom seized just that opportunity to jump on Trump’s bandwagon, angling to parlay his proposal to increase the California tax incentive to $750 million annually into a $7.5 billion national credit.
But even he knows Trump citing foreign incentives for fiscally devastating Hollywood ignores the reality. It’s incentives from other states across the country that are equally if not more to blame.
The California Production Coalition estimates that the average location shoot adds $670,000 and 1,500 jobs a day to a local economy. According to its analytics, each dollar spent on incentivizing production to stay in California creates $24.40 in new economic activity across all local businesses, $8.60 in wages and labor income, and $16.14 in increased GDP.
Tariffs, after all, would not have increased production and they certainly would not have brought it back to Los Angeles.
According to FilmLA, a nonprofit organization that tracks on-location shoot days, film and television production in Los Angeles has dropped 30% over the last five years. The annual soundstage occupancy rate dropped to 63% last year compared to a 93.5% average between 2016 and 2022.
Those employed in the entertainment industry plunged to a 30-year low last June.
Television production, which had been the most reliable employer until Covid, peaked in 2021 and has dropped almost 60% in just three years. In the first three months of 2025, TV drama production was down almost 40% from the previous quarter, reflecting both global cutbacks in uncertain economic times and California’s continuing loss of work to rival jurisdictions.
Not only film folks but every Angeleno is suffering, given the proven trickle-down benefits to all businesses when a production spends millions on salaries and services, purchases for the shoot and those by employees with paychecks padding their bank accounts.
But now the studios’ Wall Street 90-day window profiteers are leading the race to the bottom, scooping as much as they can out of the carcass of the glamour and creativity so they can invest their money, not in the future of filmmaking but in living excessively elsewhere.
A corporate agenda sees content-providing as just another commodity, not creative, and its emphasis on an extractive approach, like with any mining, leaves production people’s lives and all those around them as waste by the roadside.
At the Stay in LA rally on Sunday, April 6, SAG secretary-treasurer Joely Fisher passionately reflected the views of those attending: “This is Hollywood, California. We have to stay competitive to stay alive, to keep our industry alive, to keep tourism alive, to keep the entire ecosystem alive.”
Ending with “Make Hollywood Hollywood again!”
Loss of its iconic industry means the loss of a significant tax base and tourism attracted by the mystique of Hollywood.
If Los Angeles and California want to retain film and television production and all its ancillary industries, they are going to have to fight for it… but that’s another article – stay tuned.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno who now resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
