Standing in the Los Angeles headquarters, Hollywood Guild Sag-Aftra actors alongside a cavalcade of film industry players, Mayor Karen Bass is committed to productions on Tuesday to run more easily in Los Angeles.
The mayor has signed an executive directive to support local local and televised jobs – an action which, according to her, will reduce costs and will rationalize the city’s processes for the rental of rental, as well as to increase access to the legendary locations of the, in particular Griffith Observatory, Central Library and the port of Los Angeles. This decision was applauded by representatives of actors on the Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists screen and other union leaders.
During the 115 years since DW Griffith shot the first film in the then Hollywood village, it firmly established it as the world capital of film production.
However, although the city remains international synonymous with the magic of the film, it has hemorragist production jobs to other states and countries which offer generous tax incentives, cheaper work and bureaucracies more suited to shooting.
Now, in the midst of a broader slowdown in cinematographic and television production, the local industry is found at an existential crossroads.
Will Los Angeles always be a place where middle-class entertainment workers, below the line, can earn a living and that new productions can drop, or has the city permanently gave this land?
The changes commissioned by the mayor are relatively modest, but the veterans of the industry hope that they will alleviate some of the charges facing smooth productions and logistical problems.
“We have taken the industry to acquire,” said Bass. “We know that industry is part of our DNA here. And sometimes, if you think it’s part of your DNA, you may think it will always be there. ”
Bass, who said that his own family had been involved in the film industry for three generations, has also urged the state’s legislature to adopt legislation that would increase tax credits on films and television to make the state more competitive. When he published his draft budget revised last week, Governor Gavin Newsom kept his commitment to double the California film tax credit at $ 750 million next year.
The Los Angeles signature industry has been beaten by a series of crises and opposite winds of compounds in recent years, COVVI-19 pandemic closures that have closed, then seriously reduced production to the Hollywood work strikes in 2023 and a prolonged stagnation that followed.
The fires of January 2025 were only the last blow. According to industry estimates.
During the first three months of this year, production in the place in the Grand Los Angeles region decreased by almost a quarter, compared to the same period a year earlier.
The pain has resolved far beyond the studio backlots. Restaurants had trouble keeping their doors open and a flow of Hollywood workers left the city.
The decrease in filming has a broader “multiplier effect” on the local economy, said the member of the Adrin Nazarian council, which represents the East Valley of San Fernando and introduced a previous proposal from the Municipal Council to rationalize the city’s film license process.
“Many people who are affected live in the district. It is their mortgages. If the mortgages are not paid, people lose houses, if people do not spend income available in restaurants or on life costs – raising their children, raising their family – these retail taxes did not come in town,” said Nazarian.
Industry challenges go far beyond productions that are not sufficiently supported in Los Angeles.
In the post-pic television era, the film and television industry has, at least for the moment, a considerably contract.
The recent era of streaming wars, when the competing subscription services triggered a cash cradle and an overabundance of content to try to deviate from the domination of the Netflix market, is finished.
The studios are at green lighting fewer shows and losing jobs. Generous tax incentive programs in other states and abroad have also made much more difficult for productions to be economically achievable.
All this means that even if the mayor was to wave a magic wand and facilitate infinity for productions to shoot the emblematic streets of Los Angeles, jobs would still not follow automatically.
But the Bass directive “will help the immediate productions that are already there,” said Lindsay Dougherty, the local team section, Lindsay Dougherty, which represents more than 6,000 film teams in Hollywood, including drivers and location managers.
“All these things matter,” said Dougherty, while invoking the need for more funding for the state tax credit program and possible federal legislation. “When a production company plans to budget, this is one of them.”
The mayor’s executive directive has a certain number of components which aim to reduce production costs, in particular by reducing the number of city staff who must be on a place of filming to a single staff member.
Bass also orders all city services to report on how their current costs “associated with staff or on -site inspections” can be reduced.
The order also aims to facilitate shooting in a number of properties belonging to a particularly illustrated city. The city will reduce the shooting costs to the Griffith Observatory, which, according to cinema defenders, has become prohibitive to use as a location. The shooting will always be limited to the times when the observatory is not otherwise open to the public.
BASS also undertook to dissolve the long waiting period of the insurance review which prevented certain productions from being able to film at the port of Los Angeles and said that it would reopen the central library of the city center to the shooting.
The industry defenders have raised these problems with the mayor’s office in recent years and some had previously expressed their frustration that Bass had not been more proactive in the shooting.
The writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.
