Entertainment workers, soundstage owners and actors including Keanu Reeves and Bette Midler are calling on studio executives and politicians to more bring more business back to Hollywood as the fallout from the most destructive wildfires in California history threatens to push more production out of Tinseltown.
Screenwriters and local industry groups have launched Stay in LA, a campaign aimed at boosting planned film and television tax incentives. They are asking studios like Netflix and Paramount to increase local production as much as 10% to help Los Angeles recover from economic blows it suffered, a move that would increase demand for soundstages and other facilities.
"The fires have made a desperate situation worse," reads the open letter from Stay in LA's co-founders, screenwriter Sarah Adina Smith and writer and director Alexandra Pechman. "We need a flood of new work to help our beloved city rebuild itself and ensure LA's future viability as a place where craftspeople, film workers, and businesses thrive."
The campaign launched last week has collected more than 18,000 signatures online, from A-list movie stars to camera operators and other entertainment stakeholders.
Movie production has fallen 28% in greater Los Angeles over the past five years while television output has dropped 36%, according to FilmLA, a nonprofit group that tracks the industry. That drop has affected the local real estate market, with soundstage occupancy down 3% in 2022 to 90%, according to Film LA.
Declines in activity have also pushed entertainment companies out of Los Angeles office space, contributing to the region's historic vacancy rate of 16%, up from 15% a year ago.
Compounding the challenges are recent wildfires that have ravaged the homes and businesses of entertainment industry workers, raised the specter of higher insurance premiums for future filming and created misinformation that filming permits are not being granted, locals say. Nearly 30% of the country's film and television workers live in the greater Los Angeles area, according to Otis College of Art and Design.
Star power
Actors including Kevin Bacon and Zooey Deschanel, influential filmmakers such as Patty Jenkins, Mike Flanagan and Lilly Wachowski and thousands of other creative and technical workers have signed the Stay in LA petition and shared it via social media and through media interviews.
Stay in LA is a collaboration with trade groups CA United and the Union Solidarity Coalition that plan on appealing to state and city officials when enough signatures have been gathered, according to Smith. It's also making an impression on social media, with locals sharing success stories about productions they're working on in Los Angeles.
California Governor Newsom has proposed increasing the state's film and television production tax incentive to $750 million annually later this year to help the state compete with cheaper shooting locations around the country.
The Stay in LA group wants to go even bigger, proposing removing the cap on the tax incentives for productions that shoot in Los Angeles County for the next three years as part of the overall disaster relief effort.
"Shooting in L.A. is hard, and it's expensive. We need a stronger tax incentive, and we need more perks to shoot here," said independent film director Cameron Mitchell in an Instagram post. "We all came to Hollywood to chase our dreams, and I refuse to believe those dreams aren't achievable here."
The Stay in LA campaign is calling on studios and streamers to pledge at least 10% more production in Los Angeles over the next three years to demonstrate dedication to the city's recovery. It also wants to reduce or eliminate permit fees and create a state-backed insurance program, similar to the FAIR Plan, to support productions during the crisis.
"We need LA-focused production incentives to be part of the emergency relief effort. The best crews and the talent are here," said director and producer Payman Benz in an Instagram post that linked to the campaign.
Meanwhile, some actors have separately pledged to film their productions on LA soundstages to help benefit the recovery. Vin Diesel posted on Instagram that he would ask Universal, the studio behind the latest film in his "Fast & Furious" series, to relocate shooting to Los Angeles to help bolster the local economy.
"Los Angeles needs it now more than ever," Diesel wrote in an Instagram post.
Call for action
Owners of soundstages and production offices are also eager to lure productions back. They want to help reverse lingering effects of the 2023 actors' and writers' strikes and a slowdown in filming activity after pandemic-era streaming wars drove production to historic highs.
Even as overall production has slowed, development of billions of dollars of studio space is underway across Los Angeles, designed to better compete for global productions with space more conducive to modern methods of filmmaking than existing older facilities.
A group of 30 businesses and organizations called the California Production Coalition formed in December before the fires to help convince the state to ramp up incentives. Members of the Motion Picture Association-led group include such development firms as Hudson Pacific Properties and Raleigh Studios, film equipment providers and other ancillary businesses.
"The highly skilled and hardworking below-the-line crew members are the ones disproportionately impacted when production moves out of Los Angeles. And they are the heart of the entertainment industry," Victor Coleman, chairman and CEO of Hudson Pacific Properties, owner of several soundstage properties in Los Angeles, including Sunset Studios Glenoaks, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
"These are the types of jobs California needs to fight to keep."
The average location shoot adds $670,000 and 1,500 jobs a day in Los Angeles, according to the coalition. 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 gross domestic product, the group said.