From the Wall Street Journal, October 2:
Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread
LOS ANGELES—Brian Mainolfi has been drawing since he came to this city in 1994. The Baltimore native started as an assistant to legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones, worked on Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Mulan,” and spent a decade on the animated sitcom “American Dad.”
The appeal of the work was simple. “People love cartoons,” he said. “And I love making cartoons.”
Since his last show was canceled in 2024, Mainolfi’s artistic output has been limited to dinosaurs and monsters in his sketchbook. Like thousands of people who work in the entertainment industry, he has become collateral damage of a precipitous slowdown in production. The only work he’s found is teaching an animation class at a Cal State campus three hours away, for $350 a week.
Mainolfi’s family of four never lived extravagantly on his salary of around $100,000, but now they’re using retirement and college savings and scrimping to survive in their three-bedroom ranch house in suburban Burbank. With his union healthcare set to disappear at the end of the year for lack of work, the 54-year-old is trying to figure out for the first time in his life what he could do to make money besides draw.
“By the end of the year if I don’t have something, I’m going to have to apply to a big-box store or a grocery store or something,” he said.
Los Angeles is full of transplants who moved here to pursue dreams of working in movies and TV. Few earned millions as stars or A-list directors. They build the sets, operate the cameras, manage the schedules and make sure everything looks and sounds perfect. The work isn’t steady, because film shoots end and TV shows get canceled. But established professionals had rarely gone more than a few months between gigs—until now.
The entertainment industry is in a downward spiral that began when the dual strikes by actors and writers ended in 2023. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.
“This is the first year since 1989 that I haven’t had a show to work on,” said Pixie Wespiser, a 62-year-old production manager and producer who has worked on 36 TV series, including the original “Night Court” and its recent revival. “I look around and I see so many people who are seriously suffering.”
At the end of 2024, some 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two years earlier, there were 142,000.
The primary reason is that Hollywood is making less stuff. The film business has yet to rebound from the shutdown of theaters during the pandemic. TV production was booming in the 2010s and early 2020s as companies tried to jump-start streaming services, but in 2022, investors saw streaming growth was slowing and decided what actually matters is profitability. Entertainment companies, which plan productions many months in advance, cut spending dramatically when the strikes ended the following year.
Nearly 30% fewer movies and TV shows with budgets of at least $40 million began shooting in the U.S. in 2024 than in 2022, according to data firm ProdPro. The first three-quarters of this year were down another 13%.
The situation is particularly dire in Los Angeles. Because of the region’s high costs and a state production tax credit that, until recently, lagged behind what competitors like Georgia and British Columbia were offering, studios make most of their content far from their corporate offices. Last year, there was less production activity in the Los Angeles area than at any time since at least 1995, save for the pandemic, according to the nonprofit group FilmLA.
The industry’s slump is contributing to L.A.’s broader economic challenges. The region’s recent employment growth has been anemic compared with other major metropolitan areas and the nation overall. Its 5.7% unemployment rate is higher than California’s 5.5% and the nation’s 4.3%. And L.A. is still struggling to recover from the winter’s devastating fires in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, where many entertainment workers lived. That disaster exacerbated the city’s already severe housing crunch.
Hollywood has endured downturns before, but rarely this sudden and severe. Some industry analysts believe consumers might be pivoting permanently from professionally made content to the endless buffet of YouTube and social media.
Any rebound in production activity would take at least a few years, and possibly many more. And a full recovery might never happen if generative artificial intelligence makes animation and visual-effects jobs obsolete, as many workers fear.
Meanwhile, thousands of dreams built around working in the movie and TV business are evaporating.
Missing purpose
Thomas Curley won an Oscar recording the sound on 2014’s “Whiplash” and had more job offers than he knew what to do with as recently as 2022. The 49-year-old hasn’t worked since April of last year, save for one week on a movie that was made in Europe but needed to shoot exteriors in San Francisco.The hardest part isn’t watching his savings wither while he does home improvement projects and hunts for jobs, Curley said. It’s missing the creative camaraderie he has enjoyed for most of his adult life on movie and TV sets.
“Feeling like you’re part of a team that’s making something that can provide joy for millions of people around the world is what drew me here in the first place,” said the native of upstate New York. “That level of purpose is a really hard thing to let go of.”
Entertainment industry workers got through last year with a mantra: “Survive ‘til 25.” But jobs are even more scarce this year. L.A. and New York-based members of the health and pension fund that covers most behind-the-scenes craftspeople worked 18% fewer hours this year through mid-August than in the year-earlier period.
“It felt like the floor fell out,” television writer Matt Walsh said of the evaporation of job prospects. After moving to L.A. from Orange County, he spent a decade hustling as an assistant on sets and in writers’ rooms before finally getting his first scriptwriting assignment in 2023, on the TBS series “Miracle Workers.”
Since the strikes ended, the 34-year-old hasn’t been able to find work as a writer. He’s back to working as a production assistant, the first job he ever had in entertainment.
Hollywood’s downturn has rippled through the region’s economy. Fewer productions mean fewer orders for props, costumes and catering from local businesses, and less spending by unemployed or anxious workers on everything.
Courtney Cowan’s Milk Jar Cookies shop made deliveries to movie sets and agents’ offices, but most of its business was regular people. She was expecting 2023 to be a banner year with the opening of her second location and a franchise program. Instead, the strikes began and sales immediately dropped 30%....
....MUCH MORE
Brutal, just brutal.
Possibly also of interest:
"New 'Mary Poppins' Movie in the Works from Disney"
Blasphème!"Concern grows over whether Hollywood's film and TV industry can survive in California"
Well, they had a good run.
And many many more,
