The veteran Hollywood cinematographer Bruce McCleery knows all about Los Angeles’s struggles to maintain its dominance in the entertainment industry, because for most of the past 16 years he has lived on the road, never short of work but unable to land a major job within striking distance of his home and family in southern California.
It’s an increasingly common experience for many successful professionals in Hollywood who are hired by studios and production houses still largely based in Los Angeles, but do the actual work in Atlanta, or Toronto, or London, or Budapest.
Late last year, McCleery was at last hired to work on the second season of Fallout, a post-apocalyptic television drama based on a popular computer game that was moving from New York to LA. It was a welcome chance to sleep in his own bed and, McCleery hoped, a step toward a much-needed recovery for LA after the pummeling the city took during the Covid pandemic and, again, during twin strikes by the writers’ and actors’ guilds in 2023.
On set, though, McCleery found only different symptoms of the same old dysfunction – not because things were bad, but because they were eerily, almost uncomfortably good. The lighting crew, he noticed, was essentially an all-star team – everybody in town he could have dreamed of working with. The same was true of the grips, who specialize in rigging and setting up cameras, and of the camera crew itself.
“Even the day workers were superstars in their own right,” McCleery said. “And of course it was all a function of what was going on in Hollywood, because a lot of people who should have been busy were very much available.”
Fallout has proved, at least so far, to be an outlier in breaking the increasingly fraught pattern of “runaway production” – Hollywood film and TV shoots that have strayed far from Hollywood the geographical location. The show’s producers certainly hoped for a different outcome, since they lobbied for – and subsequently took full advantage of – a boost in state incentives to lure as many productions as possible back to California. The show received $25m in state funding to come to LA for season two, which wrapped in May, and a staggering $166m to stay on for season three.
Still, the news across most of the rest of the industry has remained stubbornly bleak. At a time when Hollywood is reeling from the double murder of the beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, big structural shifts in the technology and corporate structure of entertainment have made it impossible to emulate Reiner’s record of smart, funny, character-driven hits from the 1980s and 1990s because the business model for them has largely disappeared.
And those shifts have hit Los Angeles hard.
According to data compiled by state lawmakers and a watchdog that tracks industry data, contributions to the motion picture pension plan have dropped by about one-third over the past three years – a sign of particularly bad times for LA’s unionized actors, writers, crew members, and truckers.
The number of shooting days in LA fell more than 20% between the beginning of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, and LA’s share of overall worldwide production in film and television fell from 21.9% in 2022 to 18.3% two years later.
Every week brings more grim headlines, some of them LA-specific and some a reflection of a broader industry malaise. A beloved warehouse in North Hollywood that made its living renting costumes to television and movie productions closed its doors after a fire sale in October. Camera and equipment rental houses have either shuttered their storefronts or gone out of business altogether.
The owner of one of the few remaining car lots catering in industry needs – anything from vintage cruisers to ambulances to smashed up sports coupes – said he was renting an average of six vehicles a day, down from a 42-a-day average in happier times. “I’ve been in business 56 years, and I own all 900 of my cars and motorcycles. All my competitors who lease their cars have gone bankrupt,” Ken Fritz of Studio Picture Vehicles said.
In a town that gave birth to the disaster movie, it’s tempting to see such developments in apocalyptic terms. Owen Gleiberman, chief movie critic for the Hollywood Reporter, watched in horror as one highly-touted movie after another flopped at the box office over the summer and early autumn – a reflection of changing audience habits and stiff competition for their attention from streaming services and smartphones. “It has seriously begun to look like the bottom is falling out,” he declared.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, reached for a similarly doom-laden tone earlier this year when pushing to increase the state’s production incentive program from $330m to $750m – a controversial move in the midst of a budget crunch that has left little room for discretionary spending. Newsom said of the entertainment industry: “It’s on life support. We need to step things up.”
Insiders and economists tend to paint a more nuanced picture of an industry that, they say, is very much alive but beset by overlapping crises, many of them triggered by major structural changes in the technology of both producing and delivering filmed entertainment. Most say these are global phenomena more than LA-specific problems, but that Los Angeles feels them most acutely because it has the most to lose.
“Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the lion’s share of productions in the North American market were made in California and New York. California still leads the pack, but does so from a very diminished position,” said Philip Sokoloski of FilmLA, which keeps close track of production data on behalf of both the city and county of Los Angeles.
“Fewer than one in five TV shows are made in California, whereas even a few years ago it was closer to 30%. That’s a rather sudden drop.”
Some of this, say industry insiders and economists, was bound to happen anyway. Advances in everything from filming technology to post-production effects have meant fewer overall shooting days on location, smaller crews, and far less physical handling of equipment or reels of finished film.
Those advances have not only opened the industry to far more people than would have been imaginable a generation ago – a teenager can now shoot and edit a credible film with a phone and a laptop – it has also made it easier for production centres far from Los Angeles to train up a corps of highly accomplished industry professionals. “There is no piece of the industry that cannot now be done anywhere,” Sokoloski said.
Layered on top of this trend is the fact that production has been in an unusually volatile boom-and-bust cycle, going back to the late 2010s when the arrival of streaming services created a seemingly insatiable appetite for content, and continuing through the pandemic, when demand for home entertainment reached even greater heights. The industry has been suffering an extended hangover ever since, with streaming services ditching content they previously commissioned and old-guard studios shedding jobs, merging, or, like Warner Bros which is now the subject of a ferocious, ideologically-tinged acquisition battle between Netflix and Paramount Skydance, putting themselves up for sale. Early in the decade Los Angeles went on a building spree to create more sound stages, but by the time the first of them were completed, demand had receded and more than one-third are now going unused.
The arrival of big tech as a significant Hollywood player has both informed these developments and disrupted much of the way the industry works. Netflix, Amazon and others are now major producers as well as distributors of content, and their grip on the marketplace – exemplified by the Warner Bros deal – is making it harder for the old guard to keep competing. The old business model for movies is in tatters since titles are no longer given an extended run on the big screen before they appear on streaming platforms, and movie-going itself has not recovered after the pandemic because of the convenience of watching from home.
Christopher Thornberg, an economist whose firm, Beacon Economics, has written multiple reports about the entertainment industry, argues that tech giants have had a similar effect on film and television as they have on the news media. “They have figured out how to make news organizations compete with each other to death while they make all the money, scraping stuff off the top and putting it on social media platforms. And the same’s true in Hollywood,” he said.
“New production is struggling to find an outlet. Even the streaming services are beating the living crap out of each other. And who’s making the money? The servers, the people putting clips on YouTube and earning advertising revenue off of them.”
Thornberg is sceptical that much, if any, of this structural headache can be fixed by bigger state incentives and subsidies, a position shared by some other economists who question Newsom’s assertion that the incentives will pay for themselves. A better approach, Thornberg argues, would be for the studios and the guilds to lobby for stronger intellectual property rights that would put more money back in the pockets of content creators.
Still, Thornberg believes talk of LA’s demise as the centre of the entertainment business is greatly exaggerated, because the business has always been cyclical and because the most stable and highest-paying jobs, in marketing, sales and distribution, are overwhelmingly based there and showing no signs of moving. “Los Angeles is still the centre of the universe, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
The flipside of that argument – pushed by champions of Newsom’s new incentive package and by FilmLA – is that even diminished location production has become too competitive to leave to market forces alone. There are now 120 centers around the world with the facilities to make films and television shows, Sokoloski said, which meant that LA needed every inducement to keep productions in town. “It’s an increasingly competitive environment,” he said. “Any amount lost is felt very keenly by the local entertainment workforce.”
That sentiment was echoed by Michele Mulroney, president of the west coast chapter of the Writers Guild, who described the new state incentive package to the Los Angeles Times as “a real bright spot of good news in an otherwise really bleak and tough time for our industry”.
McCleery, the cinematographer, reflected that it is now a much more challenging business to enter than when he started out as a lighting specialist more than 30 years ago. “It’s not the idyllic and charmed industry that worked so well in LA for so long,” he said. “It’s controlled by different forces.”
He agreed that Los Angeles was not facing an existential threat so much as a period of downsizing and restructuring. “It will come back, but in a different form and size,” he said. “I’m just hoping it will come back sooner than later.”
