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The building boom across Southern California has revitalized neighborhoods and brought new prosperity to the region. Downtown Los Angeles, especially, has benefited from the rise of new office buildings, multi-purpose structures, places to live and things to do.
One business, however, hasn’t exactly been positively impacted by a decade of gentrification. Movies and TV shows that used to count on Downtown L.A. for locations that looked like older urban areas of Anycity, U.S.A. are finding it harder and harder to fake 20th Century New York, Chicago or even vintage L.A.
“I’ve been in L.A. for 25 years; there are huge changes,” noted Mike Fantasia, a location manager with a number of Marvel movies under his belt and a vice-president of the Location Managers Guild International, a professional organization that promotes best practices and the art of the craft. “When I first moved here from Montana, Downtown was a ghost town. Every parking lot was empty. You could shoot any sightline and never have a problem. Now there are always new buildings, especially in the southern part of Downtown near Staples Center. There was a Bank of America on Spring Street we used to use for all kinds of things.”
“We basically pumped enough money into those great old buildings to keep them from being torn down, and now they have all been retrofitted into expensive condos. Filmmakers are no longer welcomed in the Downtown area.
— Lori Balton, location scout
Before Staples, L.A. Live and other cultural institutions inspired Downtown’s building and population growth over the past decade, it was primarily a depressed area whose landlords and older businesses indeed counted on productions to bring in some much-needed revenue.
Then: 800 block of West Cesar E. Chavez Avenue between Bunker Hill Avenue and Figueroa Street. (Archive photo by Lori Balton)
Now: A changed view of downtown Los Angeles on April 3, 2018, along the 800 block of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, which is now obscured by the Otani development. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Then: The 6th Street bridge at the Los Angeles River in 2004. (Archive photo by Lori Balton)
Now: The view of the Los Angeles river toward the 6th street bridge, which has been torn down. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Then: An alley off of East 2nd Street in downtown Los Angeles in the late 1990’s. (Archive photo by Lori Balton)
Now: An alley off of East 2nd Street in downtown Los Angeles shot on April 4, 2018. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Then: A Broadway street scene at 6th Street in Los Angeles, Feb. 1976. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
Now: Broadway and 6th Street in Los Angeles on April 3, 2018. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
“The film industry sustained Downtown Los Angeles in those lean times when everyone left the urban core to decay,” Lori Balton, a founding member and former president of LMGI whose most recent location scouting work can be seen in the mostly California-shot “A Wrinkle in Time,” said in an email. “We basically pumped enough money into those great old buildings to keep them from being torn down, and now they have all been retrofitted into expensive condos. Filmmakers are no longer welcomed in the Downtown area.”
While it must certainly feel that way to some tasked with finding appropriate spaces for their shows, FilmL.A., the nonprofit that handles location shooting permitting for the city of L.A., has a wall map in its office that shows a good amount of filmmaking activity still going on Downtown.
But it’s more difficult than it used to be.
“As the city has experienced a development boom, two things have happened that affect filming directly,” FilmL.A. President Paul Audley said. “One is the loss of surface parking lots for base-camping. Downtown and Hollywood in particular, both of those communities have seen such a surge in building of residential properties on what were formally parking lots, it’s created a crunch.
“The other question is one of aesthetics and look,” Audley continued. “As the city modernizes, and puts in things like the array of bicycles that you can check out, the bumpouts for pedestrians and buses and the coming streetcars, and of course when a modern building comes up in what was a historic Downtown area, all of that affects the ability of filmmakers to get an easy shot. They can still do it, but it now requires more money and a limited number of angles that they can film from.”
Movie magic things can be done to cover-up or ameliorate unwanted modern looks, but all require extra expense and labor. Fantasia noted that the hated-by-cameras green bicycle lane markings, not just Downtown but on streets everywhere in the city, can be erased digitally in post-production, covered with temporary paint that then has to be pressure-washed and vacuumed up before the the dirty water reaches storm drains, or covered with mats that rarely stay in place under foot and vehicle traffic.
“Or get permission to park vehicles over the bike lanes” from the city and facing businesses, Fantasia explained. “But that pisses off the bike-riders.”
Additionally, productions have to pay street-level businesses to let them replace signs and window appearances when they’re seeking an older or different look, and to shut down during hours of filming. Much cheaper back when those businesses were decades-old pawn shops or watch repair stores, costlier when they’ve been replaced by high-traffic Paneras or Jersey Mikes.
“There’s still a great-looking block of Spring Street between Sixth and Seventh,” said Timothy Hillman, a location manager who’s worked TV series shot in L.A. — such as “CSI: New York” and his current gig, “Lethal Weapon” — exclusively for the last dozen years. “Great looking New York block, ‘CSI: New York’ used to be there once or twice a month. But all the facades have been updated, there’s a Starbucks and an iPhone Store. There are all these places that need to be changed and covered up. You can still go there and shoot, but for the most part it’s off the books for a TV show because you just can’t afford it anymore. And to close, the new businesses are going to charge you 10 times as much as the old businesses used to charge.”
Still, local television production is booming as much as building, thanks to improvements in California’s production tax credit program instituted two-and-a-half years ago and the explosion of streaming services’ programming. But Hillman, for one, sees a potential new reason for producers to head out-of-state as a result of gentrification.
“It upsets your budget because now you’re spending money to paint out a street and cover signs and change windows that you didn’t have to spend before,” Hillman suggested. “Your budget starts to go through the roof, and that’s why they’re starting to look at places like Cleveland and St. Louis and certain parts of Chicago that are still old. But when they go there they also have to deal with something called weather.”
Local filming booster Audley pointed out another reason to stay here with beefed-up art and set dressing departments.
“One problem they do run into now more than they used to is with the number of chain stores all over the world, but this isn’t just an L.A. problem,” Audley said. “Cleveland also has Starbucks.”
Kevin James, director of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Film and Television, helps coordinate various city departments to accommodate productions – and find other locations that might work when cherished ones disappear.
“We do have a building boom in Downtown,” James acknowledged. “We are also building a subway in Downtown. We have lots of economic activity and jobs Downtown, so we have traffic Downtown, and the traffic is of all different types. And it still is, in essence, the backlot for the commercial filming industry in the United States – and we manage to pull all that off.”
Of course, upscaled cityscapes aren’t limited to L.A.’s Downtown area either.
“I’m scouting on a period movie at the moment,” Balton revealed. “Every one I work on gets progressively more difficult as Los Angeles tears down or modernizes at an alarming rate.”
Fantasia lamented how blocks and blocks of the region’s residential streets that used to be all picturesque, vintage houses now have a McMansion or two on them. Overall, he praises how vast and diverse the range of locations is in Southern California compared to its arguably biggest competitor for production work, Atlanta, Georgia.
“We’re losing our old, period buildings and vintage look. We used to be able to go down to Spring Street and Main Street at Seventh and Sixth and Fifth, and they had all the old buildings that doubled as New York or Chicago or St. Louis. Now they’ve all been gentrified – which is bad, we’ve lost all of our old stuff. However, it’s good because now we have all this new, hip stuff to shoot when we have a modern-day show like ‘Lethal Weapon.’”
— Timothy Hillman, location manager
That’s where Marvel shoots many of its superhero movies, including the one Fantasia is still working on, “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” That production is back in L.A. for some reshoots, and Fantasia has just run into a situation he associates more with Georgia, where crews can nearly bump into each other.
“I was scouting a location today, and the best part of the location is unavailable because another Marvel film is there at the time period we want to be there,” he said, more amused than indignant about it. “They’d already booked it! I called my friend and gave him a ration of s—. But we found a different part of the property we can use.”
Even if the steady loss of desirable L.A. locations is leading to situations like that and worse, gentrification may not be all bad for the filmed entertainment business.
“It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” Hillman reckoned. “We’re losing our old, period buildings and vintage look. We used to be able to go down to Spring Street and Main Street at Seventh and Sixth and Fifth, and they had all the old buildings that doubled as New York or Chicago or St. Louis. Now they’ve all been gentrified – which is bad, we’ve lost all of our old stuff. However, it’s good because now we have all this new, hip stuff to shoot when we have a modern-day show like ‘Lethal Weapon.’ I can go down there and find all these really cool loft spaces and great clubs and contemporary L.A., and really show off our beauty.”
“I think that people realize, including the industry, that all this progress is great for the city,” FilmL.A.’s Audley rightly but cautiously observed. “Returning people and business to Downtown is a good thing for the City of L.A. But even the influx of people into an area that once was virtually vacant creates more complexity in what can and cannot be permitted to film.”
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