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Except for maybe at a few talk show hosts’ homes, entertainment production has effectively ceased in Los Angeles County and throughout most of the world.
California’s, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s and the county’s Thursday night orders for everyone to stay home for at least a month mean no more movies or TV shows are getting made during the coronavirus crisis.
Not that many were in the past week; from major studios to the smallest independent endeavors, casts and crews were sent home from sets none of them wanted to potentially get infected on anyway.
As with every other business outside of maybe toilet paper manufacturing, the financial devastation this will cause in the short and (especially if there is a) long term is incalculable.
“This is the largest challenge that the entertainment industry has faced at the very least since World War II, and probably in its history, in terms of disruption,” stated Kevin Klowden, executive director of Santa Monica’s Milken Institute’s Center for Regional Economics and California Center. “Hollywood is a lot more resilient than people give it credit for, but that doesn’t mean that the day-to-day life for people employed in Hollywood has not gotten incredibly hard.”
The major unions are all trying to cope in different ways.
SAG-AFTRA, the performers guild, streamlined its foundation’s COVID-19 Disaster Fund’s application process Thursday due to “an extremely high volume of requests” for aid. Like SAG-AFTRA’s, the Directors Guild of America’s health plan has waived co-pays and deductibles for Coronavirus tests.
The Writers Guild of America, traditionally Hollywood’s most contentious above-the-line union, even seems to be cooperating with the bosses’ representative, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, for a change . . . If only to figure out when and how to start negotiating the writers’ new contract.
Hardest and widest hit, however, are nonunionized support and office staff, as well as organized below-the-line labor, which are virtually every other skilled craftsperson necessary to make a show.
While some Southern California BTL jobs are represented by Teamsters Local 399 (which is at least able to get its laid-off production drivers preferential employment for one of the few booming businesses in the new corona economy, transporting food and goods to besieged grocery stores), the majority of rank-and-file film and live production workers are members of various International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees locals.
The International has projected that 120,000 of its 150,000 members in the U.S. and Canada are now unemployed because of the coronavirus shutdown. Many of those professionals go from show to show, and therefore do not meet some of the past-employment requirements Congress’ emergency relief legislation requires. IATSE is furiously lobbying lawmakers to take the unique circumstances of entertainment workers into consideration as other rounds of aid packages move forward.
“Given the fast pace and freelance nature of the entertainment industry, a lot of entertainment workers – not all of them – wouldn’t qualify for extended benefits because they don’t meet the days worked for a particular employer requirements of that law,” Jonas Loeb, IATSE’s director of communications, explained.
In the meantime, IATSE has been contributing to charities, such as the Actors Fund, that its members can access for aid, and moving to see what the also income-squeezed employers, from the major studios like Disney to single-show independent producers, can do to help the idled rank-and-file.
“The IATSE is working with employers and looking at all of our contracts for pertinent clauses,” Loeb said. “We’re fighting around the clock on every possible front.”
While it’s unclear what many individual outfits in the vast array of production and distribution entities can and/or are willing to do to support workers through the shutdown, at least the one major player that hasn’t seen its business battered by the work and performance stoppages, Netflix, on Friday established an $85 million fund for the hardest-hit folks from its many, worldwide productions, with another $15 million earmarked for third party industry aid.
“Almost all television and film production has now ceased globally – leaving hundreds of thousands of crew and cast without jobs. These include electricians, carpenters and drivers, many of whom are paid hourly wages and work on a project-to-project basis,” Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos wrote in a company blog post announcing the fund. He added that for Netflix’s pros, “This is in addition to the two weeks pay we’ve already committed to the crew and cast on productions we were forced to suspend last week.”
Even those who are getting a few weeks’ severance will need help to stay solvent through a pandemic it will likely take months to outlast.
“You have to assume that there will be some companies that are able to provide some kind of support to the staff that is not working as a result of these shutdowns,” FilmLA president Paul Audley observed. “And there’s some that can’t, so like every other industry in the region, it’s going to be devastating for individuals and really hard for the overall economy. That’s why we all hope, in the global picture here in the United States, that some of the federal and state initiatives come through to help support the individuals in this business through what could be a fairly long period of time of no work.”
Audley said that his film office for the city and county saw a huge drop in location shooting permit requests since most major productions announced that they were shutting down late in the second week of March. By last Wednesday, no permits were being requested, and on Friday they were forbidden until at least March 31, with extensions beyond then likely.
Beside talent, crew and producers getting strangled by the production shutdown, hundreds of independent service vendors – from those who provide talent trailers and cameras to set caterers and florists – are seeing their small businesses hit a wall.
“Vendors are, obviously, suffering greatly,” Audley noted. “So much of this business is margin-based, they don’t have months and months of runout time. We have grave concern that some of these people could be history.”
A similar fate could be looming for many independent producers, traditionally the impresarios who find and give new talent their break in the industry.
“The studios, the bigger companies will survive,” Milken’s Klowden asserted. “It’s some of the independent producers that are a concern. That problem is true not just in the movie industry but in a lot of small business. When you operate without a lot of reserves, when you operate with smaller margins, then this winds up being a huge, cash-crunch problem.”
While David M. Smith, a professor of economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School agreed that a work stoppage beyond 12 weeks would be terribly hard for individuals and an existential threat to smaller companies, he did think that Hollywood’s skilled workers will right their career ships if they can weather the current storm.
“Some of these workers are very valuable, and I’m sure the studios are taking that into consideration and may help some of these individuals over time,” Smith said. “There’s going to be pent-up demand for entertainment when things do get back to normal. For some small businesses like a small hotel or restaurant, there may be a question of whether there’s going to be a job to go back to. For these workers, there will likely be jobs. Good, below-the-line workers are in high demand.”
FilmLA’s Audley saw another ray of optimism in the now totally gone-dark picture.
“The studios have all suspended their work and they’re not setting a date by which they believe they’ll be back out,” Audley acknowledged. “But one thing to think about for the entertainment industry versus a lot of others is that it can start working the next day after clearance, because they’re that flexible and mobile.”
Overall, though, Southern California can expect one of its signature industries to mean just a fraction of what it did to the area’s economy until this pandemic abates.
“It becomes one more piece on top of what is already a very complex, frustrating situation,” Klowden concluded. “As far as oddities, you had seen that a certain amount of the port activity had been in a slump because of the trade war and, then, the Chinese isolation. Now that Chinese production is coming back online, that’s showing signs of starting to recover. But that’s going to wind up running into the production shutdown in entertainment and the hospitality and tourism industries.
“They’re all going to be hit together, and that’s going to affect people in both lower and higher incomes. It’s going to stretch the problem throughout Southern Californian society,” Klowden said.
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