The Hollywood sign draws some 50 million visitors a year, according to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Photo / Jenna Schoenefeld, The New York Times
With actors and screenwriters on strike, Hollywood is shut down for the foreseeable future. Los Angeles isn’t a pure company town, but the industry is inextricable from the city in many ways.
Los Angeles County has 88 cities. Ten million people. Two hundred-plus languages spoken.
And a nine-letter sign that, for much of the world, defines the entire region: HOLLYWOOD.
Los Angeles has long been regarded as the global “company town” for show business, and as a rare actors strike upended the signature industry this week, the potential for cascading economic impacts across Southern California has emerged as a critical local issue. But economists disagree on just how extensively the simultaneous actors and writers strikes will be felt.
Even by the most generous estimates, Hollywood has never supported more than about 5 per cent of employment in a region where many more people work in trade, health care, government and even Southern California’s diminished manufacturing sector. Yet Hollywood pervades Los Angeles life in ways as big as a movie backdrop or as small as a street detour on some awards night.
For many, the ceased productions and darkened premieres are not just a threat to the flow of dollars to restaurants and retailers that cater to film crews, but also a blow to the region’s cultural heart.
“To the extent that Hollywood defines America’s idea of where I live, Hollywood’s troubles become my troubles,” said D.J. Waldie, a cultural historian in Southern California. “When Hollywood stops, a great many things stop here, and not just a few studios.”
During the 2007 screenwriters strike, the California economy lost US$2.1 billion, according to one study. The last time unionised screenwriters and actors staged dual walkouts, in 1960, the strikes did not settle for nearly six months.
Economists on Friday said the length of the two strikes will largely determine the financial impact on Los Angeles, although some were more optimistic than others.
Lee Ohanian, an economics professor at UCLA, who has written extensively about California, estimated that about 20 per cent of the local economy could be hit, in part because the industry generates so much revenue and has so many highly compensated local employees.
Chris Thornberg, a founding partner at Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics, said the strikes might not be felt locally for a long time because so much of show business has been focused on exploiting and distributing existing content.
“As long as people are paying for Hulu and buying Disney movies online, we’re making money,” Thornberg said. “Eventually, there will come a time when the lack of content will start to pinch, but this is a slow boil, not a rapid one.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass made it clear that she considered the labour standoff to be an urgent local issue and called on the studios and unions to “work around the clock” to reach an equitable agreement.
“This affects all of us and is essential to our overall economy,” Bass said.
Less tangible is the potential impact on Southern California’s self image. Show business is wrapped up in the region’s civic identity in ways that are unparalleled in less-renowned cities.
An audience of 18.7 million people this year tuned in to the Academy Awards, Los Angeles’ best known office party. Backdrops from Venice Beach to the Sixth Street Viaduct are regarded locally with pride as stars in their own right. Homeowners from the San Fernando Valley to South Pasadena run lucrative side hustles, renting their houses for film shoots and ads.
Although most of the famous names live in mansions behind gates, few Angelenos, even in far-flung exurbs, are without a celebrity story — the producer spotted in Joshua Tree, the famous face in the next lane in traffic.
“Everywhere I go, people ask me the same question: What stars have I met?” said Stephen Cheung, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. “Nobody would ask me that if I were from another city.”
Born in Hong Kong, Cheung, 44, said that he saw his first real celebrity in Los Angeles when he was about 10, through a car window. “We were near the convention centre in downtown, and all of a sudden, a car pulled up and I saw Madonna get out.”
Many also know stars the way anyone knows anyone in the nation’s second-largest city: as neighbours or fellow parents or people walking their dogs. Entertainers sponsor local schools, embark on second careers as politicians, stump for state ballot initiatives and occasionally get into scrapes with the mayor for trying to fill their own potholes.
Democratic leaders throughout the liberal state have long been supportive; earlier this month, Governor Gavin Newsom of California extended a US$330 million-a-year film and television tax credit program to encourage studios to keep productions at home.
Certain communities share a special bond.
“We have a lot of studio people who live in Burbank,” Mimi House, a retired medical clinic administrative worker, said Thursday while lunching with a group of fellow retirees in the Los Angeles suburb’s “beautiful downtown” shortly after leaders of the actors union, known as SAG-AFTRA, announced the walkout.
Without the entertainment industry, Burbank would be a “ghost town,” added Virginia Bohr, a retired accountant at the table with House. Local officials recently renamed their airport Hollywood Burbank, although Hollywood is technically a neighbourhood in Los Angeles, a separate city.
The region has long attracted show business aspirants from around the world who hope to catch their big break. Many scrape by for years before they find work outside the entertainment industry.
Thomas Whaley, a veteran teacher who for 23 years has coordinated an extensive visual and performing arts curriculum at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, credited the entertainment community for drawing him to the region and helping to ensure the long-standing success of his program, which has become a statewide model for the breadth and quality of its offerings. Were it not for the local concentration of talent, he said, he might never have ended up in the job he has come to cherish.
“I moved to LA to play trombone for film and TV in 1990,” said Whaley, who grew up in Rhode Island and studied to become a studio musician on full scholarships at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Miami. “My mother kept saying, ‘Come home, Rhode Island’s great,’ and I was like, ‘Mom, they don’t have what I need.’”
Other Angelenos feel a disconnect with an industry whose workers have long been concentrated in parts of the city that are more affluent and white.
In Mid-City, a Los Angeles neighbourhood several miles south of Hollywood that is predominantly Latino and Black, Rachel Johnson and Rosario Gomez, both 17, were more interested in frozen fruit treats from the local paleta shop than in the demands of Hollywood strikers.
“It’s the least of our concerns,” Johnson said of the picket lines, noting the struggling mom-and-pop businesses on their streets, rising rents and persistent homeless encampments.
“Yeah, there are bigger problems here, like gentrification,” Gomez added.
Nearby at La Cevicheria, a tiny eatery on Pico Boulevard, Yejoo Kim, 29, who works in geopolitics, agreed that Hollywood “can feel worlds apart,” even for Angelenos who were born and raised in the city, as she was.
But she and her roommate, David Choi, 27, also pointed to the large immigrant communities in Los Angeles that have been reflected with care in recent years in film and television.
“I feel a sense of solidarity,” said Choi, a novelist interested in the pay standards that Hollywood sets for its writers. “I’d be happy to participate in a boycott of a show.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shawn Hubler
Photographs by: Jenna Schoenefeld
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