Why Hollywood jobs are moving away from New York and Los Angeles

Something has happened to the film and television industry in the past two years: Many of the jobs it creates have been moved from its traditional centers of Los Angeles and New York to the rest of the country.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by our partners at APM Research LaboratoryEmployment in film and sound recording has increased nationally, but the share of workers in Los Angeles or New York has fallen from just under half in early 2023 to just a third more early this year.

The move comes amid major upheaval in the industry and the way it delivers shows and films, which is impacting the availability of work for people left in the industry's historic capitals.

Among them: Janie Haddad Tompkins, who describes herself as a journeyman actress. She has been rebuilding her career in Hollywood for over 20 years, mainly through small roles in television comedies like the new “Night Court,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Modern Family.” She also did voiceover work on “Regular Show” and “American Dad!” » and reserved advertisements.

To get these roles, you have to audition, and before the start of last year, she did that often.

There were constant hearings. I mean, constant auditions, Haddad Tompkins said.

This is because Hollywood was in a sort of production bubble. Following Netflix's success, many companies have launched streaming services in recent years, banking on subscriber demand. To attract them, they filled their platforms with new shows and movies.

All this activity peaked in 2022, when 600 original scripted shows were in production, according to FX network. This provided ample opportunity for everyone who makes a movie possible: the writers, the crew members, the caterers, and the actors, like Haddad Tompkins. But it didn't last.

At the start of 2023, there appeared to be a slowdown in production, manufacturing and purchasing, she said.

According to the number of effects, the number of scripted shows fell to 516 last year. The studios pulled out for several reasons, according to Patrick Adler, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and director of the consulting firm Westwood Economics, who published a recent report on the film industry workforce.

First, investors began to feel the effects of rising interest rates.

Wall Street became much less patient with studio spending on streaming platforms once money started getting more expensive, Adler said.

Second, he said, studios realized that consumers might not have as much capacity as they had anticipated for many new streaming subscriptions.

Then, in May of last year, the Hollywood writers' union went on strike, followed by the actors' union. (Disclosure: A separate arm of SAG-AFTRA represents some of Marketplaces' editors.)

The resulting work stoppages effectively crippled the industry for six months. But once the two unions reached contractual agreements with the studios, many in the industry expected production to resume. Maybe not at the level of the streaming bubble, but a slight increase.

But in Los Angeles and New York, that didn't really happen. Actress Janie Haddad Tompkins said that when studios were producing shows amid the streaming bubble, she was allowed one or two auditions a week.

Now it's like I have maybe one a month, she said. So it's been dark.

But while work opportunities have collapsed in Los Angeles and New York, the workforce in the rest of the country has actually increased slightly in some sectors since late 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Travis Knox, a longtime film producer who teaches at Chapman University, thinks a long-term industry trend may be at play here: generous state tax credits for film production.

If the state wants to give you back 30% of your budget, it's a no-brainer, you have to go for it, he said.

This trend dates back several decades, when Louisiana first offered a tax credit to movie studios that brought their productions to the state. Dozens of other states have followed suit since some, like Georgia, thus becoming major players in the sector. Many allow production companies to recoup significant percentages of their expenses, if they film in a particular state and meet local hiring thresholds and other requirements.

Although some incentives have come and gone over the decades, state policymakers have shown renewed interest in encouraging film productions in recent years: At least 18 states have created or expanded movie incentive programs since 2021, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But it's not just government incentives that attract movie studios to other states. Many of them also have cheaper fuel, food, and housing than California and New York. So from a studio perspective, Knox said, as you reduce the total number of productions, the first thing you're going to do is stop making them in locations that are expensive.

Bad luck for California and New York. Knox acknowledges that he is part of this trend.

I have a film at the moment in a big studio, at Sony. It's set in central California in the 1940s, and we're going to shoot it in Oklahoma, he said.

But even if crews can decamp to Oklahoma or Georgia to shoot movies and TV shows, parts of the industry are unlikely to leave their traditional capitals, like TV writers' rooms. And the shrinking post-streaming bubble is making life difficult for writers trying to find work at these venues.

Basically, everyone is trying to do the same job, said Jackie Penn, a television writer with a few employees writing credits under her name, including Disney's “Turner & Hooch” and the CW's “4400.”

Although getting into these writers' rooms helped her find her way into the industry, writers with her level of experience, she said, simply aren't in high demand right now.

Many shows are only looking for top-tier writers.

Or, she says, they're looking for writers working on their very first series. This leaves a void for mid-level writers like her looking to advance in their careers.

We are the next generation of showrunners and creators, Penn said. If we don't get these opportunities, I don't know what television will look like when other people retire.