On June 11, as protests raged in Los Angeles over the escalating immigration crackdown and California legislators furiously attempted to address a $12 billion budget shortfall, state Sen. Ben Allen issued a gentle reminder to top Hollywood creatives that politicos had a lot more on their minds than movies and TV shows.
“Keep in mind the pressures that everyone is under right now,” the legislator told a group of industry players in the Capitol’s swing-space office building. Substantive cuts to healthcare, social and public services were on the table — in fact, the chants of protestors outside the building were echoing as he was speaking. “You’re under a lot of pressures; we’re under a lot of pressures.”
His rapt listeners wouldn’t have looked out of place at a glamorous Oscars after-party, and they had been tasked with doing the kind of delicate politicking and advocacy that on the West Side of L.A. is usually synonymous with awards season.
Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman, was there. So was Jonathan Nolan, now producing Fallout. Then there was Damon Lindelof, co-creator of Lost, and American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson who — as the group frequently teased him — was the only Oscar winner present.
They were backed by two grips, Marco Flores and Angel Isarraras and one set dresser, Samuel Chavoya, all graduates of Hollywood CPR, a nonprofit that trains individuals from underrepresented communities to work in unionized entertainment trades, as well as set painter Alicia Dorsch.
The group was there to thread the tricky needle between expressing gratitude to lawmakers — who had seemingly coalesced around Gov. Gavin Newsom expanding the state’s film and TV program from $330 million to $750 million in a perilous budget year — while also pushing to institute those changes sooner rather than later.
To confront the growing California production exodus, lawmakers are in the process of leveraging what’s known as a “trailer bill.” The mechanism allows lawmakers to move quickly and bypass procedural hurdles that other legislation must typically endure for high-priority initiatives, implementing the budget’s financial mandates by altering laws that govern how newly-allocated money must be spent.
The man who brought them all together for this marathon day of lobbying was Scott Budnick, a producer of Todd Phillips-directed bro-y comedies (The Hangover, Due Date)-turned-activist who founded the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in 2013. He has long supported Hollywood CPR, whose training programs are open to people with a history in the prison system.
“These young people that I care about, that I fight for, this is their livelihood, this is their dream,” he explained over airline coffee on the flight from LAX to Sacramento. (Yes, Budnick and all others present flew commercial.) “And if I’ve pushed them into a business where their dreams can’t come true, that’s heartbreaking for me.”
Above: Patty Jenkins (center), Damon Lindelof (left), Cord Jefferson (third from left), Jonathan Nolan (sixth from right) and more lobbied Sacramento lawmakers.
Katie Kilkenny
On the charter bus ride over to 1021 O Street, a nondescript 10-story office building in downtown Sacramento two blocks from the state capitol, Budnick stood to face his team and walk members through the complex dynamics at play.
The legislation was initially met with resistance because of the appearance that it was designed as what Budnick called a “fat cat handout.” One key message of the day, he said, was appreciation: Many legislators were unhappy with devastating budget cuts but still backing Hollywood’s push for more. Another was the urgency of the lifeline the legislation would bring to the behind-the-scenes workers that make up the majority of Hollywood. “We can’t wait until January 2026,” he told the group. “We need it now.”
Jenkins agreed that the help can’t come soon enough. “The door is closing,” she told the group.
Nolan nodded to the move of Star Wars projects from Manhattan Beach Studios, the former home of The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett, to the U.K. amid an increasingly tit-for-tat battle to host Hollywood. With Ahsoka‘s relocation, Lucasfilm no longer has any productions slated to film in Los Angeles. (Lucasfilm declined comment.) “All the infrastructure in L.A. is going to shrivel up and die” if something isn’t done soon, he said.
In addition to the budget, on Wednesday legislators’ attention was captured by the ongoing battle between California and the federal government over ICE raids in L.A and the deployment of the National Guard. When the group touched down on O Street, Western executive director of the powerful directors’ union Rebecca Rhine was on hand to advise on the sensitivities of that context.
The film and television tax credit may seem slightly insubstantial when compared with the state of the world right now, Rhine advised in a session largely focused on messaging. But she argued a stronger film business means a stronger California, due to its economic and tourism benefits, fortifying the state for any future battles to come. “It gives lie to the myth that California is burning and about to fall into ocean,” she said.
By passing the trailer bill, changes to California’s film and TV tax incentive program could go into effect as early as next month — in time for the next application window.
Nolan told the group that he was under pressure to decide the location for the third season of Fallout. “There are jobs in jeopardy right now,” he said. “The second it becomes clear that the rebate doubles in size, you’ll see producers line up to get back in here. But six months could be decisive.”
State Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who quarterbacked the industry’s bill in the Assembly, stopped by later. Since 2022, Zbur has represented a stretch of L.A. from Griffith Park to Santa Monica. He was greeted like a conquering hero by Budnick, who noted it was “very unlike a politician” to bring so may co-authors onto a bill, as Zbur did, in a bid to bring others into the tent.
Budnick encouraged Graham Taylor, the co-president of production and distribution firm Fifth Season, to tell Zbur about a dilemma he was facing. Taylor said Fifth Season was working with Ang Lee on the story of 1870s California as seen through the eyes of a Chinese immigrant family. Lee wants to shoot the film in California; but shooting it in New Mexico would be “many, many, many millions of dollars” cheaper. (THR has reached out to Lee for comment.)
Even if the proposed program expansion is greenlit, it will be up to certain filmmakers and producers — people with some degree of leverage — to push back on studios that aim to shoot in the most cost-effective regions possible. In those instances, sacrifices will have to be made. This could be mean smaller-scale productions or cheaper sets.
The trip’s attendees appeared to be taking that responsibility to heart. “It’s incumbent on the people who really have the power,” Jefferson said. “It’s all of our parts to make sure that, if and when they give us this support, we in turn are reactive and make sure we’re pressing the folks that are pushing production out of California.”
This period of fiscal austerity and penny-pinching has fueled creative workarounds. Some execs have been experimenting with shortening days to save on costs, even if it calls for adding a few more workdays. One example: filming for 10 to 12 hours instead of for 16, which requires much more overtime pay. And by adding a sixth shooting day to the week, productions can take advantage of expenses that are paid per week of month, like stages, trucks and lighting grip packages.
But by Jenkins’ thinking, moves around the margins won’t make a difference in getting big-budget studio movies to shoot in California. Not when they can film in the U.K., Australia and Canada, among other places that shower productions with generous subsidies in bids to boost their local economies with Hollywood dollars.
“This isn’t going to work for tentpoles yet,” she said. “My next movie is tentpole-sized, and there’s no there’s no way I’m going to win. The gap is too big.”
There’s truth to the sentiment. The legislation is mostly targeted at swaying TV shows, long an anchor of production in California, to shoot in the state. Some industry folks have grumbled that changes to the program only allow large-scale competition shows, excluding other reality productions, documentary programming and game or talk shows, to qualify.
But California’s film and TV incentive program has always been narrowly targeted at jobs creation. And unscripted productions “don’t create enough jobs,” Zbur told THR in an interview. “That was the issue.”
California Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur quarterbacked the industry’s bill in the Assembly.
Rich Polk / Getty Images.
Before Wednesday, the campaign to super-size California’s film and television tax incentive had been relatively star-free, and deliberately so — organizers were keen to paint the proposed legislation as a jobs measure for middle-class workers, rather than a corporate giveaway to moneyed special interests, as some critics have portrayed it. Instead of Ben Affleck or Rob Lowe, legislators were treated to unionized assistant directors, editors and location managers.
But in these final days of the push, Budnick called the A-listers an “important element.” A key turning point in the campaign was a legislator visit earlier this year to the set of Nolan’s Fallout, he argued, that demonstrated the diversity and scale of employment on shoots. At least one legislator had told him that their daughter had a Wonder Woman poster in her room — they would get a kick out of meeting the film’s director.
For Jenkins herself, the fight to bring production back is intensely personal. On a walk to the elevator between meetings, she described shooting just three weeks of her 30-year career as a director in the state where she lives, on TNT’s 2019 limited series I Am the Night. That situation put pressure on her as the mother of a now-teenager — each time she worked a job, she says, she wondered whether to take her son away from home or to leave him behind.
Now, she says, she’s thinking of moving to New York. “I could shoot in New York. I could raise my family in New York. I can’t do it here,” she says.
No one on the trip seemed to have any illusions that the proposed legislation would be a panacea to California’s production crisis. The proposed changes would simply make California competitive again with states like New York and Georgia; they wouldn’t spark a production renaissance comparable to the heady pre-pandemic days of an industry that no longer exists in the same form.
And as speakers throughout the day reminded the SoCal visitors, it’s a small miracle that so many politicians — particularly representing areas without much Hollywood presence at all — have come around to supporting their push.
That didn’t stop some attendees from imagining a sequel at a time when perhaps the state wouldn’t be as budget-crunched or anxious about the Trump administration. Said Budnick, “We’re going to be back in a year or two to ask for more money.”
This story appeared in the June 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
