Hollywood Work Was Already Drying Up. Then the Fires Hit.

The wildfires have given new urgency to discussions about how to revive one of Los Angeles’s defining, and dominant, industries: film and television production.

Even before the devastating wildfires, Hollywood was struggling.

Squeezed by studio cutbacks and competition from other states and countries, film and television production in the Los Angeles region had already fallen to a near-record low last year, imperiling the livelihoods of not just casts and crews but also the caterers, drivers and many others who depend on the entertainment industry. Some, seeing their work dry up, were leaving for other states that have lured productions with tax credits.

Then the fires swept through, dealing yet another blow to a region, and an industry, that had been buffeted in recent years by a pandemic and then strikes that halted production amid a rapidly changing entertainment landscape. The Southern California fires have given new urgency to efforts by state and local officials to keep Los Angeles a place where films and television shows are made, and not just greenlit by studio executives to be shot elsewhere.

At stake is the future of a defining industry that helps make Los Angeles a vibrant creative capital, employing tens of thousands of workers in a wide variety of fields — people like John W. Rutland, a cinematographer, and his wife, Marta Gené Camps, a television writer.

Just a week before the fires the couple had been looking over their mortgage documents. They wanted to reassure themselves that even though work had grown sparse, the equity in their three-bedroom home was on the rise. Then the Eaton fire rampaged through the eclectic art hamlet of Altadena, burning their pet chickens, destroying their home and leaving them with “a worthless strip of charred land,” as Rutland described it.

“Who knows when it’ll be safe to come build again?” asked Rutland, 44. “And if we want to build again?”