Imperfect Paradise: President Trump says ‘Hollywood is dead.’ What’s being done to revive it?

Veteran journalist Dawn Chmielewski is our go-to guest here at LAist for all things on the business of Hollywood.

She's been covering the industry for more than 20 years and she joins us now.

Hey, Dawn.

Hey, Narita.

Oh, it's

so good to speak with you.

So as we mentioned, it's been more than a year now since California expanded its film and TV tax credit program.

Dawn, can you just tell us why is this such a big deal and what was the original goal here?

California is recognized.

They're in an existential moment.

The industry has been through a lot of turmoil.

There was a pandemic followed by a pair of Hollywood strikes in 2023, both of which had tremendous impact on jobs and production here in Hollywood.

Following the writers and actors' strike, production has not recovered.

And so California's politicians saw a need to intervene because production flight was accelerating.

It was going not only to other states, but to other countries.

And so this was a moment where the industry began to step forward and say, look, we need to do something to prevent the loss of this iconic industry.

And I want to back up just a little bit.

How does the program work?

The tax credits are actually based on a percentage of the expenditures that are made in state.

It allows producers to defray the costs that they spend mounting a production.

California actually is the only state that has this competitive element to its tax credit.

Other states are sort of first come, first served kind of thing.

But California has this formula that weighs how the tax incentives will correlate with the wages paid on the production as it assesses which productions to provide these incentives to.

So we recently spoke to a woman named Pam Ellier.

She and her husband own a prop house in North Hollywood.