Once Upon a Soundstage The Golden State keeps building facilities in a bid to keep productions local
Producer William Selig and director Francis Boggs came west from Chicago in 1909 to establish the first Los Angeles-based movie studio in a neighborhood that is today known as Echo Park. By 1916, 60% of the films made in the U.S. were shot in Los Angeles. More than a century later, the city and, by extension, the state of California remain at the top of the country’s film and TV production heap. According to a February 2023 report by California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, the state boasts roughly 125,000 industry jobs, more than twice as many as its closest domestic competitor, New York.
A big part of California’s allure then and now is its warm weather, wealth of natural light (an average of 284 sunny days a year), and, perhaps most of all, diverse topography, which encompasses mountains, deserts, coastlines and flatlands.
“If there’s some specific thing you really need that you can’t shoot [in Los Angeles], you may be able to drive there in an hour or two,” says producer Steven J. Wolfe, whose credits include such California-shot features as the 2020 remake of “Valley Girl” and the upcoming comedy-thriller “The Prank.”
California’s abundance of attractive locations, its concentration of above the line talent and below the line crew, and a deep well of equipment vendors and other support services, all represent a savings of both cost and convenience. These savings, which offer a base tax credit of 20% for features and 25% for independent films and relocating TV series, may not show up on a spreadsheet when comparing the state’s production incentive to places like Georgia, where projects can easily qualify for a 30% refundable tax credit, but they are very real.
“We can get people to come and work on the show for a couple of days, because it’s not a big deal and they’re not being flown to the middle of nowhere,” says producer Jeanette Volturno, executive producer of director-star Chris Pine’s upcoming L.a.set neo noir “Poolman.”
In recent years, California has been the beneficiary of a worldwide soundstage construction boom triggered by the streaming wars and buttressed locally by the state’s 4% tax credit established in 2021 for productions shooting on new or renovated soundstages.
According to a report released by Filmla in February, the Greater Los Angeles area currently has 6.5 million square feet of certified soundstage space, with an additional
3.5 million square feet in various stages of planning and development.
One of the new soundstage projects is Echelon Studios, an ecosystem of production complexes spread across a 1.5-mile radius in Hollywood that encompasses everything from an $600 million redevelopment of the Television Center on Romaine Street, spanning roughly 6.4 acres, to a new facility at 1200 Cahuenga Blvd. that’s scheduled to break ground this month.
“I think the fact that we are located within Hollywood is key, especially with technology, the way things can get shot today without necessarily going on location as much,” says David Simon, founder of Bardas Investment Group, which is developing Echelon in partnership with Bain Capital Real Estate.
San Francisco is also looking to get into the soundstage game, either with a new purpose-built facility or retrofits of buildings like Hangar 2 and Hangar 3 (currently home to a padel and pickleball facility) on Treasure Island, which hosted many productions from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Although projects are typically drawn to the city by its iconic exteriors, which have been featured in films ranging from 1958’s “Vertigo” to 2021’s “The Matrix Resurrections,” it’s hoped that a more complete production infrastructure might help keep San Francisco-set shows from spending the bulk of their shooting days in Vancouver, Canada, as so many have in recent years, including Hulu’s “Woke” and the CW’S “Kung Fu.”
“There’s definitely a lot of interest and a lot of stakeholders that want to get this done,” says San Francisco Film Commission executive director Manijeh Fata of the potential soundstages. “We want to make sure that projects that are set here stay here.”
No matter how big the stakeholders, no soundstage project is a sure thing until the first tenant calls “action,” as evidenced by Tyler Perry’s recent announcement that he was putting his planned $800 million expansion of his Atlanta studio complex on hold. Perry credited the decision to disruptions wrought by recent advancements in AI technology, but a more logical explanation is the downturn in production caused by a retrenchment in streaming wars and the ongoing effects of Hollywood labor disputes.
Last year’s work stoppage lasted 192 days, from the beginning of the WGA strike in May to the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike in November. Many expected an immediate surge in production following their resscripted olution, but that was unrealistic, according to Filmla president Paul Audley.
“Typically, to start up a TV series takes four to six weeks and for a film it’s 10 to 12 weeks,” Audley says. Factoring in the downtime for the holidays immediately following the end of the strikes, “we sort of just passed that six-week point for television.”
According to a report by Prodpro, in the first quarter of this year, California-based production of scripted features with budgets of $10 million or more was down 15% year-over-year from 2023 and 39% from 2022. The news was even worse on the TV side, with only 37 productions shooting in the state in January 2024, compared to 56 in 2023 and 67 in 2022.
“At this point, we’re probably at about 60% of where we were last year this time, and last year this time was a little slow going into the strike,” says Dejon Ellis Jr., business manager for IATSE Local 88, which represents approximately 3,800 grips, craft service workers and set medics in the Los Angeles area.
Kevin Klowden, Milken Institute executive director of M1 finance, estimates the global economic impact of the strikes to be in the neighborhood of $7 billion. California was hit harder than virtually anywhere else because not only does it host a great number of film and TV productions, it’s also home to many cast and crew members who travel to other locales for shoots, as well as studio headquarters, talent and casting agencies, publicity firms, prop and costume houses and equipment vendors, not to mention the restaurants and caterers that serve them.
“Even if there’s a rush to do production, there’s a limit to how much money people can get back,” says Klowden, noting that many businesses were still recovering from the pandemic when the strikes hit. “So you wind up in a situation where the various service-oriented firms, even technology firms, all get nailed.”
There is some good news on the horizon for California’s film and TV community: on Jan. 1 next year, the updated version of the state’s production incentive goes into effect. Dubbed Program 4.0, it will extend the tax credit for an additional five years, through fiscal 2030-31, and, more important, make it transferable for the first time since its launch in 2009.
Says Colleen Bell, executive director of the California Film Commission: “This is a big one because you’ve got entities here that pay taxes in the state of California but didn’t have a high enough tax liability to utilize the program.”