Last summer, when the Hollywood writers’ strike had shut down film and television production, a crew of scenic painters at the legendary Fox Studio Lot took advantage of the lull to mess up New York City.

Work had recently been completed on a new set of façades meant to mimic Manhattan streets, but the result was too pretty and clean. Even the smooth gray concrete curbs looked suspiciously fresh.

“After the curbs were perfectly poured, we had a gentleman with a jackhammer come in here and chip away at them,” said Gary Ehrlich, president of studio operations. “It was slightly heartbreaking to see.”

Today, the curbs are suitably beaten up, with dings and black smears as if tires had been rubbing against them for decades. Fire escapes look corroded and other metal fixtures such as banisters have been coated to look old or rusty, while walls appear water-stained. A patina of age has settled over this faux city.

The painstaking besmirchment of New York Street was one more twist in the long saga of one of filmdom’s most famous outdoor sets. Looming near the front gate like an adult-sized playhouse, an earlier version of the set and now the new one have long served notice to visitors that they have arrived at a movie studio that is itself a leading character in Hollywood lore.

Its lineage is suitably rich in Hollywood flavor: In 1967 Fox was preparing to shoot the film version of “Hello, Dolly!,” a Tony-award winning musical set in 1890s New York City that ran for years on Broadway. The script included a spectacular outdoor parade with thousands of extras, and studio executives determined that it would be impossible to shoot on location in New York because the city had changed too much.

Fox production designer John DeCuir, who had already won Academy Awards for his design of “The King and I” and “Cleopatra,” came up with a streetscape that required more than 500 workers to labor for four months to build. The $2.25-million price tag made it the most costly movie set built to date, the UPI news service reported at the time.

It required more than 300,000 feet of board lumber and 22 miles of telephone wire strung between poles, the way it was in old New York. A painted 11-story office building façade obscured the view of the Century Plaza Hotel looming next to the lot, according to Barbra Archives, which chronicles the career of “Hello, Dolly!” star Barbra Streisand.

Barbra Streisand marches with a band in a scene from the 1969 romantic comedy “Hello, Dolly!” filmed on Fox’s New York set in Century City.

(John Springer Collection / Getty Images)

Dominating the street was a replica of an elevated train station and a steam locomotive acquired from a sugar plantation in Hawaii, where it had been used to transport workers.

On July 16, 1968, the Valley Times reported, “The parade stretching one-fifth of a mile and comprised of 675 persons in 16 units passed through a crowd of 3,108 film extras” in period costumes. Among the performers were the UCLA marching band and the Budweiser Clydesdales. The director was actor-dancer Gene Kelly.

As impressive as the set was, it was intended to be temporary, said Michael Whetstone, a production designer who worked on building the new version of New York Street.

“It was supposed to be torn down but wasn’t because it was too expensive” to remove, he said. At the time the studio was reeling from financial setbacks including a $30-million loss on “Hello, Dolly!,” according to the New York Times.

Maintenance and prop makers James Scobie, left, and Norm Greene, work on the façade of the new New York set at Fox Studios .

The set enjoyed a second, money-making act in the years that followed as Fox rented it out for use on pictures that included Warner Bros.’ comedy “Up the Sandbox,” starring Streisand, and MGM’s musical “New York, New York,” starring Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro. Among the television shows that used it were “Charlie’s Angels” and “Moonlighting,” while Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga and other musicians used it for music videos.

But a few years ago, with the set showing its age, the studio started considering its replacement, Ehrlich said. “It had been exposed to the elements for five decades and was past its useful life.”

Fox tapped Culver City architect Nathan Moore of House & Robertson Architects to design something sturdier.

Construction required 49 tons of rebar and more than 1,000 cubic feet of concrete. The set is held up by 260 tons of structural steel and backed inside with 4,400 square feet of catwalks. Lighting and other electrical functions are supported with 21,000 square feet of conduit and wire, allowing productions to hook up to house power instead of rolling in generators. The set also had to comply with building codes and be tracked by city building inspectors.

The new New York Street was made to look like the city in the mid 20th century, a decision that required detailed craftsmanship such as window heads and sills that would have been carved out of wood in years past but were instead fabricated out of plastic foam and finished with plaster. Windows were installed to be easily replaced so productions can break them when scenes call for it.

Whetstone oversaw the project and, as part of his research, made several trips to New York, spending long hours on foot trying to get a sense of how light plays on buildings at night.

“I was literally walking Lower Manhattan from 10 p.m. to 4 in the morning taking pictures,” he said.

Where the original “Hello, Dolly!” set was based on a commercial section of 1890s New York suitable for a parade, Fox elected to make the new set feel like a neighborhood from a later era.

“It’s more Lower Manhattan, more Bowery,” Whetstone said. “Definitely the Lower East Side.”

A film crew member waits to set up for a shoot at the new New York set.

While the set is “a default vision of New York City,” said Whetstone, it also is intended to stand in for any major city. Through the years, Fox’s New York Street has subbed for Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Pasadena.

Even though improving camera technology through the years has made it easier to shoot on location, there are reasons filmmakers keep shooting on studio lots, said Jason E. Squire, entertainment podcaster and professor emeritus at USC School of Cinematic Arts.

As filming equipment and cameras got lighter and more portable, the more free-flowing New Wave cinema that emerged in the late 1950s and ’60s employed provocative camerawork.

“This liberation led to people shooting off the studio lot,” Squire said. “Filmmakers wanted to get away from the studio.”

But it has remained expensive to shoot a large-scale production in the real world with all the vehicles, equipment and personnel required to be transported and managed on-site.

“One of the key decisions early in any production is whether to build sets on a lot or shoot in a real location,” Squire said. “That depends on how intricate the sequences are going to be, how intimate. It’s a judgment call and a money call, and the money usually wins.”

Shooting behind studio gates also prevents uncomfortable collisions between fantasy and reality.

“On the lot you don’t have interference from civilians,” Squire said. “You can control traffic, you can control lighting. All of the equipment is at your beck and call.”

Whetstone recalled having to flee location shooting in downtown L.A.’s Arts District when working on Season 1 of “New Girl,” a Fox television comedy starring Zooey Deschanel that premiered in 2011.

“We started out shooting in downtown Los Angeles, and by the end of our fifth night shoot we had angered so many of the neighbors around in the community that we ended up building downtown L.A. on the Fox lot,” Whetstone said.

Gary Ehrlich, president and general manager of studio operations at Fox Studio Lot, shows off the scaffolding for lighting inside one of the buildings in Fox’s new New York Street set.

The makeover of New York Street is in addition to a planned $1.5-billion upgrade of the Fox Studio Lot announced last year by Fox Corp. that is to include more soundstages and offices. Fox Corp. retained ownership of the lot when Walt Disney Co. bought most of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019.

The upgrades come as the real New York mounts an aggressive effort to lure TV and movie producers from L.A. by building new studios and soundstages.

On New York Street in Los Angeles, Fox also was able to transform the set behind the façades, adding 4,000 square feet of interior space that makes it easier to meld outdoor and indoor action. The studio declined to reveal exactly how much the new multimillion-dollar set cost, but Fox wants it to stand for another half-century at least.

“This project was approached not just as temp architecture but as something more permanent,” Whetstone said. “We want this to last a long time.”

California posted another month of anemic job growth in April, keeping the state’s unemployment rate the highest in the country, 5.3%, the government reported Friday.

Statewide, employers added a net of just 5,200 jobs in April, down from 18,200 in March, according to California’s Employment Development Department.

Nationwide, employers added 175,000 jobs in April and 315,000 in March. The U.S. unemployment rate in April was 3.9%.

Major sectors of California’s economy — including manufacturing, information and professional and business services — showed job losses last month, and job opportunities aren’t as plentiful as before, even as the number of unemployed workers in the state has risen by 164,000 over the last 12 months.

In California, there were 140 unemployed workers for every 100 job openings in March, according to federal statistics released Friday. Less than two years ago, there were about two openings for every jobless person.

Carol Jackson, an unemployed worker in South Los Angeles, says she has been pounding the pavement for months, hoping to make use of her recently minted associate degree in web management and database administration. But despite sending her resume to at least 100 employers, she has not had a single interview.

“I can tell you that California is pretty brutal now,” said Jackson, 57.

Hiring in California has been lagging behind national trends, with one notable exception. The state’s healthcare and social assistance sector added 10,100 jobs last month, bringing the gains over the last 12 months to about 155,000. That’s 75% of all new jobs added since April 2023.

Hospitals and doctors’ offices have been bulking up, but the fastest growth has been at outpatient centers, home healthcare firms, nursing facilities and, especially, social assistance, which includes vocational rehabilitation and child day-care services.

“Healthcare is the big gorilla in the room; it dominates everything,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast in Santa Barbara, adding that it’s likely to keep growing robustly with new and expanded medical facilities across the state.

Leisure and hospitality businesses added 3,100 jobs last month. The gains included employment at hotels and restaurants — despite the added stress employers are feeling from a minimum wage increase to $20 an hour for fast-food workers that went into effect April 1.

While there are fears of layoffs as the food industry adopts technology to replace workers, California’s restaurants are getting a lift from a pickup in tourism. The leisure sector overall is close to fully recovering from the deep losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public-sector payrolls also held up well last month, increasing by 2,600. Thus far, state and local government jobs seem to be showing little effects from California’s massive budget deficits.

“But clearly that will be another factor,” said Sung Won Sohn, economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Sohn and other economists worry that there are national, cyclical and state-specific threats to California’s employment and broader economic outlook.

Key pillars of the state’s economy continue to struggle.

Motion picture producers and other employers in the information sector show few signs of breaking out of the hiring doldrums, despite the film industry’s resolution of labor strikes last fall. Los Angeles’ motion picture and recording studio industries were down by 13,400 employees, or 12%, in April compared with the same month a year earlier. And many workers in the industry say conditions do not appear to be improving.

Large parts of the farm economy in the Central Valley remain sluggish, in part due to rising costs, tighter financial conditions and ongoing climate challenges.

Despite strong investments in artificial intelligence, layoffs have persisted at high-tech firms in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Scientific and technical companies shed jobs last month, and employment at computer systems design work and related services has been gradually declining.

Nationally, economists expect job growth to slow in the coming months, the result of persistently high interest rates and an expected pullback from consumers. The outlook is particularly dim in California.

“On the ground, there are several signs of even more slowdowns,” said Michael Bernick, an employment lawyer at Duane Morris in San Francisco and former director of the state’s EDD. Among them, he said, “small businesses continue to struggle statewide with higher prices and tightened consumer spending.”

He and other experts have a similar refrain about what ails the state: high costs, excessive regulation and unaffordable home prices, among other factors.

“We just have real challenges here in California that other states don’t face,” said Renee Ward, founder of Seniors4Hire.org, a Huntington Beach-based organization that helps older workers find employment.

She said the number of job seekers registered with her service has jumped 26% so far in 2024 from a year ago.

A New Mexico judge is weighing whether to dismiss involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin for his alleged role in the 2021 shooting death of the “Rust” movie cinematographer.

Baldwin’s attorneys argued during a court hearing Friday that special prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey had abused her power by allegedly withholding “significant evidence,” including witnesses favorable to Baldwin, during a January grand jury proceeding.

The 66-year-old actor‘s lawyers said he was a victim of an “overzealous prosecutor” who steered grand jury proceedings in an effort to win an indictment in the high-profile case. At issue is whether the grand jury had been fully advised that they could hear from Baldwin’s witnesses during the proceedings. The grand jurors spent a day and a half questioning witnesses who were introduced by the prosecutors.

“The fix was in,” Baldwin attorney Alex Spiro told the judge Friday.

The grand jury indicted Baldwin on an involuntary manslaughter charge in the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, the 42-year-old cinematographer, who was rehearsing a scene with Baldwin on Oct. 21, 2021. Baldwin has pleaded not guilty.

At the conclusion of Friday’s hearing, New Mexico First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said she would issue her ruling next week. Should she dismiss the case, it would mark the second time that the felony charges against Baldwin were dropped.

Marlowe Sommer’s decision is expected less than two months before Baldwin is scheduled to go on trial in a Santa Fe courtroom.

During the hearing, which was conducted virtually, Morrissey denied that she had acted in bad faith. She said she didn’t prevent jurors from getting answers to their questions or from seeking additional information. She told the judge that grand jurors had been given written instructions that outlined their ability to quiz other witnesses, including those favorable to the defense.

But because the jurors didn’t ask to hear from the witnesses who were on a list supplied by Baldwin’s lawyers, several key figures in the tragedy, including film director Joel Souza, property master Sarah Zachry and assistant director David Halls, were not called to testify. Instead, jurors heard from police officers, a crew member who was in the church and expert witnesses hired by prosecutors.

On the day of the shooting, Hutchins, Baldwin, Souza and about a dozen other crew members were gathered in an old wooden church at Bonanza Creek Ranch, south of Santa Fe, preparing for a scene. Hutchins, according to the actor, told him to pull his Colt .45 revolver from his holster and point it at the camera for an extreme close-up view. That’s when the gun went off.

Hutchins died from her wounds. Souza was injured and recovered.

Last month, Marlowe Sommer sentenced the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez, to 18 months in a New Mexico women’s prison for her role in the shooting. Morrissey argued that Gutierrez was criminally negligent by allegedly bringing the live ammunition to the movie production and unwittingly loading one of the lead bullets into Baldwin’s gun. Gutierrez denies bringing the ammunition on set.

Baldwin’s prosecution has long been fraught.

Morrissey and her law partner Jason J. Lewis joined the case last year after the first team of prosecutors was forced to step down due to missteps, including trying to charge Baldwin on a penalty enhancement that wasn’t in effect at the time of the tragedy.

“The government looked a little sophomoric and unprofessional when they charged him for a crime that wasn’t a crime at the time,” said Los Angeles litigator Tre Lovell, who is not involved in the “Rust” shooting matter. “That was embarrassing.”

The original prosecutors also displayed bluster in media interviews, making statements about the need to hold Baldwin responsible for his actions. Defense attorneys have argued that such commentary was out of line and prejudicial against the actor.

Shortly after Morrissey and Lewis joined the case, they dropped the charges against Baldwin. At the time, they said they needed more time to review evidence and address issues raised by Baldwin’s team. Morrissey and Lewis reserved the right to refile the charges.

Immediately after the charges were dropped, Baldwin traveled to Montana to finish the filming of “Rust.”

On Friday, Morrissey said last year’s decision to drop the charges was made at the request of Baldwin’s lead attorney, Luke Nikas, who had presented evidence that the gun Baldwin was using had been modified. Subsequent tests showed the gun was functional that day, but during FBI testing in 2022, the gun was broken by forensic analysts who wanted to see how much pressure needed to be applied for the hammer to drop.

The damaged gun is one of several complications that prosecutors are facing. Legal experts have said that winning a conviction in Baldwin’s case is expected to be more difficult than in the trial of Gutierrez, whose job was to make sure the weapons were safe.

Baldwin was handed the prop gun that day and was told that it was “cold,” meaning there was no ammunition inside. In reality, the chamber of the revolver contained six rounds — five so-called dummies and the lead bullet that killed Hutchins.

“The state has not even alleged that Baldwin had a subjective awareness of a substantial risk that the firearm held live ammunition,” Nikas argued in the motion to dismiss the charges. “Without a subjective awareness, he could not have committed the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which requires that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustifiable risk that his actions could cause another person’s death.”

Baldwin has argued, with support from Hollywood’s performers’ union SAG-AFTRA, that it wasn’t his job to be the gun safety officer on set.

The actor has said he was relying on other professionals to do their jobs to ensure a safe production.

Prosecutors have an obligation to present evidence in a “fair and impartial manner,” Baldwin’s attorneys said.

The judge grilled Morrissey on her thinking at the time, including an instance when she had interrupted a sheriff’s deputy and prevented her from answering a question about gun safety measures on set. Morrissey said that deputy was not an expert in film set protocols and that she instead wanted jurors to get “the most accurate information,” which would come from a veteran film crew member who was an expert witness.

Baldwin’s attorneys were also sharply critical of Morrissey for divulging during a media interview the date the grand jury was expected to meet. Morrissey said she took responsibility for providing to a reporter the initial date, which had been scheduled for mid-November. However, the matter was postponed, and the case wasn’t brought before the grand jury until two months later, in mid-January.

Lovell, the L.A. entertainment attorney, said he believes the case will go to trial and that efforts to throw out the indictment will be unsuccessful.

“Courts are really reluctant to dismiss cases brought by a grand jury,” Lovell said. “Courts have limited ability to review what goes to a grand jury unless it was provided in bad faith.”