Entertainment
How Hollywood’s production crisis became a key issue in the L.A. mayor’s race
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who serves the 4th District, makes her way across an empty, unnamed backlot, presenting her case to be the city’s next mayor.
“Studio lots like this one used to be filled with people, costumers, electricians, set medics, caterers, thousands of Angelenos making a living,” she says in the video posted on social media. “Now these lots are quiet. Since 2018, shooting days in the city have fallen by half.”
After telling voters this issue is “personal” (her husband is a TV writer and producer), criticizing Mayor Karen Bass’ leadership on the matter and outlining her own plans, Raman proclaims, “I’m running for mayor to make sure Los Angeles stays the film and TV capital of the world.”
Placing the concerns of the entertainment industry at the center of the city’s mayoral race would have been unthinkable even in the last election cycle. But the production crisis, which has rocked Hollywood and pummeled its workforce, has reached a critical juncture. The state of L.A.’s signature industry is now a political flashpoint alongside affordability, crime and homelessness in the upcoming election.
A person films an interaction between mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt and another person on his cellphone during a “Community Meet and Greet” event out of a house for sale on Long Ridge Avenue in a residential neighborhood of Sherman Oaks on Saturday.
(Etienne Laurent/For The Times)
In campaign ads, interviews and the recent televised debate, the top three contenders: incumbent Mayor Bass, former reality TV villain Spencer Pratt and Raman, have made the ongoing production slump a pivotal topic, highlighting their plans to revitalize the industry while deploying the issue to undercut one another.
For decades, elected officials have not had to focus on the film and TV business, let alone turn it into a campaign issue. It was simply a given that local production would continue to play a dominant role in the city’s economy as it has for more than a century.
But the cumulative effects of consolidation, runaway production to tax-friendly states and countries and the end of the streaming boom has caused Los Angeles to lose billions in economic activity, shed some 57,000 jobs over the last four years and led to the closing of more than 80 film and television production service businesses across the city since 2022.
“For us, ‘save Hollywood’ is more than a slogan and more than headline. It is what needs to be done,” said Pamala Buzick Kim, one of the co-founders of Stay in LA, a grassroots campaign aimed at increasing film and television production in Los Angeles.
To be sure, the biggest driver of where studios and producers film are state and federal tax credits, over which the city has no control.
But Buzick Kim and others argue that “there is lots the mayor can do, hand-in-hand with the City Council.”
Mayor Karen Bass, center, walks with Avance Democratic Club President Nilza Serrano, to the right of Bass, during Avance’s politics and tacos event at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
For starters, say filmmakers and advocates, much can be done to tackle the city’s sclerotic bureaucracy, onerous regulations and a slow and costly permitting process that has pushed filmmakers to flee to friendlier and cheaper locales.
While steps have been put in place recently, including a pilot program offering reduced-cost filming permits for shoots that demonstrate a “low impact” to the surrounding community, many complain such steps have come too little and too late.
Scott Niner, president and owner of Dangling Carrot Creative, checks on woodwork being produced at his shop in North Hollywood.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“The industry is in collapse and people have been talking about fixing things for years, but all we get are incremental little changes,” said Ed Lippman, a location manager of 34 years who lives in Sherman Oaks and has worked on such shows as “ER” and “The X-Files” and movies including “Galaxy Quest.” “And if the city is not being business-friendly, the business will go elsewhere.”
Compounding the problem, the Los Angeles area has more than 100 jurisdictions, many of which have their own set of rules and regulations regarding filming.
“There needs to be universal standards,” said Travis Beck, a location manager for commercials, small films and music videos. “Burbank is different from Glendale, which is different from Pasadena.”
The recent kerfuffle over filming “Baywatch,” the lifeguard reboot at Venice Beach, underscored both the efforts to bring production back to L.A. — enticed by a $21-million tax credit — and the complex, baffling red tape required to film here.
When shooting began in March, the production encountered a number of hiccups, including that it needed nearly double the parking space it had received a permit for, which was not part of the original approvals.
An anonymous crew member claimed on Facebook that government restrictions had forced production to relocate from Venice Beach. Production staff denied they had relocated. However, the incident prompted a backlash, becoming a rallying cry over L.A.’s burdensome filming bureaucracy.
The “Baywatch” team quickly met with city and county officials and resolved the issue, securing an agreement for a 20% parking discount from the city, and the mayoral candidates used it as an opportunity to score political points.
Pratt slammed the city’s permitting problems.
“LA turned its back on Hollywood — now the golden goose needs CPR,” he wrote on his Substack.
Bass highlighted her administration’s leadership on the matter.
“The City of Los Angeles will always clear bureaucratic barriers, making it easier and more affordable to film in the entertainment capital of the world,” she wrote on X last month.
On April 21, the mayor unveiled programs to offer productions 20% discounts on city-owned parking lots and other equipment, reduced filming fees at places like the Griffith Observatory and reopened the Central Library for filming. Last August, she appointed Steve Kang, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, as the city’s film liaison.
Raman has pledged her support for expanding the state’s $750-million tax incentive program, streamlining permitting and lowering fees and eliminating those for small productions. She has also said she will establish a dedicated city film office with a liaison who understands production.
Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman speaks to a crowd at the “Families for Nithya” event at Vineyard Recreation Center in Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
“Los Angeles is losing Hollywood,” Raman said in a statement. “Not because productions want to leave, but because we’ve made it too hard for them to stay.”
On his Substack and various podcast interviews, Pratt has promised to slash location fees in half, speed up permit approvals, reduce on-set city staff for the majority of productions and waive all fees for shoots with budgets under $2 million.
All three candidates have attacked one another over their approach to Hollywood.
Pratt and Raman have said Bass moved too slowly to address spiraling production and retain film jobs, saying she enacted measures only recently as the mayoral race was heating up.
Speaking on the Monks & Merrill podcast, Pratt criticized Bass’ moves to cut costs to film at the Griffith Observatory, saying, “Who needs that shot right now with the homeless poop all around it?”
The incumbent mayor has defended her administration’s record with the entertainment industry.
Bass and Pratt have taken Raman to task, calling her out for what they say is her lack of advocacy during her time on the City Council.
“She feels very strongly about it. But never offered one motion on the industry, and when motions came up on the industry she either recused herself, or got up and walked out,” said Bass during a debate this month.
Citing a potential conflict of interest over her husband’s work in television, Raman refrained from voting on several motions related to Hollywood.
Many working in the industry would like to see full-throttled support coming from the mayor’s office that will get results. They note how New York City has successfully promoted itself as a leading film destination over the years. (Kang, the city’s chief film liaison, said the city is working on a similar marketing campaign to promote filming that will launch by early fall.)
“For all the talk about, ‘We need to support and bring back filming,’ if they just did basics like lowering the fees and simplifying the process … that would actually help people and get things produced,” said Chris Fuentes, 66, who worked for 30 years as a location manager until he retired last year.
“We’ve heard a lot of great things, but not all things are possible in the mayor’s remit,” said Buzick Kim, noting that tax incentives are a state and federal issue.
Still, she said, “the mayor must understand that Hollywood needs to be made a priority and to find and create inspired thinking to make things easier and cheaper.”
Kang agrees, but says there are limits to what the mayor can achieve.
“We definitely can do a lot to really open up the entertainment industry, but at the same time, we recognize the larger impact needs to come from Sacramento and Washington, D.C., because L.A. just does not have the resources to compete with other jurisdictions in providing millions of dollars in tax incentives,” he said.
For most working in the industry, they just want city leadership that will execute on more than just talking points.
“This is the birthplace of cinema,” Beck said. “It shouldn’t be so hard to film here.”
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, dir. Jerry Aronson (1993)
By Jonah Raskin
ALLEN GINSBERG performed his poetry in London, New York, Chicago, Prague and in other cities around the world, but his relationship with San Francisco stood out from all the others, not because he loved San Francisco more than any other place but rather because he wrote ‘Howl’ in San Francisco (and in Berkeley across the Bay).
Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco in 1956, ‘Howl’ made Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the bookshop and the city famous and, in some circles, infamous for avant-garde poetry that shouted obscenities, evoked jazz and condemned war, mind control and materialism.
So, it’s not surprising that on the centenary of Ginsberg’s birth on June 3rd, 1926, several of the city’s cultural landmark institutions went all out to celebrate. The events kicked off on May 11th at the Chapel in the Mission District where the Kronos Quartet performed ‘Howl’ and other poems.
Sponsored by City Lights, it featured headliners such as folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Digger co-founder Peter Coyote, Tongo Eisen-Martin, an ex-poet SF laureate, Dominique di Prima, daughter of Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima, and novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. Tickets sold for $45; registration was required.
The centenary fêtes ended a month later on June 6th at the Roxy Theater, also in the Mission, with a screening of Jerry Aronson’s documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. In between the first and the last events there were readings of Ginsberg’s work at the Counterculture Museum in the Haight-Asbbury – one of the birthplaces of hippiedom – and at Bird & Beckett, a bookstore in the Glen Park neighborhood that hosts weekly jazz and monthly poetry readings.
Pictured above: Jerry Cimino of the Counterculture Museum reads Ginsberg at a centenary event
Along with Jerry Cimino, Steve Helig and Brandon Loberg, I read from Ginsberg’s vast oeuvre. My selection was ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’, which was written in 1955 at the same time that the poet wrote ‘Howl’, but that was not published until the 1960s. That event was fun. There was even cake.
On a more serious evening, I attended the screening of Jerry Aronson’s doc The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, along with my brother Daniel and Gloria Alonzo, a Latina, a friend of the family and a long time Ginsberg fan. First released in 1993, Aronson updated his doc when Ginsberg died in 1997.
A DVD was released in 2007 with added interviews with Paul McCartney, Bono, Yoko Ono, Johnny Depp and Patti Smith. Almost everybody in the world of rock and the Beats has wanted to be seen and heard with the poet who defied the state in Cuba, Czechoslovakia and the USA and who was never awarded a major literary prize in the land of his birth.
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg shows why he was so popular with the folks pursued by the paparazzi, though that was not Aronson’s explicit intention. The documentary moves from Ginsberg’s birth in 1926 to his death seventy years later. Surprisingly, it does not explore the writing of ‘Howl’, the publication of ‘Howl’ or the trial of ‘Howl’ in 1957 when Ferlinghetti was found not guilty of obscenity.
Hey, as most savvy San Franciscans knew, it was the society at large that was obscene, not the poet and his poem. Perhaps Aronson felt that there had already been enough attention to the San Francisco chapters of the Allen Ginsberg story to add it to his account.
The film ends with Ginsberg’s demise, but its emotional and visual crescendo occurs in Chicago in 1968 where the police attacked peaceful protesters, and where Ginsberg chanted and aimed to avoid what he called ‘a bloodbath’. In hindsight, he was clearly prescient. The demonstrations led to the election of Richard Nixon and five more years of the war in Vietnam. Ginsberg was as radical as Percy Bysshe Shelley who called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Pictured above: Allen Ginsberg’s gravestone
Aronson includes black-and-white archival footage, plus interviews with singer Joan Baez, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, Merry Prankster Ken Kesey and others, as well as highlights from Ginsberg’s TV appearances with mild mannered Dick Cavett and firebrand William F. Buckley, who seems to have been charmed by the cheeky poet who called the host a ‘conservative’ and described himself as ‘a faggot’.
Aronson’s documentary shows the gay poet as fearless and as an extraordinarily able performer. Ferlinghetti once observed that after his early success with Howl and Other Poems and Kaddish, Ginsberg didn’t develop as a poet, but that he remained a versatile performer of his own work his whole life.
The Life and Times shows that’s so. The film includes emotionally moving clips of Ginsberg’s loving step-mother Edith, his poet/father Louis, and a cast of thousands – the usual suspects – who gathered with him in the streets of Prague, Chicago and elsewhere.
If you want an introduction to Allen Ginsberg, his work and the era that shaped him and that he in turn shaped, you can’t go wrong with Aronson’s well-put together, entertaining documentary. And if you want a journey down memory lane to refresh your own album of Ginsberg’s images this is also the place to go. There will probably not be this many loving celebrations of the life and work of the poet who wrote, in ‘America’, ‘go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’. Not for another 100 years.
Entertainment
How the ‘Masters of the Universe’ post-credits scenes introduce you-know-who and make the case for a sequel
This story includes spoilers for “Masters of the Universe.”
He-Man has made his way back to the big screen thanks to the power of Grayskull — and Hollywood’s love of nostalgia.
Now in theaters, “Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine as Eternia’s long-lost Prince Adam. Working a menial HR job after getting stranded on Earth as a child, Adam “(he/him)” dreams of reuniting with his Sword of Power in order to make his way back home.
Spoiler: He does (with a little help from his friends).
Helmed by “Bumblebee” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” director Travis Knight, the movie is “a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be,” according to a review by Times film critic Amy Nicholson.
Much like the first live-action film around the popular 1980s toyline, the new “Masters of the Universe” features a couple of post-credits scenes that tease what could come in the franchise’s future. But for now, fans will have to wait to learn whether a sequel is forthcoming.
Yes, Orko is in the He-Man movie
Fans of the He-Man franchise can rejoice because everyone’s favorite floating wizard (and court jester) does make an appearance after the main “Masters of the Universe” story ends. In a nod to the animated Filmation series in which the character originated, Orko appears in a brief stinger after the conclusion of the film in order to share what lessons audiences could learn from the story they just watched.
Has He-Man seen the last of Skeletor (Jared Leto)?
(Amazon MGM Studios / Prime)
The mid-credits scene introduces a familiar hero
The most significant of the bonus scenes comes in the middle of the credits. The scene opens with Prince Adam’s mother, Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), sharing a moment with Duncan (Idris Elba).
After the queen mentions she had given up hope for reuniting with “both of them,” Man-At-Arms replies “perhaps one day she’ll come back to us too.”
The scene then cuts to the “she” in question, wearing a red cape and holding a familiar sword.
“Force Captain… Adora?” calls out a voice.
“No, not anymore,” she replies.
Those familiar with the lore of the “Masters of the Universe” franchise will recognize that the mysterious woman is Adam’s long-lost twin sister, Adora. The most common backstory is that Adora was kidnapped by Hordak as an infant and raised on the planet Etheria as a member of his Evil Horde. She eventually learns the truth about her heritage and defects to fight for good.
The Sword of Protection gives her the power to transform into the hero She-Ra.
Is that the last post-credits scene?
Nope. The final stinger shown after the credits are done rolling involves Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) and Skeletor (Jared Leto). It appears He-Man has not seen the last of his nemesis — as long as a sequel is greenlit.
Movie Reviews
Supergirl Movie Critics Reviews Are On the Way — Here Are The Good – And Bad – Reactions DC Studios’ First Female-Led Film Is Expected To Bring
Supergirl reviews are almost ready to be released, as viewers wait for the results. Directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, Supergirl will be DC Studios’ second theatrical release after kicking the franchise off last summer with Superman. After that movie earned largely positive reviews from critics, the question is whether the DCU’s next big-screen release can match that hype.
As revealed by @EmbargoLiftsFor on X, the review embargo for DC Studios’ Supergirl will lift on Wednesday, June 24. This comes only two days before Milly Alcock’s solo movie for Kara Zor-El is released in theaters worldwide on Friday, June 26.
The review embargo being lifted only two days before the movie’s release could be seen as a concern, as this usually happens when studios lack confidence in a movie’s success. Reportedly budgeting over $200 million, Supergirl has work to do to become a financial success for Warner Bros., even with plenty to look forward to in the titular character’s first big-screen appearance in well over 40 years.
Ahead is what fans can potentially expect from those reviews, based on what has been reported in rumors and from test screenings for Supergirl.
Early Teases for Supergirl Critic Reviews & Reactions
Milly Alcock Shines as Supergirl
According to @Cryptic4kQual, after test screenings, Milly Alcock was “praised for her acting in the role” as the film’s leading star. This should help motivate fans to head to theaters to see Alcock as Kara Zor-El.
This film will give Alcock her second appearance in the DCU, following a short cameo at the end of 2025’s Superman, in which she arrived at the Fortress of Solitude to retrieve Krypto. Now, she will get her own adventure away from the Man of Steel, giving Alcock the chance to fully flesh out the role.
Jason Momoa Is Fun as Lobo
Following a long run in the former DCEU as Aquaman, Jason Momoa will join James Gunn’s DCU as Lobo, which he has described as his dream comic book role. While reports have gone back and forth about how big his role in the movie is, he appears to be a highlight.
As reported by @AxelTalksFilm, “Lobo has a substantial role in the film, and is crucial to the ending.” Other reports suggest he’s in 10-20% of the movie, but the time he spends on screen is sure to be memorable.
Shaky Visuals
One of the most notable critical talking points for any movie, especially modern superhero movies, is the visuals and VFX. For Supergirl, early rumors hint that this may not be the most positive talking point for the DCU’s second theatrical release.
Reported by BobaTalks on YouTube, the movie does not seem to use many of the exciting psychedelic visuals fans know from the Woman of Tomorrow source comic, even with unfinished VFX. While this could be adjusted before the film is released, it is certainly a point of concern from a visual perspective.
A Mixed Villain
After Lex Luthor served as the main villain in Superman, Supergirl will move on to another classic comic book villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. While he is the same antagonist used in the original comic the movie is based on, the results of his inclusion are mixed.
@Cryptic4KQual called Krem “underwhelming” as a villain, while @AxelTalksFilm noted that he was “described as extremely ‘menacing’ and a tremendous villian.” Additionally, BobaTalks reported that Krem was “underdeveloped” and looked similar to the rest of his goons, sparking concern that he was fairly generic.
Balanced Tone
One major lingering question about the DCU is its tone, especially with new movies like Clayface introducing horror elements. With Supergirl set to come before that movie and after Superman, its tone will be another major talking point upon its release.
Reported by @AxeTalksFilm, the “cinematography is an upgrade” to what fans saw in Superman, including one specific scene in a hallway that can be compared “to the action sequences of those in Daredevil and Guardians 3.” Additionally, it is much “darker and [more] serious in tone” than Superman, suggesting a more grounded story behind Milly Alcock’s heroine.
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