The ongoing existential issue facing Hollywood is the continuing production slump in Southern California, which has thrown thousands of people out of work and prompted a not small number of creatives to leave Hollywood entirely.
There have been a number of answers floated to solve the problem, most notably an increase in production incentives.
I have been going back-and-forth in email with an executive at one of the major streamers whose job it is to help oversee international production coordination and they agreed to let me share this portion of our conversation, which I think highlights some of the issues that don’t get enough press coverage:
“I love L.A. I live here and in an ideal world I wish we could do more production here. But there are a lot of factors at work, and production incentives are only part of the issue.
Generally speaking, shooting in California is more expensive than shooting anywhere else. It’s not just the labor costs, it’s the fact that every aspect of the shoot costs more. Production incentives help offset that, but often that’s not enough.
That’s why you are seeing big facilities being built or proposed elsewhere in the United States. But at the end of the day, that just offers up an incremental savings. It’s just inherently much cheaper to shoot outside the U.S. and even Canada.
The UK and to a certain extent Australia are cheaper because of things such as healthcare costs and a competitive production environment that can shave 10 percent or more off costs even before incentives.
But shooting in Europe provides a steep production discount. Along with lower production costs, countries such as Hungary and Serbia are building state-of-the-art facilities that cost substantially less than their American equivalents. And a growing number of countries have experienced, non-union crew who are good as anyone here. Or close enough that it doesn’t matter.
And it’s an underappreciated factor that many countries now require a certain percentage of streaming revenue to be spent locally. So shooting in France or Spain also provides a way to fulfill that requirement while being able to take advantage of the great settings.
I don’t know what the answer is for the future of Hollywood production. There is always going to be productions that want to shoot here. But I have a sinking suspicion things are not going to improve moving forward.”
The Hollywood Reporter & The Art Of Trying To Have It Both Ways
This newsletter is not perfect. And looking back on certain topics, I’ve gotten things wrong or missed aspects of a trend that I should have noticed. But I spend a lot of time every day doing my best to accurately capture what is going on in the world of the media.
I’ll argue there are a lot of reasons to support independent media outlets like mine. And one core reason is that I’ll be honest and tell you what I think. I’m not beholden to any studio, network or streamer. And longtime readers will tell you that willingness to burn bridges in search of the truth might not be the best career move.
But that is still better than writing a piece that tries to have it both ways. Whatabout-ism is frustrating to read. Especially if you spend more than 1,000 words laying out both sides of an issue only to conclude:
In light of all this, what can any of us, from the biggest executive or entertainer to the most common citizen, actually do? At risk of depressing you, nothing. But also everything. Not enact policies or lash out with punishment but just pay individual heed to the conditions as they exist now and make the decisions our own conscience tells us to make (a personal-responsibility calculus you’d think, incidentally, Republicans would prefer).
That quote comes from a long think piece from Steven Zeitchik in The Hollywood Reporter entitled What Democrats And Republicans Miss On Hollywood And The WHCD.
The piece is an impressive example of laying out every possible permutation of the question, while not offering an opinion or even the glimpse of an answer:
And yet to say that public figures have no reason to consider their words is to ignore both today’s realities and plain old common sense. Anyone with a platform can influence the culture — the platforms wouldn’t be so coveted if they weren’t.
So when leading Democratic candidates throw caution to the wind and throw around the term fascism, comparing Donald Trump to the men who caused genocide in Europe, it gets harder to say that only one side is upping the rhetoric. When a Saturday Night Live comic says, "I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean — what’s the worst that could happen?," as Michael Che recently did, it's totally reasonable to feel, "Yeah, he shouldn’t have said that" (and also, "Surely, there was a better joke about Trump going to the Kennedy Center?").
And if you’re a Democrat shrugging it off with, "Eh, it’s just a punchline," imagine your reaction to near-misses on Barack Obama's life sandwiched around Tucker Carlson saying the same thing.
Aside from the fact that Zeitchik accepts the conservative framing that calling someone a “fascist” is the same as calling someone a “Nazi” (it’s not), the piece seems to accept the idea that while no entertainer should lose their jobs over an uncomfortable joke, wouldn’t it be a better world if Hollywood just focused on happier topics? Which sounds a lot like the entertainment world we lived in during the height of the Red Scare.
It’s also not lost on me that for all of this back-and-forth blaming, Zeitchik doesn’t mention the Fox News late night talk show Gutfeld!, in which host Greg Gutfeld regularly wheels out “jokes” so harsh they would make Jimmy Fallon’s head explode.
But the chef’s kiss of the piece is that ends with this paragraph, which points to a THR story about “hopecore,” and how the industry’s optimism is “the vibe shift Hollywood needs”
In this regard, our media-entertainment industrial complex is actually leading the way, with Project Hail Mary and the Artemis coverage and the little hopecore movement currently blossoming. When it comes to media moments that bring the country together, a space mission has a much better track record than either a comedian’s joke or cancellation.
I can see the advertising campaign already: “THR brings you the good vibes of Hollywood".
Speaking Of The Hollywood Reporter
I was recently sent a survey asking me a bunch of questions about my readership. And see if you can pick out what category of content they didn’t ask about in this question:
What about reviews? THR has a group of television and movie reviewers and they don’t even rate a selection? This isn’t a positive sign.
Home Screen Placement Means More Than You Might Think
LG smart TV screenshot (Courtesy Marion Ranchett)
One of things that most streaming customers don’t think about is why certain services are highlighted on the main screens of whatever smart TV they happen to own. But as Marion Ranchett discusses in her essential newsletter Streaming Made Easy, home screen placement is an essential part of the business. So much so that many European companies have passed legislation to ensure local linear channels and streamers receive equal or preferential home screen treatment:
In the UK, the Media Act 2024 requires connected TV platforms to give public service broadcasters prominent, accessible placement within their interfaces and Ofcom has since published a code of practice to enforce it. PSBs submitted evidence during the process showing measurable drops in viewership when removed from visible app menu positions. Germany introduced a public value label to guarantee prominent placement for designated German services on CTV platforms, though implementation has been uneven and, as I covered previously, the result has been described as a public value corner rather than genuine integration. France created a General Interest Service status covering public broadcasters and commercial free-to-air players with a similar intent.
One interesting twist is that two truly global streamers - YouTube and Netflix - are pursing a very different home screen strategy:
Both Netflix and YouTube have invested heavily in a different kind of placement entirely. Netflix has for years required device makers to include (for free) a dedicated button in order to get access to its app. It demands the 1st app slot on every UI which turns opening Netflix into a reflex. Same for YouTube.
The consequence of that model is that neither platform needs to promote individual titles or invest in promotional assets for CTV home screens the way Prime Video or HBO Max do. Netflix routes discovery through its own algorithm, with research consistently suggesting that the vast majority of what people watch on the platform is found through Netflix’s own recommendation engine rather than through any external surface. YouTube operates on an even more habitual basis: viewers open it with intent to search or scroll, not because a specific video was promoted on a Samsung home screen. The content comes after the behavior, not before it.
Odds & Sods
As Vienna prepares to host next month’s Eurovision Song Contest, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is searching for complete recordings of the inaugural Contest, held in 1956 in Lugano, and the 1964 edition from Copenhagen.
Season four of Ted Lasso will premiere Wednesday, August 5th on Apple TV. Here is the brief official logline: “This season find Ted taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women’s football team. Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would."
The Media Built newsletter has a great piece on experiential experiences, and the business behind the events. It’s a really fascinating take with a good overview of how those events happen and why most of them won’t scale.
The young adult series Sterling Point will premiere Wednesday, August 5th on Prime Video.
The sci-fi thriller The Last House premieres Friday, August 7th on Netflix.
In the newsletter Next In Media, Mike Shields takes a look at the Dude Perfect business, ahead of the YouTube Brandcast event next month.
The CW Network and WWE announced Tuesday that all NXT Premium Live Events (PLEs) will now air exclusively on The CW. Beginning with The Great American Bash later this summer, The CW will broadcast 20 PLEs in their entirety live on both coasts over the next several years.
Bron Maher at A Media Operator has an interview with Amanda Rottier, CNN's SVP and head of growth. She told AMO her team was "very pleased with the results so far for the new paywall.” Although she didn't share any numbers or say what ratio of people subscribe to Basic versus All Access.
This piece by Kirstie Kimball about the loss of her beloved dog Whimsy is tough to read. But it is just a beautiful piece of writing.
Trump's CBS 60 Minutes Interview: What Aired and What Was Cut
In the past, I have taken a look at segments on 60 Minutes and compared the full transcript to what actually aired in the completed segment. I didn’t have time to do with last Sunday’s interview with President Donald Trump. But the newsletter Decoding Fox News took on the challenge and broke it all down for readers:
Trump: I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me. And not that I want to sue people because I don’t. But I bring lawsuits against the fake news and brought lawsuits against your network, and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election threatening. And you paid me a lot of money, and you tried to pull one off. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing that you did. And you know, when you say, can we all get along? You can. But when people do things like that, or how about the BBC where the BBC has me? Actually, AI, they had me saying a horrible statement and I said, I never said that. It turned out they gave me AI and little AI treatment where they have my lips speaking words of hate. Tremendous hate that I never said they don’t know what to do. They’ve admitted they’re wrong. They just don’t know what to do. They actually have me making a major statement. And it wasn’t me. It was my face. It was my lips. My lips were perfectly in sync with the words I said. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. So
O’Donnell: I hear you Mr. President.
Okay, I admit that it’s pretty ironic to read Donald Trump complaining about 60 Minutes not airing comments from an interview in a part of the interview that didn’t make the air. But after reading the entire thing, my takeaway is that many of the unaired segments seem to have not been included in an effort to get rid of some of the portions where Trump got sidetracked or began to ramble. Although to be fair, that’s a pretty common practice in most interviews you see on television or in print.
What’s Coming Tonight And Tomorrow
TUESDAY, APRIL 28TH:
My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders (Paramount+)
The Cult Of Natureboy (Hulu)
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29TH:
Envious (Netflix)
Je m'appelle Agneta (Netflix)
Shared Planet (Netflix)
Should I Marry A Murderer? (Netflix)
The House Of The Spirits Series Premiere (Prime Video)
Widow's Bay Series Premiere (Apple TV)