Eric Garcetti campaigns to attract productions to California after competition from locations such as UK and New Zealand
The new mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has declared a state of "emergency" in Hollywood as film and television production continues to haemorrhage from its traditional home.
Garcetti, who was elected in May, arrives in office during a period in which LA's pre-eminence in the entertainment industry has come under increasing pressure from other US cities and international locations such as the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, most of which offer more favourable subsidies than Hollywood. Many of the past year's most high-profile films were not shot in California. Iron Man 3 filmed mostly in North Carolina, The Great Gatsby visited director Baz Luhrmann's native Australia and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey travelled to New Zealand. Disney's forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII is due to shoot mainly on location in the UK.
Garcetti, whose campaign was backed and largely funded by members of the entertainment industry, told Variety he would introduce a Hollywood "tsar" to try and attract more film and TV to LA. "We are going to fight a lot of fights," he said. "I know we are not going to win every single one of them. But if we don't put a lot of strength toward winning a couple of battles in this war, we are just going to continue to be left behind on the battlefield."
California's current incentive programme is not available to films with a budget higher than $75m, which rules out most Hollywood blockbusters. A recent report by the California Film Commission suggests the loss of such productions has had the most damaging effect on the state's infrastructure. Nevertheless, Garcetti said he would consider whether LA would be better off chasing smaller films and TV series instead. "I want to look at how many jobs did we bring back here, how many jobs did we have and get ahead of the curve," he said. "We lost feature films. That's sad. They may come back to some degree, but probably by and large they won't."
He added: "We have to be smart about what we chase. Maybe it is not the $200m movie. Maybe it is the premium cable and the commercials. Maybe it is the videogaming as well as the smaller commercials."
While talk of LA's position as capital of the global entertainment industry being under threat stretches back as far as the 1960s, there has been a marked statistical decline in the past decade and a half. According to Variety's report, film and TV production jobs in LA County have fallen from 136,680 in 1997 to just under 115,953 in 2012, while the state's share of total production wages in the US fell nearly 10% between 2004 and 2011.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/27/la-mayor-state-emergency-film-tv
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