We had a booming, absolutely thriving industry for nearly two decades. People moved from LA to be here. We built hundreds of studios and sound stages. Now they're sitting empty.
Everyone is going to Serbia now. IATSE folks are having to leave the industry entirely.
Here's a quote for you:
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“Labour unions contend that between 35 and 50 percent of feature films turned out by American producers are made abroad,” the New York Times reported on October 4 1959 as the volume of what were then called “runaway productions” began to soar.
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Notice the year.
Hollywood has been running away from California for over 70 years. Your obsession with Serbia completely ignores that all of Europe is used for movie and TV productions, and Serbia is just the latest addition: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
And stop repeating the Serbia line in every comment. You've done it multiple times. What productions are in Serbia? How many out of how many?
Did you lose your job to one in Serbia and now it's sour grapes all along?
In general, all of Europe is bursting at the seams with movie and TV productions, many of them American: https://issuu.com/thelatesteditionishereandfreetoview/docs/c...
If american producers wanted to produce in america, they always could. They never had to move. It would just be more expensive. It will still be more expensive even after tariffs. Tariffs don't make labor cheaper. Cheaper choice will just not exist for americans.
Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.
There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.
But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.
To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.
Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.
The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
