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How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
191–200 of 264 posts
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#192Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film. They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of…
Is this Pioneertown, CA?
Agua Dulce.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#193An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry. I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occa…
> He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day.…
> Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
"Probably" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#194A good question to ask is why did Hollywood, as a centralized thing, ever exist in the first place?
Cameras and equipment was expensive and not terribly mobile. Having a few studios and lots with the cameras and lights and rigs and so on gave you a huge advantage. From that a lot of the industry moved to an area, so it also had the network effect. People start getting lazy and want to commute to their latest project, so the whole #FilmInLA is compelling.
That's disappearing. Rapidly. The idea that one place is where movies are made is comically obsolete.
Talent is around the globe. Handheld cameras provide extraordinary quality and can work off the lighting of a candle.
And honestly, Los Angeles is a stunningly boring city. And if the movie is invariably some navel gazing about it by its residents (always, always featuring long shots of people on highways or driving around, because every LA film has to jerkoff about driving), why should a film be filmed there? I'd infinitely prefer London, Paris, Toronto, Miami, Vancouver, Berlin, NYC, Chicago, rural areas, Rome, and so on.
The world would be a better place if this sort of backwards, historic centralization was obliterated.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#195Nothing new. When I was in college down in LA I lived in a very small town founded by stunt people. Probably 80% of the people there were in the stunt business. Every few months they were off to another state or country for filming. Hollywood is just for the studio execs now, everyone else flies to whatever country offers the best tax breaks for them to film. They go to some pretty incredible lengths too, A friend of…
I used to have a number of Hollywood studio clients and worked at a studio-adjacent company for a bit.
It's all about the tax incentives.
Georgia started the race by offering very generous (at the time) tax credits to pull production away from LA and NYC. It worked for a while, and Disney filmed most of its blockbusters there for 15 years. But the talent was unwilling to move to Atlanta, so the actual cost savings weren't that great. This meant Georgia had a U-shaped movie distribution: very low-budget straight-to-streaming-back-catalog crap using entirely local cast and crew, or really big budget movies. Very few middle-tier movies shot in Georgia.
Then London decided to get in on the act, and offered a ridiculously generous film tax incentive that applies to almost all film costs, not just the "below the line" costs (those related to actual production expenses, like crew, equipment, etc). The only catch was that the studio had to publicly disclose the movie's budget, but the incentive was so generous that studios were willing to play along. LA survived the initial blow, until the dual writer and actor strikes drew attention to the UK's non-existent labor protections, but Georgia was destroyed by London's incentive because its tax incentive was the only reason for Hollywood to film there (and filming in Georgia is down over 80% from its peak).
So then California decided to make its film incentive competitive again, nearly matching London's film incentive. But the geniuses in the state legislature wanted to spread the love, so the most competitive credit is only available outside of LA. Epic Fail #1. Worse, there's a fixed and relatively low annual cap for the film tax incentive, so only a handful of productions qualify each year. Epic fail #2. As a result, productions that don't qualify for the CA film tax credit generally go to London (for the incentive) or Vancouver (because everything is cheaper there even without incentives).
P.S. I was part of the downturn-related layoffs, so I no longer work in film or anything film-adjacent anymore.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Ho…
A staggering amount of film and TV is shot in Canada.
If you watch Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" (shot in Vancouver) you can sometimes see the majestic Bronx Mountains in background shots.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hollywood accounting rules are regular accounting rules (GAAP). The only reason “Hollywood accounting” is a thing is because of a bunch of actors who didn’t know the difference between “gross” and “net” points got screwed over. Everyone involved still pays their taxes, but the special purpose vehicle used to organize the production is essentially a passthrough entity.
Movies like Forrest Gump, Return of the Jedi, Men in Black or Harry Potter 5 all managed to lose money, according to "GAAP". If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.
Those movies didn't lose money under GAAP. However, the specific legal entities that the talent made their profit deals with did not earn profits due to the way that revenues and expenses were allocated between the companies involved in making and distributing those films. For each of those films, at least one company was and is earning $$$, but the talent doesn't get to make a revenue sharing deal with those companies.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few days ago I visited the little picturesque town of Hope, British Columbia. While driving down the Main Street, I saw a dozen chainsaw carvings of wildlife. I thought, why does that one look like Rambo? Found out the first movie was filmed there in 1982. The movie took place in the fictional town of Hope, Washington. When the movie begins, you see Sylvester Stallone walking into town under the real “Welcome to Ho…
A staggering amount of film and TV is shot in Canada.
Living in Vancouver ruins a lot of tv shows. Chicago? Nope, Vancouver. New York? Nope, Vancouver. SF? Nope, Vancouver!
On the flip side, they use a lot of local place names and things, so it’s like a little in-joke when you notice them.
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding: 1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image 2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed. 3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the camera…
I swear I watched a 1930s hollywood film where a guy died inside the box they built to soundproof the camera.
It was Babylon (2022), which takes place in 1930s Hollywood
Re: How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume that what happens is if a movie is too profitable, other business expenses are shifted to the ledger to reduce the profits. This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity.
>This works because a movie is not a separate accounting entity. Each movie is set up as a separate legal business entity (LLC). That's the SPV (special purpose vehicle). https://www.google.com/search?q=each+hollywood+movie+is+a+se... There's also a separate LLC for the parent production company. The production company LLC can also send invoices to the individual movie LLC for services. People can get creative with p…
> whatever creative accounting they want to do still needs to ultimately satisfy IRS scrutiny if there's an audit.
Well, yes, but avoiding taxes is not the point of "Hollywood Accounting", rather avoiding paying actors.
The IRS can collect taxes from whichever business entity makes a profit, but, critically, actors cannot. They signed a deal with one entity, and are only payed a share of net profits if that one particular entity makes a profit.
Hollywood Accounting, then, is the process of shifting costs around so that the legal entity responsible for paying the actors never makes a profit.
The SPVs never own anything and never have any expertise in anything. So they have to pay the parent company for a wide range of services, from advertising and marketing to distribution to prop and equipment rental. That makes it easy to shift costs into the SPV as necessary.