LOS ANGELES — The city may stop charging small film crews to shoot on its own streets, at least for a while.
A proposal before the City Council would waive municipal film-permit fees for small productions — those with crews under fifteen and budgets below a set threshold — for an eighteen-month trial. Supporters pitch it as a modest, cheap attempt to slow a problem the paper has documented at length: the steady departure of below-the-line film work from Los Angeles.
As this paper reported in the spring, thousands of the region’s grips, gaffers, mixers and drivers have followed productions to Georgia, New Mexico and elsewhere, chasing tax credits and steady calls the city has struggled to match. The permit waiver would not touch the tax-credit gap. It aims at something smaller: the friction that pushes a modest shoot — a music video, a web series, a student thesis grown up — out of town over a few hundred dollars in fees.
“The big shows leave for the credits, and that’s a Sacramento problem,” said the measure’s author, Councilmember Alicia Rendón. “But the small stuff leaves for reasons the city actually controls. When it costs a two-person documentary the same in paperwork to shoot on Ivar as it costs a studio, we’ve made a choice, and it’s the wrong one.”
For the productions in question, the sums are not abstract. A first-time director, Malik Torres, said permit and monitoring fees for a three-day short near Poinsettia Park had come to more than his camera rental. “I paid it, and then I priced out the same shoot in a town two states over where they’d have paid me to come,” he said. “I stayed because my crew is here. Not everyone does.”
Location managers, who spend their working lives negotiating with the permit office, were cautiously in favor. “A waived fee won’t bring a series back from Atlanta,” said Priya Sundaram, who has managed locations in Hollywood for two decades. “But it might keep the little productions here — the ones that become the big ones in five years, if they don’t move away first.”
The city’s film office, which relies on permit revenue to fund its own operations, asked the council to identify a replacement for the money before waiving the fees. A staff estimate put the forgone revenue in the low millions over the trial. Skeptics on the council questioned whether the fees ever drove productions away, or whether the waiver simply subsidizes shoots that would have happened regardless.
Rendón’s answer was that the city could afford to find out. The measure is set for a committee vote in July, with a full council vote possible before the fall recess.