HOLLYWOOD — The rental truck double-parked on Gower Street on Wednesday belonged to Danny Reyes, a 44-year-old gaffer who has spent twenty years lighting other people’s stories and was now, for the first time, packing up his own.
Reyes is moving his family to a suburb of Atlanta, joining a quiet migration that has begun to worry even people who make their living cheerleading for Hollywood: the departure of the below-the-line workforce — the grips, gaffers, set decorators, costumers and drivers whose names roll past long after the stars’ — to states writing bigger checks to film there.
“I love this town. I got married here, I buried my dad here,” Reyes said, wedging a road case against the wheel well. “But I worked forty days last year. Forty. My whole crew is in Georgia half the time anyway. At some point loyalty is just a word you use to explain why you’re broke.”
The pressures are not new, but veterans describe them compounding. A long production slump, the aftershocks of the recent strikes, and the steady pull of out-of-state tax incentives have thinned the calendar for crews who once counted on Hollywood keeping them booked. California expanded its own incentive program last year, and industry groups credit it with holding some projects in place. Crew members say the relief has been real but uneven, arriving in fits and landing on some departments and not others.
“The incentive keeps the show in California. It doesn’t guarantee the show hires the person who’s been here thirty years,” said Lorna Petitjean, a business agent for a crafts local who has watched members transfer their cards to sister locals in other states. “We’re not losing them to another industry. We’re losing them to another zip code that does the same job.”
Not everyone is leaving, and some who could will not. Set decorator Amaya Brooks, 51, has turned down two out-of-state jobs this year to stay near an aging mother in Glendale, a choice she frames without drama and without regret. “I’m choosing my mom over a per diem. That math isn’t hard,” she said. “The hard part is watching the guys I came up with drive off one by one, and knowing the crew that made this town good is getting spread across the whole country.”
What worries the veterans most is not this year’s gap but the one after it — the apprentices who never get the reps, the specialized shops that close when the work goes intermittent, the institutional memory that walks out the door in a rental truck. A skill base built over a century, they warn, does not survive on nostalgia.
Reyes cinched the last strap and climbed into the cab. He would drive out through the same intersections he had lit for other productions, past soundstages where his rigging might still be hanging. He was not, he said, closing the door on Hollywood. He was just going where the lights were on.