HOLLYWOOD — The back half of the warehouse used to be a problem of space — too many stands, not enough aisle. On a recent afternoon it was a different kind of problem: rows of lighting fixtures, cable and grip stands sitting clean and idle, cataloged and waiting, in a bay the company is about to sublet to a furniture importer.

The rental house, which has outfitted film and television shoots from a low building along Hollywood’s film-services corridor for more than thirty years, is giving up roughly half its floor. Its owner has listed two of its five trucks for sale and cut the staff that loads and services gear from nine to four. The reason is the same one that has emptied crew rosters across the region: the work has not come back.

“You can measure the business by how many trucks are out on a Tuesday,” said Aaron Prewitt, 58, who took over the firm from the man who founded it and now spends his mornings deciding what to keep. “There were years I couldn’t find a truck to send you. Right now three of them are parked, and parked trucks don’t pay for themselves. So one of them goes.”

The equipment-rental trade sits a layer beneath the crews the slowdown has already thinned, and it moves on the same tide. When a production books stages and hires a gaffer, the gaffer calls houses like Prewitt’s for the lights, the stands, the cable and the expendables that fill a truck. Fewer productions means fewer calls, and the houses carry the cost of inventory that earns nothing while it waits — insurance, rent, the slow work of testing and repairing gear so it is ready the day a job finally lands.

Prewitt is careful not to sound as if he is closing. He is not, he said, and he bristled at the word. What he is doing is shrinking the company to a size the current volume can support, keeping the newest fixtures and the most-requested packages and letting go of the redundancy that a busy decade justified. The older tungsten units, the ones a modern production rarely asks for, are being sold by the pallet.

A gaffer who has rented from the house for twenty years, Celia Marchetti, 47, said the contraction worried her as much as her own thin schedule. “When these places sell down their inventory, it doesn’t come back overnight,” she said. “If the work returns next year and there’s no gear in town to service it, that’s its own problem. You can’t crew up a show out of an empty warehouse.”

Prewitt has heard the optimistic forecasts — that the slump is a cycle, that the stages will fill again, that the town has been counted out before. He is planning as though the recovery is real but slow, which is the only bet a small business can afford to make twice. He kept the four best loaders, he said, because when the trucks roll again he wants the people who know how to pack them. The furniture importer moves into the back bay next month.