HOLLYWOOD — On a Tuesday in what should be the busy season, half the trucks at a grip-and-lighting rental yard off Santa Monica Boulevard were sitting exactly where they had been parked on Friday. Fully loaded, fueled, insured, and going nowhere.
“A truck that isn’t on a set is a truck that’s costing me money to stand still,” said the yard’s owner, Bernard Kliegl, who has rented lights, stands, cable and dolly track to Los Angeles productions for a little over thirty years. “I’ve been through slow patches. This one has lasted long enough that I’ve stopped calling it a patch.”
The production slowdown that emptied call sheets over the past year has worked its way down to businesses like his, the unglamorous middle of the industry that never appears on a poster. When shows shoot, they rent his gear and hire his drivers; when they don’t, his revenue does not taper so much as switch off. He has kept the lights on, he said, by taking work he once would have passed to someone else — commercials, a music video, a corporate shoot, a two-day student rental at a rate that barely covered the wear.
His crew has felt it directly. Where he once kept a full roster of drivers and yard hands, he has trimmed to a core few and cut everyone’s hours, holding on to the people he most wants back when the work returns.
“I’ve had guys who’ve loaded these trucks for fifteen years ask me, straight out, whether they should leave the state,” Kliegl said. “What am I supposed to tell them? I can’t promise September. I want to. I can’t.”
One of them, a driver named Teodora Vance, has stayed but taken a second job stocking a warehouse overnight to cover the gap.
“I’m not quitting the business,” she said. “I’m just not letting the business decide whether I make rent. Half the crews I knew are working out of Atlanta or nowhere. I’d rather push a pallet jack at 2 a.m. here than pack up my kids.”
Kliegl is skeptical of the optimism he hears at industry breakfasts, where people talk about a rebound as if it were a season that arrives on schedule. He watches bookings, not press releases, and his bookings for the fall are thin. He has held off selling any trucks, because a rental yard that sheds its fleet during a downturn has nothing to rent when the phone finally rings.
So he keeps the trucks fueled and the batteries charged, walks the yard most mornings, and answers every call, including the ones that turn out to be nothing. He said he had learned long ago that the work does not announce itself before it arrives. It just shows up one week, all at once, and expects the trucks to be ready.
Until then, he added, he would keep washing them. A clean truck at least looks like it is waiting for something.