HOLLYWOOD — On a Tuesday in October when he would once have been rigging lights on a stage, Marcus Threadgill was home by ten, having finished a two-day commercial that was, he said, the most work he had been offered in a month.
Threadgill, a 47-year-old gaffer, is one of the below-the-line workers — the grips, gaffers, set decorators, drivers and dozens of other crafts whose names scroll after the film is over — who say the production slowdown that followed last year’s strikes has not lifted the way the trade papers keep predicting it will. The strikes are over. The work, for many crews, has not returned to match.
“Everybody said, get through the strike and it’ll come roaring back. It didn’t roar. It coughed,” Threadgill said. “I’ve got twenty-five years of credits and I’m chasing car commercials. Guys I came up with are already in Georgia.”
The reasons crews cite are familiar and stacked on one another. Studios that pulled back during the strikes have been slow to green-light. Streaming budgets have tightened. And the steady tug of out-of-state tax incentives — Georgia, New Mexico and others writing bigger checks to shoot within their borders — keeps pulling productions, and the jobs that travel with them, away from the city that trained the crews in the first place.
Union representatives say they are watching members transfer their cards to sister locals in other states, or split the year between here and wherever the work is. A business agent for one crafts local, Deborah Sarkisian, said the calls she fields have changed in tone. “It used to be, when’s the next job. Now it’s, should I move,” she said. “I don’t have a good answer, and they can hear that.”
Crew members and their advocates have pinned some hope on Sacramento, where there is talk of expanding California’s own film incentive to compete more aggressively with other states. Nothing has passed, and veterans are wary of counting on it. An incentive that keeps a production in California, several noted, does not guarantee that the production hires the fifty-year-old who has worked the same stages for decades rather than a cheaper crew somewhere else.
Not everyone is leaving, and the mood is not uniform. A younger camera assistant said she was staying put and betting the work would thicken by next year; an older set decorator said he had seen slow stretches before and lived through them. But the people who worry most tend to worry about the same thing — not this year’s gap, but what a few thin years do to a workforce built over generations. Apprentices who never get their reps. Rental houses that close when the calendar goes quiet. Knowledge that walks out the door with the people who hold it.
Threadgill said he had not decided anything. He had a mortgage, a kid in school, and a reluctance to leave a town he still considered his. He also had a cousin in Atlanta who kept telling him the stages there ran full. He was, he said, giving it until spring.