HOLLYWOOD — The proposal is a few hundred miles away in Sacramento, but the people watching it most closely are the ones who load the trucks and rig the lights, and who have spent a slow year wondering when the calls will come back.
Lawmakers are debating an expansion of California’s film and television tax credit, the incentive the state offers productions to shoot within its borders rather than in Georgia, New Mexico or elsewhere. Proponents want to raise the money available and widen which projects qualify, arguing that the state has been outbid for too long by places writing bigger checks. For the crews who have watched work drift out of state, it is the first policy in a while that might touch their year.
They are not celebrating. Two years of a production slowdown have taught Hollywood’s below-the-line workforce to discount promises until the checks clear, and the tax-credit debate arrives wrapped in the same caveats as every other hopeful forecast.
“I’ve heard ‘help is coming from Sacramento’ about as many times as I’ve heard ‘it’ll pick up next quarter,’” said Reggie Halloran, a 51-year-old dolly grip who said his working weeks had roughly halved from a normal year. “I’ll believe it when a stage I know is dark lights back up. Until then it’s a press release.”
The skepticism has a specific root. A credit that keeps a production in California, several crew members noted, does not by itself guarantee that the production hires the veterans who have worked the same stages for decades, or that it shoots in Los Angeles rather than in a cheaper county with the same state incentive. The money can keep the work in-state without keeping it in-town.
A business agent for one crafts local, Nadia Voskuijlen, said members had been calling to ask whether the expansion would change their spring. Her honest answer, she said, was that it might change next year’s, if it passed, and if the productions it lured hired locally, and if the slump did not deepen in the meantime. “That’s a lot of ifs to hang a mortgage on,” she said.
Producers and studio representatives have generally welcomed a larger credit, framing it as the state finally competing for work it had been losing. Independent producers, in particular, said the incentive could tip marginal projects toward staying. But even supporters cautioned that a tax credit is a subsidy, not a mandate, and that it nudges decisions rather than dictating them.
The debate is expected to run through the spring as part of the state’s own budget wrangling, and nothing is settled. Crews have learned to watch the process without organizing their lives around it. Halloran said he had a commercial booked for the following week and a cousin in Atlanta who still called to say the stages there ran full, and that he was, as he had been for a while now, keeping both facts in mind at once.