"Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbled pyramids" with Laura Friedman & Ron Falzone | The Movie Racket

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Now we're voyaging.

The star is born tonight.

And with it comes a growing Hollywood.

Hello you, this is the movie racket.

I'm the host, Michael Phillips, and you're the listener, your name here.

This is program number 11 in our inaugural season in which we pull apart an unofficial law, model, guideline, prediction,

or secret to movie making success.

Newton had his laws of motion.

These are our laws of motion pictures.

This week's movie law decrees that Hollywood is dead, or at least dying.

Producer David O'Selznick decreed it so 75 years ago when he said this.

Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back.

It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows, the last studio prop across the sands.

Now this comes second hand like so much Hollywood lore from someone else's book in Ben Hecht's 1954 autobiography, A Child of the Century.

Hecht recounted the day he and Selznick were walking past an eerily quiet studio sound stage.

Selznick stopped, looked at it for a while, and listened, and what he heard was nothing, not the sound of movies being made, and certainly not the sound of money being made.

Now, Hollywood's death has been predicted since the silent era, and especially since the Great Depression, but today the panic is more insidious and pervasive.

Sound stages are often empty, crews are out of work, not just in Hollywood, but in recently bustling filmmaking centers outside Hollywood like Atlanta, Georgia, New Orleans, and in Chicago.

Now since we recorded this show, the corporate consolidation of Hollywood everyone feared has taken another massive step forward.

Paramount and Warner Brothers have officially finalized their 111 billion dollar merger into a thing called Skydance.

Two guests join us to make sense of this moment.

First, Representative Laura Friedman, the Democratic Congresswoman from California, represents the geographical epicenter of Hollywood filmmaking.

Last month, Friedman, some Democratic colleagues and an array of Republican representatives introduced a bill proposing a national film and TV production tax credit similar to federal incentives in dozens of other countries, especially the nearby Canada.

It's truly a freak of nature, a bipartisan effort with support in the House and the Senate, and a strong show of pre-approval from President Donald Trump.

I actually met Friedman back in the late 1990s when we were both friends of LA film and music writer Eric Linbaum.

He had a roving monthly movie club followed by drinks at some dive or another, and this was long before Friedman was US Representative Laura Friedman, and also before Friedman's years spent in the 1990s inside the movie industry.

We'll also get some historical perspective about Hollywood's century-old cycle of persistent existential threat from Chicago Film Professor, Screenwriter, and historian Ron Falzone.

But first, we'll start with US Congresswoman Friedman.

Let's go!

Well, Congresswoman Laura Friedman, thank you very much for jumping on the movie record, our first Congresswoman.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It's always nice to be the trailblazer.

Good, good. And now for folks who don't live in your district, your district includes Glendale and Burbank and...

Hollywood, Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, West Hollywood. So, in terms of the industry, my district also is the home to Paramount, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Company, DreamWorks, Netflix, Nickelodeon, Universal.

Wow. Okay, so first of all, thank you for this bipartisan freak of nature that you've put together. I mean, in these days, to see language unapologetically used, it's a simple descriptor like bipartisan when we haven't heard much of that.

It's great. Even if I weren't into film, you have to notice that. Do you know what I mean? Am I the only one who's had this reaction about just to see what seems to be a completely sincere, across the aisle, bid to keep movie making in this country more viable?

You know, I'll tell you who's been the most happy about this thing of bipartisan effort and the road to housing, which was another significant package that passed out of Congress this year being bipartisan.

The ones who seem to be the happiest about that are members of Congress. I will tell you that there is a huge desire amongst many members, not all, but many to bridge some of these divides to stop the partisan bickering a bit and to

have times when we can show that we can work together and that the country is not as divided as people would want to think. So it seems to me that my colleagues take and I take a lot of joy in the fact that we are working on an issue that's important to so much of America in a bipartisan way.

Now, one thing, Laura, for folks who are brand new to this issue, they've heard about, you know, like keep movies in this country. They've heard maybe that much, let's say, for some folks. For those folks, what does the most picture television and entertainment revitalization act do in just in terms of the basic numbers, who's it helping in addition to all the sort of below the line folks you just mentioned?

Right. So this to be clear, major motion pictures are produced by film studios and right now, I talk just to give you an example, I spoke to one major film studio, they're only shooting about 5% of their film productions in the United States. Think about that. They are shooting 95% of Hollywood movies in Budapest, in the UK, in Canada, in anywhere but the United States. And that's because those nations are offering tax incentives for production.

So locate there. So why are they doing that? Most of these films have an average budget of $100 million. That's $100 million in economic output that goes directly into jobs into communities into small businesses and locales into the economy of a region.

And that's very important to these countries. They see the importance of that to their communities to good paying aspirational jobs that run across a variety of skill sets, including people who don't even have a college degree.

These are jobs that provide a good living. Many of these jobs are union. And that's what we have lost. We are the only major film producing nation that does not offer a tax credit. And to put that in context, we offer tax credit as a nation.

To many industries that we think are important, we give tax credits to people who manufacture semiconductor chips to people that make oil and gas to pharmaceutical companies when they develop new drugs. But we don't do it for the industry that provides one of our very largest exports. That's the entertainment industry. And so we have lost that industry. We've allowed it to go overseas. And that means that my neighbors, my friends aren't working as much as they used to. That they used to wait a couple years between production and production.

And now those productions just aren't here at all. So in many cases, in some cases, they're offered the chance to go overseas on these shoots. But more and more, we've trained crews overseas. And so those crews aren't even leaving the country. They're just not getting the opportunities anymore.

So this bill would level the playing field and offer a national film tax credit so that we are competing on an equal footing with all these other countries.

Think about a future where the US isn't producing film content anymore, where we're not telling the stories about what our country is or what our values are to people around the world. I would say we've lost certainly a huge industry that provides a lot of money to this country.

But we've also lost the soft power that's enabled us for almost a hundred years to tell the world what America is, what our values are to tell immigrants what it's like. And the reason why so many people chose to come here fleeing oppression or coming here to have a better life for their children was because they saw the United States through the eyes of a film lens. And that's the future that they wanted for themselves and their families. And we are losing our ability to do that.

Laura, there's no other politician I could talk to about this, especially anybody got over this bill because of your film background. And in fact, you're certainly the only one who's produced two not one, a two Steve Gutenberg movies back in the 90s. Right.

It's true.

But nobody has any kind of perspective like you would have on this. The death truly the demise of Hollywood has been predicted since the silent film years from some external and legitimate perceived threat.

And the quote we're going to kind of hinge this episode on is from David O'Cell's Nick, the producer who in 1951 was walking across a studio lot past some unused stages with Ben Hecht.

The screenwriter and according to Hecht in his autobiography, Selenick said Hollywood's like Egypt full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling till finally the wind blows the last studio profit across the sand. Okay. So that is such a dramatic quote. I love it so much.

It is so cinematic in and of itself. There's been a lot of demises that were overblown. Look, people love to be entertained. And if you provide quality entertainment, they will come. And Hollywood has reinvented itself several times and streaming certainly as a threat, but also a savior in some ways. And now we see big budget spectacle films making a big comeback. Right. With Barbie and Oppenheimer.

And the Odyssey and Project Hell Mary.

Please state your name.

Robin Grace. I just woke up from a coma.

There's several light years from my apartment. And I'm not an astronaut. I'm not an astronaut.

I'm not an astronaut.

If you don't go, you die.

With the rest of us. And people wanting the experience again of going to a dark theater with other people and seeing a huge spectacle on the big screen.

I think that there's a lot of reason for optimism, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be proactive. We need to be proactive. And we also have to keep in mind that AI provides a lot of threats as well, but also some opportunities.

And that means we have to do things like, you know, write this bill and pass this bill because without it, we're going to continue to see productions leave this country.

Representative Friedman knows that the film industry has its own male functioning doomsday clock that moves a little faster whenever the latest serious threat to its existence appears on the scene.

Pickle audiences, economic gale storms, these have pushed the Hollywood studios to the breaking point more than once before.

With that in mind, I reached out to film professor and historian Ron Felsone, who was more than happy to school me on earlier crisis points when Hollywood survived various near death experiences and lived to freak out another day.

So Ron, the crisis point that this bill is designed to alleviate to some degree and to compete with runaway productions drawn overseas or up to Canada.

It's got historical precedence and you and I have talked about them a lot over the years.

Oh, yeah. What are the key ones that people should know about that have something to say to what's happening right now?

Well, the big one is the late post to war period in the late 1940s into the early 1950s when Hollywood started doing runaway production and they did it for a reason.

Number one, why recreate Rome in the studio and you can just go to Rome.

So let's start with that.

Number two, there were huge tax advantages in taking productions overseas.

Number three, the people who were hired, let's say the Italian or the French or the Swedish technicians were significantly less expensive.

Studio space was less expensive. It looked like a great deal all the way around.

There was only one problem, which is that because those countries had filmmakers of their own, they wanted to draw the money over to those filmmakers.

So Bergman, Fellini, all of those people benefited tremendously.

The people who did not benefit were all the American workers who no longer had jobs because their jobs are going overseas.

The studios are not taking them overseas. They were sitting there in Hollywood with nothing to do.

So the money that Hollywood productions funneled to the countries where they shot, for example, Ben Hur in 1950, baited for 2009, or Roman Holiday.

Okay, great. So the government, the Italian government, the French government, Swedish government made the decision to redirect the money gained from that to their native filmmakers projects.

Correct.

And we still have a lot of that going on today. For example, the vast majority of the films that are coming out of Germany are being paid for by money that's coming from the German television funds, which in turn is all money that's coming from the runway productions that have gone into Germany.

There are plenty of things that are shot in Germany that are not set in Germany.

I see.

And that's true everywhere. I still remember seeing a movie called The Alphabet Killer, which was about a killer in my hometown of upstate New York and was shot in Yugoslavia.

Got it.

Lefty eyes seems to agree with initial profiles. If he was a good chance, the killer is out of state. Sloppy low intelligence.

Someone with an knowledge of Rochester resides elsewhere. Probably marginal type personality.

And Megan.

He's not Sloppy. He didn't choose her at random and we're wasting our time looking for truck drivers and transients.

Do you know how many people have the same first and last initial? 2%. So the killer found a way to get Carla Castillo into his car.

Another crisis point. We're sort of adjacent to that right here with the television, the off-site existential threat to not the immediate post-war movie industry because that was a peak attendance year for the movies right 1946.

But then television comes along, right? Television comes along.

Well, 1946 is the peak here in the low years 1950.

And they're literally 50% of the audience in that four year period walked away.

Or they didn't walk anywhere.

Well, they didn't walk away. Actually, no, they just sat at home.

They were not interested in paying for their entertainment anymore.

And that was of course increased by the middle 1950s when you saw places like Universal Warner Brothers selling their packages of films to television.

So now you can see a movie on TV. Why would you go out to see it? I mean, yes, it was maybe a five year old or a 10 year old movie, but it was still a movie.

That was the phrase, right? That's very clear.

So what movies, what specific films turned that one around for Hollywood in terms of television?

Yeah, in mid-50s, you know, the dole of them to the mid-50s.

Yeah, I mean, what you do is less looking at films and looking at technological advances.

So this is cinema.

It started to pull people into the theaters, but it was impossible to actually tell narratives because you needed three projectors and three cameras.

And the screen was so big, you couldn't do close-ups.

But that led in 1953 to Cinemoscope.

And Cinemoscope almost immediately because 20th Century Fox was charging so much to use it, led to all the other studios creating their own.

So Paramount came up with VistaVision, you know, for example.

But the result was that now instead of a little tiny black-o-white box to watch your movies, for the first time you now had a real competition with larger frame pictures.

And then you get to, all of the Ben Hurwitz was a three-to-one aspect ratio.

And literally the width of it was three times greater than the height of it.

So it was almost cinema. It took up most of the vision.

Citizens, I welcome you to these games in the name of your Emperor, the Divine Tiberius.

We dedicate them to his glory and to the glory of Rome, of which you are all pumped.

And it's not, that doesn't entirely explain why this movie year, 2026 is the best since 2019, the pre-COVID year.

But it certainly has a hell of a lot to do with why the Odyssey and Christopher Nolan's work in general tends to serve the same purpose, yeah.

Right. Right.

I think part of what helped the Odyssey was the push on it as being a Christopher Nolan film.

Yeah.

Christopher Nolan is that rarest of all things nowadays, which is a director whose name is going to sell a movie.

A Christopher Nolan movie is not a movie, it's an event.

Right.

It used to be true of Spielberg, it's no longer true.

You know, that used to be true of Scorsese, that used to be true of a lot of directors.

But this generation has developed its own event directors and Christopher Nolan is number one.

So that helps.

So it's not the quality of a film like the robe coming out in 53 that sort of helped right the ship a little bit, at least, or get it starting in the right version.

It's the format.

Right. It's the format because you know the truth is you can't look at the robe and talk about quality.

From this day on, I'm enlisted in his service.

I offered him my sword, my fortune, and my life.

And this I pledged you won my honor as a Roman.

Right.

You know, look at all of the movies that came out at that point that we can now look back at them and go, oh my god, really Solomon and Shiba.

Right. Right. Right.

You know, there were a lot of bad movies.

People were going because the experience was different from what they were getting at home.

Yeah.

Let me jump back to 1932, bad year for the film for the country for a lot of things.

We had not a technological competitor necessarily.

We just had no money as a society.

And the ones that turned it around, correct me if I'm missing a biggie, but King Kong certainly got RKO out of receivership, I think.

40 Second Street didn't do badly for Warner Brothers.

No, no, did very well.

I would also throw in the Von Sternberg Dietrich films, particularly Morocco and Blond Venus, which were huge box office successes.

How much will it take?

Anything I can get, it doesn't matter.

Now don't tell me you're working just for the love of your art, who's your boyfriend?

I haven't any.

Will you work for $25 a week?

Oh yes.

Well, you're a luck baby, you came to the right man.

I guess maybe I can get you 30 or 40.

I might be able to raise it to 50.

I wish we had directors like that saving our asses now, but we don't have that.

I don't think it's a fallacy.

Paramount was in his rough-a-shape as RKO, but May West saved that studio more than any one person.

Honey, how's business?

Fine, even salted lately?

Goodness, what a beautiful time.

Goodness had nothing to do with it, Derry.

Yeah, hands down.

Just like Shirley Temple saved 20th Century Fox.

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Oh my gosh, you can't be serious.

You think making the pick is the hard part?

No, it's not. The pick takes like three seconds.

You know it's hard? The sweat.

The time between locking in and cashing out.

Yeah, you have a take, but in the end, it's not about the winners or losers.

This is about us, man.

Whether we're brave enough to sit through it.

Don't fight the sweat. Live in it.

Because you are an underdog.

Underdog, at least you're dog.

Turns me up live.

So explain what was it about May West that saved Paramount?

What was it about Shirley Temple that saved Fox?

I think in the case of May West, it was that we were coming towards the end of the pre-code period.

And you know, she's one of the main reasons why we got a production code.

Sex sells.

They'd have much luck at it.

Oh, but I'd have a great deal more if they'll heenie and the others would cooperate.

None of them worked saving.

You hang around them long enough you'll get that way yourself.

Well, thanks for the kind interest.

You know what? I always did like a man in the uniform.

That one fit you grand.

I was come up sometimes, see me.

And she was very different from preceding sort of sex-based stars.

Because she was a woman who had power.

She was the one who controlled relationships.

And you know, that's going to be extremely appealing if all you're used to seeing

are little flower face girls being saved by the stripping young hero.

So I think that helped. It was just so different.

And in the case of Shirley Temple, you're sitting there in a depression

and you're looking out your front door and everything is horrible.

And then all of a sudden you've got this little mop it that is pure optimism.

Next Friday night, you're all invited to dance from 825.

All the fishes still alive are having a bond.

She spent all of her movies telling you it was going to be alright.

And it was a time when maybe you didn't believe it literally,

but you believed it emotionally.

And I think, and let me go through bad periods,

we need to be convinced of something emotionally before we start becoming optimistic.

And I think she had that advantage.

Interesting.

So 40 Secretary always intrigued me about why that caught on with audiences the way it did.

No big mystery in a way, but I love how that film,

which is a backstage musical, not a comedy, really,

a more of a drum musical drama, but both.

It has one foot in the difficulties of what was outside that movie theater play

in that chorus line in that show being put on.

It's going to make somebody that kid from Allentown a star.

They talk about we are one flop away from having to basically work the streets as prostitutes.

And that's exactly right.

And it's not a laugh line.

It's like the wolf is at the door.

And then you get the wish fulfillment that has a sort of intriguingly realistic context.

And I think that's why that movie actually works as a movie today.

I agree.

I've shown it in musicals classes.

And it's almost that and love me tonight or the two films,

which my students, I absolutely guarantee you that they're in love with them by the time they're done.

They get it.

They get both of those films on some fundamental level.

Those two musicals from 32 and 33.

So Ron, another crisis point, although it wasn't sudden,

but it was a little more cumulative, I think, than maybe the depression hitting.

But straight me out of that if that's not right.

But you have the massive success of sound of music in 1965.

It's start at the very beginning.

You know, the culture is changing fast.

But that one was the one that nearly bankrupted more than one studio

in attempts to replicate the success of that musical.

Do re me, do re me.

The first three notes just happen to be.

What happened?

And what did we get out of it a decade later?

Well, I would think sound of music is one of the great ironies of film history.

It was a massive success.

It should be pointed out that it was the first movie to break the album of the Wins Record.

It was that big a hit.

Also, it's an exceptionally well made film.

I think audiences were responding that last gasp of people who wanted the studio films.

That was the film that they went to.

And the problem with the studios was that instead of looking at that as the last gasp,

they were looking at it the first breath.

Right.

And so, you know, you see the immediacy of it falling apart.

As soon as Julie Andrews goes from the sound of music to the movie star.

Right.

You know, where she goes from everybody's favorite governors to this drunken Broadway star.

You know, to see him as Lawrence.

Mm-hmm.

Richard Aldrich.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

You're a stockbroker and we met in Philadelphia.

I'm a banker and we met in London.

Oh, don't argue.

I can't stand people who argue.

Who let you mean?

That failure, the failure of Hello, Dolly, those are both 20th Century Fox films.

And the huge failure of both of those movies put 20th Century Fox into this bizarre position

where it just fermented the great family from the wall time of the sound of music.

And by 1969, they were banked or only soft core porn.

Okay.

Beyond the Valley of the dolls, seven minutes, Myra Breckenridge.

They literally had hit their bottom right after they had hit a bottom after Cleopatra.

And some music pulled them out of the bottom.

And then they hit the bottom again and they started getting pulled out of the bottom

and with Pat and in mash the next year in 1970.

By 1969 is like hell year.

And it was for all the studios.

So in 1970, MGM, Auksons Off, its props and costumes.

Yeah.

And that is such a bitter, sweet echo of what David O'Cell's like apparently told Ben Hack

in 51.

All I was like Egypt full of crumbled pyramids.

It'll never come back.

It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.

Yeah.

You know, it's a very good truthful statement.

Not that I always agree with David O'Cell's name.

Yeah.

That's a good one.

Okay, two quick things.

What did all that then lead to when the stuff I was so grateful to grow up with

is an adolescent in the 70s.

Me too.

I always said that I came of age with Bonnie and Clyde.

The big thing was that the studios were falling apart, but they had to continue to create.

And so what they started doing is to throw money at young filmmakers.

And what they were telling those young filmmakers to do was not go out and make something

experimental and wonderful.

They were saying go out and make something that we can repeat over and over again.

Because Hollywood has always been about repeating success.

And you started to see that happen when the Godfather came out.

And the Godfather was immediately followed by all these Hollywood knockoff gangster films

that went nowhere.

The next year the exorcist comes out.

That led to a lot of horror films which had a big sort of renaissance that then died a little bit

until 1980 until Halloween came out.

But the movie that really did it was jaws.

And it was interesting because it wasn't that jaws was a horror film.

It wasn't that jaws was this that or the other thing.

It wasn't the movie itself that taught them a lesson.

It was how the movie was released that taught them a lesson.

There is a creature alive today.

It has survived millions of years of evolution without change, without passion, and without logic.

And that was the summer which had always been the dead period.

They suddenly looked at us, oh my God, there's all this money in the summer to pick up.

And also, if we open the movie on a couple thousand screens, as opposed to the usual two or three hundred screens,

we make the money that much faster.

It is, as if God created the devil and gave him jaws.

I mean, in jaws is wonderful. I love jaws.

I mean, too many.

I just don't think you could be alive on this planet and not love that movie.

But at the same time, it really did lead us to where we are right now.

We would not be stuck with the age of Ultron if we hadn't had the age of jaws to begin with.

Which is an exacerbated, I think, tenfold by Star Wars two summers later.

Yes, Star Wars.

Star Wars basically, if you think about this way,

jaws validated it and Star Wars certified it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The idea of Century Fox and George Lucas will bring you an adventure unlike anything on your planet.

Star Wars.

Stop that, Jim.

It's the new Star Wars land speeder.

Wow, looks like it's floating.

And people are coming. It's up to Luke Skywalker and his land speeder to get us out.

Action figures each sold separately.

Well, jaws didn't sell any toys, so I give the price to jaws.

Yeah, I know me too.

All right.

What can we learn from the turnarounds or the comebacks that Holly would have?

I mean, the death knell is told constantly.

And it's a pretty crazy time of let's call it anti-anti-trusts right now.

I mean, you know, the consolidation is about to eat itself when Paramount eats warners up

and spits out fewer movies as a result overall.

What can we learn from what happened in those crisis points of old when we're trying to

finalize industry today besides a promising bipartisan production tax credit bill?

Well, I think there's a number of things.

One of the first things that I think of one I look at this consolidation issue is the Golden Goose was killed by Disney.

All right.

Disney killed the Golden Goose called Star Wars.

You know, the excitement of Star Wars used to be that you got one every three years.

So you're this long period of anticipation.

And then once Disney bought Star Wars, they started knocking out a movie a year,

sometimes two movies a year, the TV series.

Nobody cares about Star Wars anymore.

Take a look at how Mandalorian did.

Nobody cares anymore.

And so they killed that Golden Goose.

And so you would say, okay, maybe the lesson here has to be that we don't keep doing the same thing over and over again

and handed to the audience.

You know, don't hand them a Volkswagen and tell them it's a Rolls Royce.

And I fear that where we're going to see that lesson play out,

either for Good Or for Bad is with James Bond being purchased by Amazon.

All right.

But this idea of repetition is something that Hollywood is always, always been drawn to when they're in trouble.

They tended in the past to do it as Let's Repeat Genreous.

All right.

When you had a phenomenal success with, let's say, the Ten Commandments,

all of a sudden you're getting Ben Hurr and Solomon Shiba.

And you're getting all of these San and Sandalapics.

Right.

And I do feel that the lesson that we're going to wind up learning from this is,

don't keep going back to the same well.

And it's taken the death of Star Wars and it may have to take the death of James Bond for them to learn that.

But what they really need to start doing is to look and say, where is the audience instead of trying to do this mass audience

that is everybody on the planet, do what they started doing the 50s rather intelligently,

which is let's start aiming movies that specific audiences.

You know, in the 50s was the first time in which they started making movies that were for the teen audience,

for the adult audience.

For that, they broke it up finally in the 50s.

And I think that's a lesson that they're going to have to learn in this new age,

which is you can't make a movie for everybody.

You have to start breaking these down.

They're cheaper to make.

Okay. So you can make more of them.

And let's just start playing around with these, what we've got to see where we need to go forward.

But right now, we're, what scares me about this consolidation is that they only know one model.

And now all these studios are getting together into one studio to say,

let's just keep replicating that model because that's what's brought us money.

But they're not really seen to be paying attention to is diminishing returns.

Right.

Fewer return ticket sales, more expensive to make the movie less money coming in at the door from it.

This model of we make five movies of which we know three will fail.

One will break even and the fifth one is going to make enough money to pay us back on all the losses.

That model just doesn't work anymore, but they don't know what to do.

They don't know where else to go.

What was William Goldman said something about that?

I don't know what else I think.

Hey, Ron, appreciate the time and the insights.

And I hope you're wrong and probably think you're right.

Well, I know I'm right.

All right, be well.

All right, talk to you later.

So Ron laid out how Hollywood managed to untie itself

from the railroad tracks of certain doom several times across the 20th century

and how to survive another crisis another day.

The more recent and escalating problem of runaway production,

or if you prefer the economically sensible filmmaking options afforded by Canada,

the UK and other parts of the world, this problem is seriously debilitating

to the film crews and actors trying to make a go of things in LA

and across the United States.

In the 1990s, before entering politics, Laura Friedman worked for

a rightshure entertainment, a film production and distribution company.

There, she wasn't just reading about runaway production in the trades,

she was watching it happen from the inside.

You mentioned a film that you worked on near the end of your time in the film industry

before you moved the politics.

That was a clear example to you of like, well, this is the runaway production problem right here.

I don't know how long ago that was.

When I was at rightshure entertainment in the late 90s, early 2000s,

somewhere in that area, Canada began their film tax credit program.

And we were doing a slate of lower budget movies.

We did larger budgets and then we did lower budgets straight to videos straight to cable,

kind of movies.

And they really only penciled.

We were taking advantage of the Canadian tax credit and allowed us to do a lot more of those smaller films,

which we could then bundle and sell in bundles around the world.

So we were one of the companies like many that took advantage of the Canadian film tax credit program

when it first started.

And so I was there watching while companies like the one that I worked at were starting to send their films up to Canada.

And the impact that that had on people here that had to go,

but also on the hundreds of people who weren't getting work anymore.

Because you had to use a certain amount of above the line talent that was Canadian.

And then the crews were increasingly in Canada.

So it was money going directly out of Hollywood and into Vancouver.

Back at 1995, the production migration to Canada was sparked by its implementation

of federal tax credits and other production incentives.

Word got around very quickly about the advantages to US-based filmmakers working on a wide range of production budgets.

And once lost, film production jobs do not come back easily.

Now to fix that, you can suggest slapping 100% tariffs on any US film production working outside the US

as the current president did, or you can work toward bipartisan federal legislation.

Even if bipartisanship is a peculiar, distant sounding word in these divided United States.

This is what Laura Friedman and other Democrats and other Republicans did.

And you know what the president likes the idea.

So starting back when I right after I was sworn in when I jumped into this back January, February of 2025,

right after I was sworn in, I started working right away with this very large coalition.

You know, a lot of whom are sort of centered in my district or in Los Angeles.

So this was the different unions that represent people who work in the industry.

So you have IOTSY and there are many locals, the teamsters, WGA, SAG, AFTRA, and the writers guild,

as well as the laborers and the independent producers who have their own experience with the industry and their own economics for their films,

and with the MPA representing the large studios and Netflix.

So working with the independent producers, the large studios, and the unions coming up with something and negotiating what the bill would actually look like

to address any concerns and to make sure that we met the needs of all of these different parties took a long time,

as well as working across the aisle with the Republicans to make sure that we had an approach that was going to pass muster with Republicans who are in the majority

and with the White House because the end of the day Donald Trump is going to have to sign the bill.

So that's been taking quite a long time.

And once we had all of those pieces to this puzzle put together, we brought the bill into Waze and Means,

which is the Committee of Jurisdiction, picked up Waze and Means members as co-authors

because they're the ones that are going to have to shepherd the bill through that particular committee,

and that's where we are today and introduce the bill.

Laura, I'm just astonished at this bill coming together the way it did because if you had told me,

this is just a few months ago where our current president threatened to levier 100% terra fun,

all movies made outside the US just in retaliation.

That would have been ruinous for the US production level.

It would have been raising ticket prices for movie goers.

And the argument, I guess if he had one, was that these other countries,

what is it?

80 nations that have a federal tax credit program for production.

He would just argue that that's hurting Hollywood and therefore these foreign made films are a national security and propaganda threat.

Those are his words, not mine.

And then we have this, one of your bill's sponsors, Representative Brian Jack of Georgia,

said that we all saw the evolution of the president's direction on this,

and then he said, that's because of John Voit.

Is that an accurate assessment and flesh it out for us?

What conversations have you had with Mr. Voit?

Yeah, so Donald Trump has been interested in this issue for a while, and I give him credit for that.

If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't be where we are right now for sure.

Donald Trump comes out of Hollywood, he comes out of television, he understands a lot about the industry and he sees its power and its importance.

And he took an interest in it and he did tweet about how awful it is that we're losing this signature industry in this huge export for the US.

But he did talk about tariffs.

You know, that's been his approach on a lot of issues, one that I don't agree with using it as a blunt tool in general.

It's something that has its place, but needs to be very carefully considered and it has to be the right tool at the right time.

So he also appointed three Hollywood ambassadors.

And there's only one that I ever heard from, and that was John Voit.

And John Voit came to see me a couple of times, and he is incredibly passionate about Hollywood.

He's passionate about the people who work behind the camera, he's passionate about the world,

the industry that created the lore of Hollywood, the energy that he used to experience in the studio system.

And when we were such a company town and he sees people having to leave LA because of this runaway production.

And he wants to help, he loves the industry and he wants to help.

And he's been a great spokesman and he does have Donald Trump's ear.

He's a supporter of Donald Trump, he is a Republican, he's very vocal about this.

And he has been a great partner to me and to Brian Jack.

And absolutely, he and his producing partners understand the power of a tax credit.

They have used it themselves when they've shot in different places.

And they know, especially on the independent producer side, how price sensitive those projects are.

You know, his partner said to me, for us it's not about going where we're maximizing a profit.

It's about the difference between being able to make a movie or not being able to make a movie.

And so they were able to go and tell their stories to Donald Trump and to that administration and show them how this is a proven solution.

Something that has effectively brought television productions back into Los Angeles because of our tax credit and showing how this would bring productions back to the United States.

There is an intersection that I love to get your insight on.

There have been moments in crises in the Hollywood sort of timeline where there have been sort of behind the scenes or maybe out in plain sight political maneuvering to kind of help things come back.

I just wonder if is this moment something that you see is kind of a beginning if we can get this past where we'd like to see it in 10 years.

Yeah, I think that this is very important for production, but I also think we do need to look at corporate consolidation of this industry and so many others because the financial and syndication rules were there to try to break up, you know, a lot of the studio system and sort of monopolistic behavior within the entertainment industry.

And that allowed for an ecosystem that provided opportunities for a huge amount of independent producers and creators.

And we're going the other way right now we're going the other way for a while streaming gave a lot of opportunities, but now we're starting to see a lot of the same sort of shrinkage and conflation.

And it's bad for consumers. It's certainly bad for creators and it's bad for creative content.

So and by the way, this isn't just about Hollywood monopolies and consolidation is bad in every industry and I would challenge anyone to show me an industry where allowing for more consolidation has provided for better consumer experience, better consumer choice lower prices more jobs.

It's almost always or at least I would say always the other direction. And so this is something that as a nation, we should be looking at strengthening our antitrust laws and making sure that we provide fairness, you know, if you're going to have a capitalist system, it doesn't work if you don't have fairness and points of entry for new businesses and expansion of of industries and jobs and conflation does the opposite of all of that.

So that would be to me something we should look at whether it's Hollywood or the hospital industry, telecom industry, anything else.

It is look, we have just not been as a nation, we have not been competing. We just haven't been competing. We're just not in the game. And to me, this bill is about America saying we're done losing.

Laura, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Well, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. I appreciate your interest.

Good bye forever. Good bye forever. I'm going with all the long, long time.

After we talked, I thought about what representative Laura Friedman told me about what John Void's producing partner said regarding their proposed film production tax credit bill.

He explained why using federal money for the movie industry to actually make more movies here in the US is just good business.

He told Friedman, it's not about filming in a country where we can maximize our profit. It's about the difference between being able to make a movie or not being able to make a movie.

I also thought about Ron Falzone's weirdly comforting list of potential industry destroying crises, the Great Depression, television, the counterculture of the 1960s,

and more recently corporate takeovers and the political string pullers, plus AI, plus filmmakers having every incentive in the world to film somewhere else in the world because it's more cost effective than making movies here.

All these brushes with extinction and so much evidence for worse problems to come. And yet look at 2026 and not just the Odyssey, though I do love it that Christopher Nolan is now the biggest movie star in the world.

He just happens to be a writer director, not an actual actor. You see a low budget smash like obsession or back rooms take off the way they did in ways that most of traditional hidebound Hollywood couldn't imagine.

And it feels like the late 1960s all over again. We could fix it all if the money that owns the screen industries now rediscoveres the value of more and smaller.

Smaller and medium budget projects mean less uncreative pressure and fewer exhausted roles of the franchise dice designed simply and only to boost the stock price.

I don't know, call me a commie, but no, I don't like that. That's no way to run an industry. Just change the priorities and take different kinds of risk that will actually help your screen industries turn out better work and probably make enough money

for any sane form of capitalism change the priorities in this damn country economically politically, cinematically, every way. That's all that's all I'm asking.

The movie record is produced by Joe DeSau and nominally Michael Phillips, Adam Kempner, Sam Van Halgren are the executive producers.

Special thanks to representative Laura Friedman of California and professor and screenwriter Ron Felsone of Chicago, Illinois.

Thanks to everyone who's dropped a little something to me and Joe by way of electronic mail which recently changed his name by the way to email.

So email us at movie racket at filmspotting.net. Come back next week. Why don't you? This is a film spotting production.

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