--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza.
--:-- Ben Fritz: I'm Ben Fritz, and I cover the entertainment industry for The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: When I think about the people who make up Hollywood, I think of action stars, red carpet icons, A-list directors, and big studio bosses. But the vast majority who work in the industry have jobs that are way less glamorous. You wouldn't know their names, but these are the people who actually make films and TV shows, mostly behind the scenes.
--:-- Ben Fritz: My colleague Ben Fritz covers the entertainment industry. They're assistant directors. They're grips who hang the lights. They're sound recordists. They're animators. They're working writers. They're production managers.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's so many jobs that make a movie and TV show work. Just think of the end credits or the end of any film. If you ever actually sit through them, they're really long, right? There's hundreds and hundreds of names. These are the names that make up the backbone of show business, Los Angeles' creative middle class.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Ben's been talking with a lot of these workers lately, and things haven't been good. What sort of things have they been telling you?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They've been telling me that there's not nearly as much work as there used to be, just bottom line. And it's not one of those things where it's been slowly falling and slowly falling. It's not like the frog boiling in the water. It's a dramatic drop-off.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Broadly speaking, in L.A., if you're involved in the entertainment industry, this has been a very rough two years. Very, very rough.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ben, you've lived in L.A. for 20 years now, so this isn't the first time you've seen Hollywood go through a downturn. How does this compare to what you've seen before?
--:-- Ben Fritz: Oh, as far as anxiety about the future of entertainment and people's ability to work in entertainment, this is the worst since I've ever been here. By far, not even close.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to The Journal. This episode is presented by SAP. A bad storm hitting your warehouse. Incomplete customs forms. A short supply of those little plastic twist ties. These could all deal a crushing setback to your business, but they don't have to.
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--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Hey, Thomas. Are you up front?
--:-- Thomas Curley: Yeah, I'm at. Yes, we're at your gate. All right, I'll be right there.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Late last month, Ben drove up to Silmar, a northwest suburb of Los Angeles. A lot of people who work in film and TV live in this area. Houses are more affordable, and the big studios are within driving distance.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Ben was there to visit a member of Hollywood's creative middle class, Thomas Curley, a production sound mixer.
--:-- Thomas Curley: Welcome. Good to see you, Ben.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Yeah, you too.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Walking up to Thomas' house, one of the first things Ben saw is a big, beautiful orange tree.
--:-- Thomas Curley: Do you plant this orange tree, or is it here?
--:-- Ben Fritz: No, this was here when I moved here. A lot of this is kind of when I bought the place.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Thomas bought his house in 2023 for $650,000. But the recent downturn in L.A. has hit him hard. He's barely worked since April of last year. Now, his mortgage is in forbearance.
--:-- Thomas Curley: He never imagined himself in this situation. I thought that this house, if the career didn't pause, you know, that I was living below my means. I could have theoretically afforded a house twice that much if work never stopped.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, there always kind of a thought in the back of your head that this can all stop. But I didn't think that that was likely.
--:-- Thomas Curley: His big break came in 2014 on the critically acclaimed indie film Whiplash.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Five, six, and... They sent me the script, and I'd never read a script faster. It just was blistering on the page, and I was very excited immediately.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Whiplash follows the story of a young jazz drummer at an elite music conservatory who becomes obsessed with achieving greatness.
--:-- Thomas Curley: The challenge for a production sound mixer like Thomas was capturing the actor's dialogue over live music.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Got Buddy Rich here.
--:-- Thomas Curley: Thomas made it work by carefully layering the right amount of pre-recorded music along with recording live.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Walking up to the stage, I was just trying not to pass out. I was getting short of breath, and my mouth was dry, and, you know, I was getting, like, tunnel vision.
--:-- Thomas Curley: Thanks, Mike and Dave, my crew. You guys are awesome. Here's your Oscar, yeah? Keep it on this bookshelf? Yep.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Was there a lot of thinking about where to put an Oscar? Where does one put an Oscar in one's house?
--:-- Thomas Curley: My options are kind of limited in this house, you know, but I figured a place of prominence is, you know.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: After he won the Oscar, calls for bigger-budget, longer-term jobs flooded in. Thomas worked on the hit TV show Yellowstone for three seasons.
--:-- Ben Fritz: And then in 2022, he got another gig that he thought would last for a long time with CSI Vegas.
--:-- Thomas Curley: It's kind of the dream job for a production person to be on a pedigreed television show that was almost guaranteed to go for a very long time. And possibly even time it out completely to where I could retire after the show wrapped.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: If that had gone for 10 years, I would have been set.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Then, in the summer of 2023, everything in Hollywood stopped. Hollywood has gone dark tonight. SAG-AFTRA actors have now joined Writers Guild members on strike against the studios.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So all of a sudden, production just came to a screeching halt.
--:-- Ben Fritz: That's my colleague Ben again. And of course, during a strike, there's no work. If you don't have actors, you don't have writers, you can't make anything.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: What was it that these workers wanted? What were they fighting for?
--:-- Ben Fritz: There was a variety of things. Some of it was the basic stuff workers always want, which is higher pay and better benefits. But they were also very concerned about the effects of artificial intelligence. And they demanded protections against AI stealing their jobs, essentially.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That was another big issue.
--:-- Ben Fritz: We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And what were the studios saying at that time? What was happening then?
--:-- Ben Fritz: Well, the studios, of course, were saying that some of these demands were unreasonable. And they were saying that the longer you're on strike and the more you demand, the more danger you're putting this entire industry in as far as how much production is going to get made.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Finally, in the fall of 2023, after months of negotiations, the union struck a deal with the studios, and the strikes ended.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Many writers, actors, and production workers thought that Hollywood would simply start back up again. And for some, it did. For a while.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Thomas went back to work on CSI. But in the spring, the show was canceled, and Thomas found himself unemployed.
--:-- Thomas Curley: My phone didn't ring for months. I was reaching out to my network regularly and talking to all my colleagues and friends and seeking out information like we do when we're not working.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And there was a lot of speculation. There was a lot of, you know, just sort of out loud wondering about what's going on.
--:-- Thomas Curley: But, you know, that turned into I didn't work again all year. Nothing was getting going.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Nothing was getting going. And people were thinking geez well maybe the studios are just being really cautious after the strikes.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Ben spoke to dozens of workers including animators, writers, and production managers who all told him something similar.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: In the past, sometimes there have been slow periods, but they don't last too long. And the lesson everybody's learned is, like, just be patient, make sure you have some savings to get through a tough time, and the jobs will come back soon enough.
--:-- Thomas Curley: But it's been two years and the situation really hasn't changed at all. If anything, it's gotten slightly worse.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So it sounds like Thomas and these other workers you talked to, they really just thought things would go back to normal after the strikes ended in 2023. Like, even if it might take a couple of years.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Yes, that's exactly what they thought. I think people didn't realize that these broader macroeconomic trends coming down the road were about to hit them like a semi-truck.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Thomas and the rest of Hollywood's creative middle class thought that the studios were just easing back in after the strikes ended. But Ben says the strikes had created an opportunity for studios to rethink the entire business.
--:-- Ben Fritz: That's after the break.
--:-- [Sound effects: Brief pause]
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--:-- Jessica Mendoza: To understand why Hollywood didn't get back to business as usual, you need to understand what was happening to the industry at the time of the 2023 strikes.
--:-- Ben Fritz: The movie business had taken a nosedive when theaters shut down during the pandemic, and audiences never came back in the same way.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But more importantly, the TV industry crashed. And TV is really the economic engine of Hollywood.
--:-- Ben Fritz: There's a lot more TV shows than movies. Back in the late 2010s and early 2020s, investors were betting big on streaming.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You would have experienced this. You know, remember there were so many TV shows on streaming, you couldn't keep up with them all just a few years ago.
--:-- Ben Fritz: It was all about growth. Wall Street just wanted to see these three new services like Disney Plus and Apple Plus and HBO Max grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Just like any young tech company. It's all they cared about.
--:-- Ben Fritz: By 2022, the U.S. market was saturated. America seemed streamed out.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That spring, Netflix said that for the first time in over a decade, it lost subscribers in the first quarter.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Suddenly, instead of growth, investors wanted to see studios turn a profit.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And the studios figured the easiest way to do that is to cut costs, to just make less stuff.
--:-- Ben Fritz: The streaming bubble was popping in 2023.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And the strikes provided an opportunity for the studios to completely reset how much they were making.
--:-- Ben Fritz: You know, it's very, in Hollywood, productions take a long time to get going. And you can't just turn on a dime, you know.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: But when nothing was happening for several months, it was actually an opportunity for the studios to really rethink how much they were making.
--:-- Ben Fritz: And once they restarted in late 2023 when the strikes were over, they restarted at a much lower level than they'd been at before them.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: One data firm found that from 2022 to 2025, the number of major studio productions that started shooting in the U.S. dropped by more than 40 percent.
--:-- Ben Fritz: And think about that. Imagine if there was just 40 percent less work to do in any industry, right? That's like it would feel like a depression hit out of nowhere.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: A big movie can employ over a thousand people for months. And a TV show can employ hundreds for even longer.
--:-- Ben Fritz: So with fewer productions, jobs vanished.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Well, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2022, so just before the strikes, there were 142,000 people who were working in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County.
--:-- Ben Fritz: At the end of 2024, there were 100,000 people.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So that's 42,000 jobs gone in a span of two years.
--:-- Ben Fritz: In the best years I was making over 200 With all those jobs gone people like Thomas are now seeing their incomes plummet.
--:-- Thomas Curley: I was actually making double mortgage payments for a while in an effort to pay down my house quicker.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And I think this year, 2025, I might be under $20,000 income.
--:-- Ben Fritz: But one corner of entertainment is booming. User-generated content.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Some analysts say audiences are permanently shifting from Hollywood to YouTube and social media.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Why couldn't people just shift to working in the creator industry if that's where, you know, the money is going, if that's what's blossoming?
--:-- Thomas Curley: There's just a lot fewer jobs and a lot fewer well-paying jobs in YouTube and especially in TikTok.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Even if it's the highest level professional stuff, think of a show like Hot Ones, if you've ever watched that on YouTube.
--:-- Ben Fritz: That's still being made by way fewer people than make a talk show that's on NBC or whatever.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: They're just smaller productions. And not only do these social media productions hire fewer people, they also don't pay as well.
--:-- Ben Fritz: All the jobs making content on YouTube and TikTok are not unionized.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And Hollywood is a union town, and the union jobs are the ways that people are able to make a good middle-class living.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Yeah, it's like going back to Thomas Curley, it's hard to imagine, you know, a YouTube show sort of paying somebody like him $150,000 for a show on YouTube.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Yeah, exactly.
--:-- Ben Fritz: The industry downturn has been especially hard on Los Angeles. The city was already experiencing a production exodus to places where costs are lower.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: More and more big budget movies are shifting production overseas to the UK, Canada, and Eastern Europe.
--:-- Ben Fritz: Ben says what's happening in L.A. reminds him of Detroit, when the auto industry fell apart and thousands of union workers lost their jobs.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Just walking around L.A., are there signs that you can see that studios are shooting less?
--:-- Ben Fritz: Sure. Well, there's just, you know, if you go to the studio lots where there are big sound stages, a lot of them are empty.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There's just a lot less activity.
--:-- Ben Fritz: There's fewer people driving around on golf carts and walking in and out with their costumes and stuff because not as much stuff as shooting.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The way that they measure production activity in L.A. is how many days of shooting there are.
--:-- Ben Fritz: And the level of production activity last year in Los Angeles was the lowest it's been since at least 1995, which is as far back as the data goes.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: 30 years, like I guess except for the pandemic. Yep.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Ben, what does this all mean for the future of Hollywood as an industry?
--:-- Ben Fritz: It means that Hollywood may not ever come back to the level that it was at before.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: I mean, certainly people are always going to want to be entertained.
--:-- Ben Fritz: There's no question about that.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And there's always going to be a place for the sort of premium, high-quality productions that we're used to getting from Disney and Netflix and so on.
--:-- Ben Fritz: But there may be less of it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: There may be fewer people working in it.
--:-- Ben Fritz: And Hollywood may just be, bottom line, a smaller industry that employs fewer people.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: As for Thomas, he says that if he doesn't get a longer-term gig by the end of this year, he might move out of L.A.
--:-- Thomas Curley: I'll survive. You know, I'll figure something else out to do with the rest of my life if I have to, but I don't want to.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Because as hard as the financial loss is, what's most painful to Thomas is that he's no longer getting to do the work that means so much to him.
--:-- Thomas Curley: Like, I put everything into this. You know, I put my whole heart and soul into it, and I'm very good at it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And there's nothing that should be stopping me for the next 20 years if I wanted to.
--:-- Thomas Curley: They can ask me to do anything, anywhere, and I'll make it happen, and I'll make it good, you know?
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So it's not just that, like, I'm sad that I don't get to turn a wrench anymore. Like, I'm sad that I don't get to create like I used to, you know, and help other people create the way they want to.
--:-- Thomas Curley: And, you know, like money is money, but this is more than that.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, it's part of me.
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--:-- Jessica Mendoza: That's all for today, Monday, November 10th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Laura Foreman. Special thanks to Phoebe Unterman. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
