Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse
Odd Lots
Hayes Davenport discusses the structural decline of Hollywood, noting that production shoot days in Los Angeles have plummeted from a peak of 40,000
Key takeaways
- LA shoot days dropped from 40,000 in 2016 to under 20,000 currently.
- The shift from cable networks to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon has reshaped the writing economy.
Main topics
- Hollywood economic decline
- Impact of AI on entertainment
Notable quotes
Shoot days in LA hit a high in 2016. About 40,000 shoot days.
Conclusion
The episode provides a data-driven look at how structural shifts in te
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) AI is entering its most consequential phase where scale, safety and sovereignty will determine who leads and who lags. Join Bloomberg Tech in London on November 2nd and 3rd as global leaders across business, finance and policy examine the defining trade-offs shaping the future of AI. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Salesforce, and supporting sponsors, IDA Ireland and Schneider Electric. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash Tech London. Speaker 5 (0:32) Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Speaker 4 (0:48) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And Speaker 3 (0:52) I'm Joe Wiesenthal. And we are here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood. It's Speaker 4 (0:58) our first ever live show in Los Angeles. And we have an incredible lineup. So first up, we're going to be speaking with Hayes Davenport. He was a writer for shows like Eastbound and Down and Family Guy. He is now the creative director of LA Material and co-host of the podcast Hollywood Handbook. And we're going to talk about the business of writing for Hollywood. And Speaker 3 (1:22) we're going to talk about the state of Hollywood and whether Hollywood exists in some form that we know it and whether it will continue to exist. So take a watch, take a listen, and enjoy. Speaker 4 (1:32) Hayes, thank you so much for being here. Hi, Speaker 3 (1:34) guys. Thank you Speaker 2 (1:34) so much for having me. Welcome to L.A. Thank you. I Speaker 4 (1:38) feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure. Speaker 2 (1:45) You're in a city of podcast professionals. You're in the right place. There's a Speaker 3 (1:49) podcast lawyer Speaker 2 (1:50) in the audience. I know who you're talking to. Yeah, that's right. We all know each other. Speaker 3 (1:55) Tracy was telling me before this show. Her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy season 13. Family Guy season 13. Speaker 2 (2:02) It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know if that's related. That's Speaker 4 (2:06) just Speaker 2 (2:06) a total coincidence. Yes. Total Speaker 4 (2:07) coincidence. Wait, okay. So first question, is Hollywood just screwed at the moment? No, like honestly, you hear about, you know, the stats about writers not earning as much income, fewer shoots and production actually taking place in LA, the threat of AI. Is everyone cooked? Speaker 2 (2:27) If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about like shoot days in LA. Yeah, Speaker 3 (2:30) let's Speaker 2 (2:30) do the numbers. The numbers that we look at are shoot days. Okay. That's the metric. That's great. Speaker 3 (2:35) That's Speaker 2 (2:35) for reality, for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in LA hit a high in 2016. Okay. About 40,000 shoot days. And from there, it sort of leveled out to around 37,000 by 2019. Okay. Pandemic hits, the shoot days collapse, obviously. There's a backlog, and then in 2021, they sort of skyrocket again. 2022, we're back to 2019 numbers, around 37,000. The next year, 2023, the strikes hit. Shoot days fall again to 25,000. The next year, people are sort of hoping for a recovery. They end up at 23,000. Shoot days fall again. The mantra I think a lot of people heard in this city was survive till 25. That was like a phrase in the entertainment industry here. And instead, shoot days fell again to under 20,000. So that is half of what it was in 2016. So maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Speaker 3 (3:36) Actually, we'll talk about the impact of COVID and the strike. And I guess we're unfortunately going to have to talk about AI. Is Speaker 2 (3:43) there a theory for... the 2016 to 2019 Speaker 3 (3:47) decline? Like, let's, if we started there, is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years? Speaker 2 (3:54) I think you saw an increase, obviously, in the streaming economy. There were more shows on Netflix and Amazon, entire new networks being built. I remember when House of Cards started when I was first a writer and we called it a web series. We didn't really know what it was. And at the same time, A decline in the number of network productions and cable. Cable was shrinking around the same time. So that's how you get to like a leveling out between 40,000 and 37,000. My first couple jobs were Comedy Central shows. Comedy Central does not really do new shows anymore. And so that like you can see just from the options that are sent you as a writer what. is growing in terms of streaming and what is sort of falling away, which was cable. Speaker 4 (4:45) So what happens to all the unemployed writers? Do they, I guess they all start podcasts. Speaker 2 (4:50) Uh, yeah, that's, uh, that has been sort of a safe Harbor for a lot of us. Uh, some people move, uh, like an interesting thing happened is the, uh, the membership in the writers guild grew a lot in the late 2010s because of people. moving out because everyone who had worked on a cable show was still a member of the writers guild and many more new shows were starting that were bringing new people into the business uh and i think it is a lot of the newcomers that then as production has been cut in half since then that are not seeing the same opportunities so i mean i know people who have moved home for sure, and have taken on, you know, I work with a news outlet now. We did a piece about people that have taken on different survival jobs around the city. So it varies, but yeah, people are struggling, for Speaker 3 (5:43) sure. I Speaker 2 (5:44) joked about Speaker 3 (5:44) it, you know, and we're going to talk more about it later, but, you know, there's this sort of, the influencer creator world. Yeah. And I'm curious, like, maybe... From an economic footprint, Speaker 2 (5:58) does Speaker 3 (5:59) that ameliorate things? Is the influencer, creator, person doing stand-up comedy in vertical video, et cetera, does that have positive spillover effects on some Speaker 2 (6:12) level? I mean, so there's the industry here, and there's the economy. Okay. And the industry is the studios, the networks, like the traditional Hollywood. But the influencer network is... absolutely part of the economy. Okay. It is taking money from subscribers around the world and like putting it into the local economy. And so it's really, really important. And I look at things like I get jealous of places like New York because what New York feels to me now is a social media user is a place where you just walk down the street and people ask you what you're listening to or where you get your confidence from. Or what song is this? We don't have that here. I've never been asked Speaker 3 (6:56) that. Speaker 2 (6:56) I'm actually Speaker 3 (6:57) really paranoid Speaker 2 (6:58) about being Speaker 3 (7:00) accosted by one of those people who is like, what do you pay in rent? Can I come home with you? Can I come see where you live? It seems Speaker 2 (7:10) like you Speaker 3 (7:10) have to Speaker 2 (7:11) say yes. There's a lot of that. Speaker 3 (7:12) You don't have to say yes. A Speaker 2 (7:14) lot of people do. I live in fear of just one of those random... What if they showed my clip of me saying no? Speaker 3 (7:21) Yeah. No, no. What do you do? I look so bad. Everyone else said yes. We need some protocol for, like, Speaker 2 (7:26) it's like, I'm opting out. Yeah. The no comment. Like, we don't have that. Like, I kind of Speaker 3 (7:32) wish we did. Speaker 2 (7:33) But, like, honestly, it seems so. I really do. It seems so stupid. But, like, it tells a story about New York that is exporting it to the rest of the country. Interesting. Which is, like, what we have had in L.A. We sort of had a. We had that corner for decades. Yeah. Like, every. movie and show. You'd see the Venice Boardwalk, some, like, a girl on rollerblades. Yeah, yeah. Like, we were exporting, right? Yeah, that's right. Speaker 3 (7:57) And Speaker 2 (7:57) we're not doing that in the same way when it comes to social media. We are on some things. People know about Erewhon smoothies in Central Europe because of our influencer economy. Speaker 3 (8:08) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:09) But it's, we don't own it the same way as we do. did we Speaker 4 (8:15) we tried to get