But these days her struggle to find steady work in Hollywood has led her to reopen what she fondly calls “the shack in the back” — the eight-by-10-foot shed by her pool where she is cutting and coloring friends’ hair to help ensure her family’s survival.

“This was never meant to be my income,” Ciganovich told TheWrap on a recent Sunday, while standing against one wall of her shack, near a framed still from “The Mandalorian” signed by creator and showrunner Jon Favreau.

“It was just always meant to be where my friends would come over and get their hair cut. Or where I would do little projects. It was like my little safe space, where I would practice a hairstyle or whatever.”

In the last year, work has dried up in a way that Ciganovich, 48, had never experienced. Before the Chicago-area native landed a recent gig working on the movie “Freaky Friday 2” as the third hairdresser, she had depleted her savings account to about $500 and was struggling to keep her guild health care coverage, she said. 

“My savings are wiped out,” Ciganovich said. “I know that’s the ebb and flow of the business, but I didn’t really think it could ever get to where I feel so desperate because I have no money, and I have a child. It feels like you’re begging, and I’ve never had to beg for work.”

Now Ciganovich is seriously considering a pivot that could see her moving across the country in search of work or even back to her family’s farm in southern Indiana to open a day spa in a church.

The double strikes last year shut down television productions and deepened a troubling trend that Ciganovich was already experiencing: A lack of new shows and shrinking opportunities for veteran below-the-line workers around Los Angeles.

As TheWrap has reported in its Holding on in Hollywood series, the employment struggles for Hollywood workers amid industry convulsion — with studios like Paramount now doing more layoffs — have reached an acute level. Some workers say they are living on food stamps, or accepting money from their parents, and most are at least considering leaving production hubs like Los Angeles and New York City for more affordable places.

For Ciganovich, who works mostly on streaming shows, the studios have become risk averse, relying on “remakes and more remakes” rather than greenlighting new shows — a recurring theme in TheWrap’s series. “When you look at the production report nothing is [being filmed] in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s all Great Britain, Ireland, New Mexico, Atlanta.”

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s strikes, several producers Ciganovich typically turned to for work opportunities either retired or stepped away from the business altogether, she said. “Now I have to build up new connections and get new people to hire me. It’s like I’m starting over,” Ciganovich said. “When I moved here at 25 I did this, and now I’m doing it again at 48.”

From beauty school to Star Wars

Ciganovich has dedicated her career to hairdressing. She grew up in Naperville, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Her father worked for a carpet company, her mother worked as an event coordinator and travel agent. After graduating from high school, Ciganovich attended beauty school. 

She completed her 1,400 hours and got her beautician license. She delivered pizzas before landing a job as a colorist at a Chicago salon that performed a variety of Jenny Jones makeovers including on lottery winners, at the NBC building. “That’s kind of how I got my taste of Hollywood,” she said.

Then, in her early 20s, she wanted a change, so she moved to Boulder, Colo., for a few years. By that time her sister had moved to Los Angeles and needed a roommate. Ciganovich obliged. 

Soon after arriving in L.A., she met a boyfriend who had co-written the 2003 movie “Wonderland,” which starred Val Kilmer and Kate Bosworth. She worked on the film essentially for free, but she got her hours and that paved her way to joining local 706, the IATSE hair and makeup union.

In the beginning it was slow going, and she kept a steady job at Rudy’s Barbershop for about five years. Then she landed a hairdressing gig on “Monk,” and suddenly she felt part of the Hollywood professional community.

She found real stability when she joined the team on “So You Think You Can Dance.” She stayed on as a hairdresser for 12 seasons. “That was the show that I loved so much that it didn’t matter like what I was doing, I would just quit whatever job I was on to go back to it,” she recalled. 

“That show was the ultimate. You had all this creativity to do everything. It was quick changes and the dancers were really cool. And the group of people that came together on that show was like a family.”

She continued to hone her skills and learn new techniques through classes and by working on shows like “Cold Case,” a police procedural where cast members would solve dormant cases often using flashbacks of the same character. She did five episodes of “Glee,” 21 episodes of “The X Factor,” a full season of “Bones” and led the hair department on “The Orville.” She worked with background actors — the secretaries and office workers — on one season of “Mad Men.” 

Now I have to build up new connections and get new people to hire me. It’s like I’m starting over.

Hairdresser Sallie Ciganovich

She was in the hair department for the 2011 movie “Friends With Benefits” starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis.

In late 2021, she joined the hair department on the third season of “The Mandalorian” and the next year she worked on another Star Wars spinoff, “Ahsoka.” For both, she was nominated for Primetime Emmys, her third and fourth nominations.

And then the strikes happened, and the work dried up. And since they ended, it hasn’t gotten much better.

By July of 2023 “it really started hitting our family where you can’t buy a bottle of wine. You can’t go out to dinner. It was scarier than what it was in COVID.”

The shack in the back and possible pivots

While still digging for jobs on set, she decided to take clients in the shack in the back, which she had purchased for $1,900 from Home Depot some eight years earlier. The shed sits in the back corner behind the pool of the rented one-story bungalow Ciganovich shares with her husband and daughter. 

Her husband, who works in property management, insulated the roof, put in the floor and they painted it white, she said.

“He has a steady income for sure,” Ciganovich said. “But I couldn’t be a housewife. I have to work to make our house survive.” (Her husband also has financial commitments to his ex-wife and two children, she said.) 

On a blistering hot Southern California afternoon, with a fan blaring inside the shed, Ciganovich gave TheWrap a tour of the space, which features a salon chair and makeup mirror. Adorning the walls are her framed Emmy nominations, a picture of the band Poison (“my favorite childhood band”) and signed publicity artwork from the Star Wars shows.

On that Sunday, she trimmed the hair of two Hollywood makeup artists. One worked with Ciganovich on “The Orville” and the other on a “Star Wars” show. After her interview with TheWrap, she was expecting the costume designer from “So You Think You Can Dance” and “The Masked Singer.”

She isn’t charging L.A. prices: A men’s haircut is $60. An all-over color is $100. “It’s just friends helping friends, really,” she said.

But even with the supplemental income from her home salon, and her husband’s job, Ciganovich has been struggling to keep up. Before landing her spot on “Freaky Friday 2,” she was in danger of losing her health insurance for not qualifying for enough hours, she said. “In the 20 years that I’ve been in this, this is the first time that I’ve ever been in danger of having no health care for me and my daughter.”

Now she is considering other more radical pivots. Her mother recently called her to note that 32 movies have been greenlit in Kentucky, which has established tax breaks for productions. “My family lives in Indiana,” Ciganovich said. “I might as well just go try to find a job in Kentucky.”

Or she has been mulling the idea of trying to transform a church close to her parent’s family farm near Hanover, Indiana, into a day spa. She plans to take an online business course to prepare for that possibility.

But it’s not where her heart is.

“How do you give up something that you love so much?” she said. “People moved here to be part of this [entertainment] community. That’s why there’s a Hollywood sign on the side of a mountain. It’s just kind of heartbreaking that it is all falling apart.”

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

Part 2: A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)

Part 3: An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks (Paul Lindsay)

Part 4: A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’  (Phil Stark)

Part 5: A Dolly Grip Says: ‘I Don’t Know How Long This Career Can Sustain Itself’ (Diego Mariscal)

The post A Hollywood Hairdresser Styled ‘Star Wars’ Actors Before the Slowdown Led Her to Open the ‘Shack in the Back’ appeared first on TheWrap.

But with the advent of AI and the specter of virtual film shoots replacing real behind-the-scenes people, he’s worried that his decades of on-set experience won’t transfer anywhere else. 

“I never went to college, I really have no other skills. It’s a very specialized thing that I do, as a dolly grip being able to move an 800-pound dolly to a three-ton camera crane and getting it in a specific place,” the 41-year-old told TheWrap. “No one really cares about it outside of this industry,”

Mariscal is not just concerned for himself. He worries about his fellow crew members, especially anyone just now coming into the industry with the same dream he had. “There really is no security blanket in this industry, even for people who dedicate our whole lives to it,” he said. “There’s a whole generation of kids that are coming in right now, in their 20s. I can already tell them, ‘You’re not going to be able to fulfill all the hours you’re going to need to actually make it.’”

That feeling of uncertainty led Mariscal in 2017 to start the Facebook group Crew Stories, a place for dolly operators and others in the entertainment industry to share their personal struggles and help each other find work. 

As the group’s administrator, he’s noticed a troubling pattern: Accidental deaths of crew members are on the rise, as are suicides in the industry. He somberly referred to the July suicide of a transporter driver at Trilith Studios in Atlanta.

“She was in her car in the parking lot and committed suicide at the studio. That’s a message; it’s not like she just picked a random place,” Mariscal said. “It’s always happened, but now you’re hearing about it every week.”

When Crew Stories first started it was “just the funniest stories in the world,” he said. “I wanted to have a place for good news and I wanted it to be a celebration of crew members.” As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, the online group “took a very real turn” where members started talking about their personal and professional struggles.

Today the Crew Stories community is more than 96,000 strong on Facebook (with nearly 53,000 members also on Instagram) and has become an indispensable resource for crew members as opportunities for work — especially in Los Angeles — shrink. And last year, on the first day of the writers’ strike, Mariscal broadened the scope of Crew Stories by organizing his first in-person event. 

As TheWrap has explored in its Holding on in Hollywood series, Mariscal is part of a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — who are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their lives. 

Mariscal said he never used to contemplate doing anything other than making movies, but realized over the last few years he’s got to have a Plan B. At one point recently, he was even considering starting a power washing business. 

“Deep down, I think it’s literally in the name — ‘below the line,’” he said of his and his colleagues’ place in Hollywood. “Like we are below the line, we’re the shadows. We’re just the little people behind the curtain and we’re replaceable,” he said with a sigh.

From Star Wars-inspired home movies to the real thing

Mariscal lives in Eagle Rock with his wife, Ami, and their two dogs, Indiana Jones and Deckard, both named after iconic Harrison Ford characters. He proudly showed off his collection of Star Wars figures and models, and a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” baseball cap signed by Ford himself.  “I was working on ‘Shrinking’ and I was wearing it and he just pulled it off my head and signed it,” he said. 

He found his first set job as a production assistant in 1999 thanks to the Mandy list — a site for crew, acting, and other jobs in the industry —and was quickly  promoted from just fetching coffee. He was sent on an errand to Home Depot to get a piece of breakaway glass. “I saw this other piece of glass. It was the same price, but it was double the size,” he recalled. He bought the larger piece and had it cut in two and arrived on the set with the asked-for pane and an extra. 

“The art department guy was like, ‘All right, you’re with me.’ And then the grip was, like, ‘No, that guy’s with me. I need that kid.’ They started fighting for me. They asked me what do you want to do? I said, ‘I want to work with cameras.’ And then I was a grip for my first little show,” he said.

He liked being in the camera department, but realized that shooting “digital stuff” as an assistant cameraman was not for him. “I do not like being at a monitor. I don’t like pulling focus like that. I feel detached from everything,” he said. A director of photography suggested, “Hey, maybe you should think about dolly gripping.” Mariscal said, describing the person on set who directs the camera operator away from obstacles. “It hit something in me. I love pushing stuff. I like being in shape more. I like to be able to move around a lot more. And then I just slowly gravitated towards that.”

The original “Star Wars” films inspired Mariscal to get into movies in the first place. After he saw a behind-the-scenes documentary about the model makers behind the film’s Death Star and X-wing Starfighters, he began making his own home movies. 

“When I was a little kid, I would build models and then get my dad’s camcorder and get a jet fighter and explode them with fireworks,” he said. 

By the time he was old enough to enter the industry, however, model making was on its way out and CGI was taking over. “I really tried to get into computers,” he said after watching CGI-heavy films like “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2.” 

Then he realized, “I am not going to sit down for hours and do little data points. I want to make a model with a camera around it and explode it.”

Being hands-on and in-person proved to be the right career path for Mariscal.

“I’m doing it at pretty much the highest level you can do it at, which is what I’ve always wanted,” he said, but he doesn’t know if all-digital sets of the future or AI-heavy productions will even need dolly grips. 

There are currently about 100 to 150 dolly grips in his local, he said. A big movie like “Thor: Love and Thunder” usually employs two people in that capacity, but a small comedy like the Apple+ series “Shrinking,” needs more. “Comedies tend to carry three to capture the unscripted funny moments,” he explained.

With his gripping days possibly numbered, he’s grateful to have broadened his skill set to include event planning. For his next event, he wants to build homages to “Blade Runner” and “The Fifth Element.” “We build the taxi [that Bruce Willis drives in the movie] and have the entire windshield be LED screens, and then put it on a motion base,” he said.

Two of the things Mariscal mentioned most to TheWrap are how important working in person and helping other people are to him. 

Recently, the nephew of Rico Priem — a grip who died in June after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel after a night shoot for “9-1-1” — thanked him for setting up the GoFundMe in his uncle’s name. 

“I got to meet him three days ago on set and he said ‘Hey, thank you so much,’” Mariscal recalled. “And we hugged. It’s so great to put a name to the person I’ve been talking to online, and then seeing the look in his eye. That means the world to me, where you can actually have real world impact on your peers and people you love and care about.”

Raising money for the crew community and their causes

Crew Stories became a place to vent, share a GoFundMe, or find help for a myriad of issues. But Mariscal wanted to do more. The first day of the writers’ strike, he threw his first in-person event. 

He’s thrown three more parties since then. The most recent one in July was the first that he and his co-organizers didn’t pay for out of their own pockets. Thanks to more than 30 sponsors including Matthews Studio Equipment, Chapman/Leonard equipment rental and Milagro Tequila, he and dozens of volunteers set up an ’80s-slasher-themed “Crew Camp,” with DJs, food trucks, a free craft table and mental health experts on standby. 

They were also able to raise $1,000 each for three nonprofits: Local 80 Mutual Aid Pantry in Burbank, the Safety for Sarah foundation, and the Outlast Arts and Education film camp in South Dakota.

The food pantry is located in the lobby of the IATSE 80 headquarters in Burbank and is for “local members that are hurting,” he said. “We have milk, eggs, bread, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, dog food, anything you want. Just come and grab whatever you need.”

The money raised at that event will go toward an industrial refrigerator so the pantry can finally store perishable food. 

While there are other online groups for various crew people, he hasn’t seen anything quite like the Crew Stories community. 

“It’s rewarding,” Mariscal said. “It just needs to be done, and no one’s doing it. I mean, I didn’t pick this, it just fell on me, and it’s a lot. But we’re helping people, and that’s all that matters.” 

Next week: The series continues.

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

Part 2: A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)

Part 3: An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks (Paul Lindsay)

Part 4: A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’  (Phil Stark)

The post A Dolly Grip Says: ‘I Don’t Know How Long This Career Can Sustain Itself’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The 51-year-old former comedy writer, who authored the movie script “Dude, Where’s My Car” and worked in the writer’s room of “That ’70s Show,” is seeing the pain and confusion gripping entertainment professionals from another angle: through his tele-health practice as a licensed psychologist.

His patients, who are mostly screenwriters and comedians, are living through the Hollywood tumult. The WGA strike stopped production in its tracks. Screenwriters are struggling to pay their bills, even as they walk the picket lines to fight for their futures. Production is fleeing California. 

And as Stark described it, there is a general sense of pessimism in the air, the feeling that the present was difficult, but the future could be bleaker.

“People are coming to me with the bigger questions about whether this career is sustainable or whether they can afford to do it at all,” Stark told TheWrap. “A lot of people are looking for help and support dealing with the aftershocks of these big changes in entertainment.”

As TheWrap has reported in its Holding on in Hollywood series, a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.

Stark can certainly relate, in more ways than one. For him, the 2008 recession was a turning point in his own career, when the writing opportunities started to dry up and he steadily lost his mojo — before he decided to pivot to an entirely new career in his 40s.

He has a message for Hollywood workers battling their own anxieties dealing with the “entertainment industry apocalypse.” First, there’s no going back. “Time is just a conveyor belt that constantly moves into the future,” he said. And second, Hollywood workers today need to be prepared to leave. 

“You can’t just get the same jobs in L.A. anymore,” Stark said. “Production is fleeing the state and the country. Now you have to assess: Do I want to move to Vancouver for three months, or can I get this same job that somebody in Alabama is going to be doing instead of me? You might be thinking it’ll go back to normal. But the truth is, you should be trying to figure out can I live like this in the future? Is this how I want it to be?”

From “South Park” to “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

Stark drove out to Los Angeles from his native Houston, Texas, with the goal of becoming a screenwriter. The year was 1995 and he got a job in a coffee shop so he could focus on his scripts. He read all the classic screenwriting tomes, including Syd Field’s “Screenplay.”

Then a friend suggested he was funny and should take a stab at comedy writing. So he wrote a “Simpsons” spec script, and a “Seinfield.” Then another friend from college got him a job as a PA on a new animated show for Comedy Central in development. It was six weeks work. That show ended up being “South Park.”

“It was a rocket ship to hang onto,” Stark recalled.

He only worked on the show for a year, as a writer’s assistant, but it set up his career. His agents soon lined up producers wanting to meet anybody who had a “South Park” credit. His first meeting ended up being for “That ’70s Show.” Suddenly, he had an office and was being paid a WGA minimum for scripts.

He ended up working on the sitcom for all eight seasons, forging friendships with cast members like Ashton Kutcher, who was later cast as the lead in Stark’s movie, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

Stark saved well, bought a house and started a family with two children.

Then Hollywood began to change. Reality TV took off. The recession hit. “And there were less and less overall deals,” he said. “People were making fewer pilots. I felt like a coal miner in an industry where everybody was going solar.”

Stark said he had “made a lot of money” in the first decade of his career but slowly he drew down his savings. His agents stopped returning his calls, and the frustration and unhappiness mounted. “Eventually I started feeling like I had to break in all over again,” he said. “And it is hard enough to break in one time.”

He recalled a turning point of sorts, when in 2018 his agent at the time dusted off an old spec script of his for a multi-camera sitcom and lined up financing. The agent wanted Stark to make a formal pitch deck for him to be named showrunner. “So, I made this deck, and it was pretty shitty,” he recalled. “I half-assed it.” 

In that moment he realized he didn’t want to be a showrunner, after all. He wanted a different life, one with less of the same struggles. “That was when I realized that I made a real choice,” he said. “By the end of my career, I was just writing stuff that I hoped somebody would buy. And I didn’t care if it was my story, or I was passionate about it.” 

A new beginning

In 2019, Stark enrolled in graduate school at Antioch College in Culver City to be a psychologist. At Antioch, he was surrounded by other writer friends who also later became therapists. “We could have put on a production, because we had a director, a producer, a writer and actor,” he said. ‘We had everybody.”

Only months into his training, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down his opportunity at practical training. He started out administering counseling via zoom calls and has never known otherwise.

“I work 100% via tele-health,” he said. “This is how all my clients experience the work.”

Today, he is happily acting as his own agent to find clients. He works with writers, directors, producers, comedians, comedy troupes. Oftentimes they are dealing with a midlife crisis. And more recently they have specific concerns, like how will artificial intelligence affect their entertainment careers. Will the studio just have a computer write feature scripts? Will human writers even be needed?

The pivot hasn’t been easy, Stark admitted. “It’s not as stable or not nearly as lucrative” as his early entertainment career was. He has a lot of work to do still to establish his practice. He joked that he wishes there were “residuals” in therapy. “If a client like had a breakthrough and felt great that I would get a percentage of their earnings, it’d be great,” he said. “Makes me feel how lucky I was to be a member of the guild back in the day. But I’m loving what I’m doing now, and I’m happy doing it. I’m building it as a career, just as I did my writing career.”

He counseled that it’s okay for those holding on in Hollywood to admit they don’t have all the answers right now, that their anxiety and paralysis are not misplaced or wrong to feel.

Today the industry “is fragmented, and people are realizing now that they’re not going to do for the whole lives what they started out doing” Stark said, “and that period where you’re trying to figure out the differences is hard.”

In late 2021, Stark self-published a self-help book, “Dude, Where’s My Car-tharsis?” 

In the book, there’s a chapter about change that uses the metaphor of standing on top of a dam, watching the water rise below. “We know it’s coming. We know we’re going to get wet. We know we need to move, but for some reason we can’t act yet,” Stark described. “We’re just not ready. Sometimes it’s only when our feet get wet that we become ready to act.”

Next week: The series continues.

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

Part 2: A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)

Part 3: An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks

The post A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’  appeared first on TheWrap.

The New School grad “hustled” his way onto film sets by donning a headset and looking important. He got hired as a PA and later as an assistant director on top shows like “Six Feet Under,” Grey’s Anatomy,” “Westworld” and the Jordan Peele feature “Us.”

Now the 53-year-old is shuttling between Los Angeles and Atlanta to find enough work to keep his Hollywood dream alive.

“From when I was young, all I wanted to do was make movies,” Lindsay told TheWrap. “And I finally got there but I may not be afforded to finish that journey.”

These days, the calls or text that used to lead to jobs — or at least a “thanks for coming in” message — are being met with silence, as AD gigs have gotten scarcer. “There are hundreds of us that are sitting at home, and we’re not sitting at home or working other jobs because we want to,” he said.

Lindsay is part of a private Facebook group, Crew Stories, where 96,000 crew members commiserate about how they may have to drop out of — or already have left — the industry. 

The mantra for many, he said, is embodied by #SurivingUntil25, a hashtag nod to the belief espoused by optimistically minded industry executives and workers alike that 2025 will somehow be better than 2024. As TheWrap has noted in its Holding on in Hollywood series, the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, double Hollywood strikes, linear television decline and industry consolidation have led to fewer employment opportunities for both above and below-the-line workers in the film and TV industries. Many people are suffering — and struggling to forge a path forward.

When productions aren’t calling, Lindsay can rely on a few non-industry sources of income, including two Airbnbs he rents out. And when he’s not in LA, he often sublets his Sherman Oaks apartment to friends in the business.

In one of his Airbnbs, he set up a studio where he records a podcast about below-the-line workers that he’s shopping around, which he created to “give a face and a name and a personality to prop masters and production secretaries and wardrobe stylists.”

 Lindsay also has a dotcom brokering business in which he sells web domain names. “I’m on it a few hours a day, and in those other hours, I can write, I can reach out, I can prospect on other jobs,” he said.

Lindsay spoke to TheWrap from Atlanta, where he was visiting family members. He expected to work while he was there as well, but he was unable to line up a gig before he flew in. “There were a number of shows I was up for in LA and Atlanta,” he said. “And because of the looming strike, it either didn’t happen, or it went to someone else.”

A one-way ticket led to “Six Feet Under”

Lindsay’s parents, who came to New York City from the West Indies, were skeptical that he could make a career out of his “filmmaking hobby,” as his father once phrased it. 

After he graduated with a master’s degree from The New School, Lindsay found work in New York City as a PA on commercials.

On the night of the Oscars, he decided to head West to Hollywood. “On the flight from JFK to LAX, the flight attendant asked me, ‘Are you going home?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ I had never lived in Los Angeles before, but I knew that that’s where I wanted to be,” Lindsay said. 

Once he hit LA, he didn’t put out resumes. Instead, he slipped onto sets wearing a headset and volunteering to help. “I stayed hungry, and one thing led to another,” Lindsay said. A TV pilot he was hired on shut down after the lead actress got ill, but it was shooting at Sunset Gower Studios — and next door to the set of HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” 

Lindsay hustled onto that set and got hired as a PA for the Emmy-winning series’ final season.

“I kept working as much as I could, sometimes doing double shifts,” he said.

But Lindsay wasn’t making enough on a PA salary, so he dropped out of the industry for a year to work for various websites, including one for Serena and Venus Williams, and took a job as a project manager for Blitz, an ad agency. “I saved up a nest egg, and then came back into it,” he explained. 

By then, he knew he wanted to become an AD.

That seemed more possible during the boom period from 2015 to 2023 when he sometimes worked 11 months out of the year. And in 2018 and 2019, Lindsay said, new streaming platforms ordered so many shows it created a glut — which seemed to portend endless growth. 

But then came the pandemic and the strikes and the new Hollywood approach of shelving series or movies, sometimes for tax write-offs, which meant residuals from past shows were no longer coming in. 

Lindsay lamented the cancelation of “Westworld,” seemingly because of a dispute between HBO and the series creator. “They can take away all the royalties from the actors, writers and the directors, which is an atrocity, because people put work into that show. They dead end the cost and that’s it,” he said.

He credited directing mentors including Bill Purple for showing him it was possible to go from AD to the director’s chair. And he called Joe Lazarov his “‘ambassador of Quan,’” to quote ‘Jerry Maguire.’”

Another mentor and good friend was Rico Priem, the veteran grip who died in June after suffering a heart attack while driving home for a night shoot of “9-1-1.” 

“When you see that Rico was killed in the car, it may not be anyone to you, but it was someone who brought your favorite TV shows and movies to life. They’re your neighbors, they’re your friends,” he added. 

Among his career highlights was an episode of “Genius” where he and his team had to recreate both the Tulsa riots and the shooting of Malcolm X within two days in Macon, Georgia, which doesn’t have the same level of infrastructure as Atlanta.

“We used background [actors] from Macon because we couldn’t afford to travel to Atlanta or bring people down,” Lindsay recalled. “When you walk onto set and see all this, you’re, like, ‘Wow, this really came together.’ It was such a rush. You think about the shows and the days and the long hours, but then you look at [results like that], it was an amazing thing we did here.”

He also recounted a recent shoot in Joshua Tree at a house that was built into the side of a mountain. “It was an amazing house, made of poured concrete, granite and stone… How many people would see this? It was 104 degrees, and people were passing out, but still, you do what you do with that,” he said.

The bonds he formed on film sets were stronger than even when he was in the Navy or on a basketball team. 

In 2016, he was working in Atlanta when his daughter was about to deliver his first grandchild back in California. “The executive producers chartered me a flight to Burbank so I would have no delay,” Lindsay said. “That’s the type of people that this business has, family-centric people that are really amazing.” 

But lately, with cost cuts and fewer jobs, Hollywood is less generous to its workers.

And not working takes an emotional as well as a financial toll, he admitted. “When you’re not working, you miss that,” he said. “It’s a communal thing. And by not working, you miss that camaraderie, you miss being part of that machine.”

To increase his chances of finding work, Lindsay has also registered as a local in Atlanta, and he splits his time between the two cities. One problem, however, is that LA productions often bring their own LA crews. “More than likely the person who you’re bringing in was somebody who trained me or someone that I worked alongside of,” he said.

From when I was young, all I wanted to do was make movies. And I finally got there but I may not be afforded to finish that journey.

Paul Lindsay

Lindsay said that being Black can also mean he and his colleagues are sometimes overlooked when producers simply hire their friends. 

“The most common lament heard between a lot of my peers is, ‘Oh, I don’t know any Black ADs, so I didn’t call anyone,’” he said. “When someone says, ‘I didn’t know any,’ you didn’t really look, because we’re all over,” he said. “As a result of more people being available… I don’t want to say it’s gotten worse, but it’s become more evident.”

He had hoped to achieve his goal of making it as a director — and then retire early by 60. He and his girlfriend have talked about moving to a different country, somewhere that is not as expensive, where life is a little bit easier.

“I don’t need to make gajillions of dollars,” he said. “I live very simply. I’ve been homeless as an adult,” he said, referring to a brief period in New York when he was in his 30s. “I know what it’s like to live below your means and under your means. I want to make sure that my people, and my tribe, are taken care of and that’s that.”

Lindsay likes to focus on the positive. But the game has changed so drastically, he knows he may soon have to consider a day when he can no longer do what he loves.

“It’s like, damn, I’m close,” he added, “but I’m not going to be able to do it because it’s not fiscally sustainable anymore. It’s like going 90 meters in a race and your shoes fall off, so you can’t continue. And now it’s $4,000 to buy new shoes.”

Next week: The series continues.

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

Part 2: A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)

The post An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks appeared first on TheWrap.

Minutes later, Odin slapped on a VR headset and journeyed into “Penguin Paradise,” his arms flailing about as he shouted to other contestants inside the game.

“This is the death of television,” Copen Howard, 44, told TheWrap. “That’s all they watch, YouTube Shorts. And it breaks my heart.”

For most of the past two decades, she has spent her time developing reality television shows. These days, she watches the painful transformation of the TV industry playing out in real time in her Santa Monica apartment.

For Copen Howard, the tumultuous shift in television viewing habits — especially among younger consumers — is top of mind as she contemplates her family’s financial survival. In November, she was laid off from a job as a senior vice president of development for a Canadian production company. She hasn’t been able to find work in the industry since.

The divorced mother of three small children, who left an abusive marriage, is trying to hold on. Copen Howard’s eldest son, JJ, is autistic and eats mostly through a gastrostomy tube, the result of congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a situation that generates large — and persistent — medical bills. She recently had to tell her nanny she could no longer afford her. And she is leaning heavily on her retired, middle class parents in Arizona, who are contributing thousands of dollars to try to keep the family afloat in their $4,000-a-month, rent-controlled apartment.

When she’s not shuttling her kids to summer camp, Copen Howard spends her days searching for TV consulting gigs, preparing to launch a self-funded Etsy business and is pecking away at screenplays. 

“I could try to put something on YouTube if I just wanted to tell stories,” she said. “But I can’t make a living that way. And right now, I have to figure out how to make money.”

Copen Howard is part of a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — who are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. In television, especially, they are seeing troubling trends that lead them to think that their hopes may be misplaced, that the industry contraction may be secular — and that they are being left behind.

As TheWrap reported on Thursday, studios are cutting costs and becoming more cautious about greenlighting new shows, forcing production companies to find ways to make content more inexpensively. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.

For development executives like Copen Howard, an introverted but normally sunny person, despair is starting to creep in.

“I knew that the earth was shaking, but I didn’t realize that the earthquake was going to crack open the ground and we were all just going to fall through it,” she said. “I’m still hanging on, clinging to the side of that cliff. I’ve been laid off before, and I’ve always gotten another job, but this job doesn’t exist much anymore at all now.”

From Superbowl halftime show to “crocodile whisperer”

Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., Copen Howard always seemed to be on an eventual path to the entertainment industry. At 12, her parents gave her a home video camera, expecting that she would film herself acting. “But I never really wanted to act,” she said. “I wanted to write the story. So I would write scripts, and then I would have all my friends in the neighborhood act in them.”

In 2002, fresh out of college at the University of Arizona, Copen Howard made her way to Los Angeles. She intended to work in the scripted world, but the opportunities were more plentiful in the booming unscripted genre. She landed her first PA job on the 20th Television “EX-treme Dating” show with Jillian Barberie. She worked the front desk as a PA/receptionist on “The Sharon Osborne Show.”

Soon after, Damon Wayans hired her as his assistant when he was doing “My Wife and Kids” at ABC.

Within six months, she had scored a plum PA job working on the 2003 Super Bowl Halftime Show, where Sting and Gwen Stefani sang “Message in a Bottle” together. 

“I thought, ‘Well, this is it, I’m here to stay,’” she recalled. “And, you know, if anyone could have told me that 20 years from now everything is going to crater, maybe I would have planned better.”

Some assignments took her to places she wouldn’t normally visit. She journeyed to Alaska in the heart of winter for a pilot for “Wild West Alaska,” which aired on Animal Planet and later on Discovery Channel. “It was frightening — everything in Alaska is built to kill you,” Copen Howard said.

She ended up in rural Louisiana for a pilot about events for off-road enthusiasts that tricked out their own trucks and competed. And she traveled to Belize to shadow a “crocodile whisperer” who could tame crocodiles into being less aggressive so they could be returned to the wild. The docuseries was never picked up; Copen Howard thought it had the potential to be special.

“And that’s always the sad thing. We work so hard on these things that we believe in,” she said. “Most of my job was failure. It’s like, I worked so hard, and I believed in it, people need to hear the story. And then the network said no.”

In all, Copen Howard calculates, she has developed over 1,000 projects in the last 22 years, including numerous shows for HGTV more recently.

A few years in, she realized that her comfort zone was not on sets in far-off places, but in the office. “It was the thinking and the creation and all of the work putting it together that I really sort of fell in love with rather than going out there and having to get the shot 100 times,” she said.

I knew that the earth was shaking, but I didn’t realize that the earthquake was going to crack open the ground and we were all just going to fall through it.

Erin Copen Howard

Copen Howard pivoted to focusing on development. She landed several jobs as a senior VP of development, creating a sort of niche as someone who could be trusted to run an operation remotely from Los Angeles for companies based far from Hollywood. She would create a slate of new ideas for shows, gather the materials and pitch them out to networks.

She was laid off in 2008 during the recession. And again, in the summer of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. In each case, she bounced back within a few weeks or a month or so. 

“I never had any problem with job security until now,” Copen Howard said.

“Wish seeds” and screenwriter dreams

This summer, Copen Howard has settled into a new routine. She wakes up early to work on her screenplay projects, shuttles her kids to day camp, checks up with contacts and job boards for TV consulting jobs and carves out time for her “Wish Seeds” business idea. It came to her during a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in February at Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade.

She was feeling particularly vulnerable after having just lost her job. “I knew I was going to have to pivot and evolve and change,” she said. “And I was terrified.” Amid the dragons and red lanterns, she and her children all wrote down wishes and hung them on a cherry blossom tree and took a group photo. 

Inspired by the experience, Copen Howard is creating quills made of seed paper that children can write their “enchanted wishes” on, soak overnight and then plant the seeds and wait for them to sprout into reality. She hopes to sell them through sites like Etsy.

But Copen Howard’s real passion is screenwriting. Being unemployed for so long has given her the impetus she may have been lacking to lean into her writing. She is working on a script for a low-budget horror film, one in the sports action-thriller genre and another inspired by the true events involving her son’s medical challenges. She recently changed her LinkedIn tagline to “emerging screenwriter.”

She also sees her children’s obsession with short-form videos and virtual reality as a harbinger of a new normal that will continue to roil the industry, especially with artificial intelligence now daring to infiltrate numerous industry professions. When she explained her job struggles to them, as young as they are, their response was for her to “make TikTok movies.”

What she worked in was “old television,” she said. “New television will be something completely different.”

Copen Howard looked over at Aurora and Odin immersed in their entertainment worlds. “I get really sad talking about it,” she said, her voice breaking for an instant. “Because I really loved it, and I can’t do it anymore. There’s still a table of people doing it. The table is very small. There’s not a lot of seats left. There’s no room for me to pull up a chair.”

Next week: The series continues.

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

The post A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market appeared first on TheWrap.

The pandemic and double strikes have taken their toll on the entertainment industry. And the recovery that many had expected has proven messy, at best.

And now, Hollywood veterans — in production, development and whose businesses support the industry — are facing the unimaginable reality that their dreams of making a long career in Hollywood may be coming to an end — or to a moment when they are forced to consider a pivot to a different life.

TheWrap talked to working folks in the industry to understand their personal stories. They include producers in unscripted TV, an award-winning hairdresser, a TV director, a senior vice president for development, a dolly grip and a sound supervisor. All have struggled to find work since last year. They are coping with mortgages, car payments and even food. Most are scrambling to line up a Plan B before it’s too late. As they explained in their own words, industry trends suggest the unemployment malaise is likely to deepen. Studios are cutting costs and becoming more risk-averse about greenlighting new shows, forcing production companies to find ways to make content more inexpensively. And with jobs drying up — and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence — the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.

Major industry hubs Los Angeles and New York are steadily losing out as the industry goes through one of the most transformative periods in its 100-year history. On-location shooting in L.A. fell 12% from April to the end of June compared to last year, according to a study from FilmLA, a drop primarily attributed to a 56% slide in shoot days for reality TV shows. Film and TV jobs now make up a smaller share of Los Angeles entertainment industry employment than they have in 30 years, with more jobs shifting to online content creation, live events and gaming, according to the Otis College Report on the Creative Economy.

This week, we delve into the stories of two Erins living on opposite sides of the country. 

******

IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, ERIN BROWNE is a producer for reality TV and other unscripted shows. The single mother of two children, aged four and 10, said she hasn’t worked in entertainment for more than six weeks, total, since November. She is leaning on food stamps and credit cards to survive and has turned to doing minimum-wage jobs at AI companies.

“There are a lot of workers in the industry right now that are struggling,” Browne said. “There are a lot of people that are having to sell their homes, figure out new ways to feed their children. This is unique in anything I have experienced in the past 25 years I have been doing this.”

In Los Angeles, Erin Copen Howard, also a single mother who has three children, one of whom has special needs, has tried fruitlessly to get another job in TV development. She is leaning on her parents and is trying to embrace the moment to write screenplays.

“I knew that the earth was shaking, but I didn’t realize that the earthquake was going to crack open the ground and we were all just going to fall through it,” Copen Howard told TheWrap. “I’m still hanging on, clinging to the side of that cliff. I’ve been laid off before, and I’ve always gotten another job, but this job doesn’t exist much anymore at all now.” (Copen Howard’s story will be more fully told in Part Two of this series, on Friday.)

From “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to food stamps

Erin Browne stepped into Hollywood as a wide-eyed 22-year-old NYU graduate in 2000. It was the era of “Survivor” and the reality show craze, and Browne first found work as a personal assistant on a variety of unscripted shows, including “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Faking It” and the American version of “Wife Swap,” a hit show on ABC where mothers from two different families would trade families.

The California native was hooked. “I always loved TV and film, but that seemed a little bit inaccessible to me because I came from a poor family, a poor town,” Browne, 45, told TheWrap. “It seemed unreachable. But then, after school, I was able to get a few PA jobs and just sort of move up.”

After a slew of jobs on reality shows, Browne shifted into on-set producing of documentary-style unscripted shows. There was “Most Evil,” a show discussing the science of serial killers, for Discovery. For PBS, she worked on “History Detectives,” “Gangland Graveyard” and “Can Animals Predict Natural Disasters?” And she helped produce a spate of true crime shows, including “The First 48” and “Secret Lives of Stepford Wives.”

Among her favorites was “Big Ideas for a Small Planet,” a show for the Sundance Channel that involved talking to “real folks who were doing extraordinary things.” Her work on “History Detectives” taught her obscure history and she traveled from Pearl Harbor to museum backrooms in Seattle to the Florida Panhandle.

Over nearly 25 years, her TV career has taken her to about 30 U.S. states, from the countryside to the city, from prisons to colleges.

She made a home in Brooklyn. And she became a single parent — today, her son is 10 and her daughter is four. Motherhood led her to travel less and eventually work only around New York City, where she can more easily utilize daycare options — and she pivoted from being on set to story producing, coordinating and post producing.

Over the years, she took a couple of breaks, but never for more than about a month. When she was about to give birth to her second child, she took a job at Disney in the legal department working as a paralegal on Broadway shows. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing the closure of theatres, and she was laid off. She pivoted to working on clip shows, repackaging sound and doing remote interviews.

“I went back to TV and have been really lucky,” Browne said. 

That was, until last year. 

Work slowed considerably during the strikes, even for non-union reality TV. Browne has struggled since late last year to find jobs, despite her two decades of experience. She has searched on “a ton of job boards” to no avail. “I am sort of applying for anything that comes along and getting nothing,” Browne said.

As she explained, a deeper shift was taking hold, one that other people holding on in Hollywood talked about to TheWrap. Networks have stopped producing as many new shows. Cable channels, which are inexorably declining, don’t need as much content, and streaming platforms have a backlog of content and are struggling to monetize their viewership. “It’s sort of trickling down to the creation of content,” she said.

This spring, Browne worked on a development project for A&E for six weeks. “We found amazing stories,” she shared. “And they just didn’t pick them up, which I’ve never had happen in the past.”

After finishing work on one series in November, a few new jobs she was targeting “just never materialized.” Browne started to feel the walls closing in. “It was at that point that things seemed to evaporate,” she said. “I started to really notice that my former bosses that I had loved in the past were also out of work.”

Since then, Browne said she has worked in TV for just six weeks.

Last month, her unemployment coverage ran out. Now she is digging into savings, leaning on her credit cards and living off food stamps (EBT). In February, she secured a grant of $2,000 from the Motion Pictures & Television Fund (MPTF), which has helped a little. “But there are certain debts I can’t pay,” she said, noting how her credit score has dropped precipitously. 

More recently, Browne has turned to working part-time for two artificial intelligence companies, one of which is a subcontractor for a tech giant. They are paying the New York City minimum wage of $16 an hour for her to help train chat boxes, also known as Large Language Models (LLMs). There are no benefits, but the work hours are “super flexible,” she said. “You would think that it would pay more with the specialized knowledge I have, but at this point, it doesn’t.”

For one AI company she is helping train a chat box to build out a travel website. She is also prompting a chat box to write poetry, scripts and TV outlines — and then grading those outlines.

“Obviously, it’s not creative and it does feel a bit like training my replacements,” she said. “So, there is an ethical [quandary].”

As the TV job drought deepens, Browne has commiserated in a Facebook group of women working in reality TV in both the U.S. and the U.K., where lately the messages have gone from hopeful to despondent.

I really feel a lot of despair for all the years that I put in, and the fact that I do love what I do. And I may never get a long-term job again.”

Erin Browne, TV producer

She is considering leveraging an unfinished master’s degree in early childhood education and applying for teaching jobs at elementary schools. She also interviewed for a job in the press office of a teacher’s union, figuring her teaching skills and ability to understand what journalists and TV producers want could set her apart. Still, she said, “I’ve been wanting so badly to stay in TV that I haven’t really focused on what’s next.”

Leaving New York would make sense financially, but would be hard to stomach in other ways. “I’m a queer, single parent by choice,” Browne said. “I just really need my kids to be in a diverse environment where them not having a father or a mom who may not fit gender stereotypes is accepted.”

This month, Browne landed a three-week gig helping director Marshall Curry on a project for a Democratic political action committee (PAC). Her assignment is to find stories about how the Democratic administration has helped people with medical caps and to pressure drug makers to charge less for routine lifesaving drugs. While temporary, “it is a total dream job,” she said.

Still, Browne reflected, “It’s hard to feel hopeful after this amount of time” without consistent TV work. “I was feeling hopeful at first. Now I really feel a lot of despair for all the years that I put in, and the fact that I do love what I do. And I may never get a long-term job again.”

Next in the series: Erin Copen Howard, a former SVP in development laid off in November 2023, works through her new reality.

Additional reporting by Guerin Blask.

The post Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads appeared first on TheWrap.

The report, which was first published by The Los Angeles Times, found that Hollywood studios spent $11.3 billion on productions in the second quarter of 2024, down approximately 20% from the same period in 2022. That figure is up around 30% from 2023, but that can be attributed to the anticipation of and the start of the Writers Guild of America strike last May.

Even when compared to the strike summer, the number of feature film productions that have started worldwide has dropped. ProdPro counted 261 feature films worldwide that started principal photography in Q2 2023, while the Q2 2024 count dropped 18% to 214.

Industry insiders told TheWrap that they believe one factor in the decrease in productions has been anticipation of another strike staged by IATSE or the Hollywood Basic Crafts that would force productions to shut down.

Throughout Q2, IATSE was in lengthy talks with studios on new mutual bargaining agreements, reaching a deal at the end of last month. Members of the crew workers’ union will vote to ratify the new contracts next week.

The Basic Crafts, meanwhile, are in the midst of negotiations on their own contracts. While a strike authorization vote has not been held by any of the unions in the basic crafts, they have informed the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the studios in labor talks, that they will not extend the expiration date of their contract past July 31.

Even if these contracts are ratified, leading to more productions, a return to pre-strike levels is still unlikely as studios are cutting back on spending to make their streaming services profitable. For several years, the entertainment industry benefitted from an arms race among the studios as they tried to fill their fledgling streaming services with a diverse array of original films and TV shows.

But the new period of austerity in Hollywood has led to a significant drop in employment opportunities for the industry’s workers, particularly in Los Angeles, where union members are struggling to keep up with high living costs. That struggle has been compounded by the exodus of productions to other states and countries in search of more generous tax incentives.

While Los Angeles remains the top driver of production employment even ahead of rising competitors like New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Albuquerque, that new competition, along with the rising costs and the toll the strikes have taken on financial reserves has put Los Angeles’ entertainment workers under new strain.

The post US Film and TV Production Down 40% From Pre-Strike Level, Report Says appeared first on TheWrap.