Posted in: Movies | Tagged: film permits, movies, tv

Los Angeles On-Location Filming Permits Dropped in December

California has been a COVID-19 hot zone for months now, and Los Angeles, in particular, has been hit very hard. There have been articles in recent days talking about how Los Angeles was uniquely left vulnerable to COVID-19. As the central hub for all of TV and film and with lots of productions working on the ground in the city. As COVID-19 continues to hammer the United States largely because people are acting like wearing a mask is somehow an affront to their basic human rights, and many people traveled without quarantining or testing before and after, we're probably in for a very long winter and spring. Yesterday, it was reported that many TV productions would remain on hiatus going into January, which isn't exactly promising news, and now we have the number of Los Angeles on-location filming permit numbers, and things aren't looking good for workers on the ground.

According to FilmLA, the city and county film permit office, and Deadline, the preliminary data says that applications for filming permits "declined significantly in the month of December, and last week, to lows we have not seen since the weeks after the restart of production last summer." This is the second consecutive month of declining requests. It means that people aren't looking to shoot on-location in Los Angeles because it's just too hard to try and keep everyone healthy. It wouldn't be surprising to hear that productions would want to go to different cities to get their productions off the ground. The problem is a lot of people who do multiple jobs in Los Angeles, like being a PA or an extra or something else along those lines, are now out of work.

FilmLA went on to say that, "The local film industry is highly invested in efforts to control Covid-19, as demonstrated by the strict safety protocols and testing that all productions are subject to. Receptive to the guidance of County public health experts, the industry also responsibly began dialing back activity considerably, beginning earlier in December." The vaccine has started to roll out, but most people in Los Angeles are on the younger side, or at least the people doing the smaller jobs are, and won't be eligible to get the vaccine before the spring at the earliest. It's not looking good for people just trying to get by in Los Angeles.

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