After the Strike, Back to Work in NYC?

Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian today. We were just talking about the state of the nation's economy viewed through the lens of policymakers who see a post-pandemic rebound versus voters who say things are worse. Now, I want to shift our attention to a sector of the local economy that should definitely be seeing an improvement.

Actors, writers, and all of the film and television industry in the city, with the end of the actors' strike and the writers before them, is it back to business for everyone involved from the actors and writers to the caterers and customers? Greg David has looked into this. He keeps track of the city's economy for THE CITY news site and is the director of the Business & Economics Reporting Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Welcome back to the show, Greg David. So great to have you here.

Greg David: Thank you and thanks for having me on.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, if you've been out of work due to the writers' and the actors' strikes, whether you yourself are on the picket line or just work in the film and TV production industries or adjacent businesses, we want to hear your back-to-work stories. Are you already seeing an improvement or is it taking a little bit longer than you expected for things to get going again? Call us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. If you can't get through on the phone, you can text that number or tweet us @BrianLehrer. Greg, let's put this into context. How important is the film and television production industry to the regional economy and what's the size of the industry here?

Greg David: It's one of our most important industries. It employs about 100,000 people directly, but if you count all the people who work around the industry, say, caterers, et cetera, you can get as high as about 180,000 people. That's 5% of the workforce, which, by the way, is almost exactly the percentage of the workforce that Wall Street accounts for.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Greg David: While this industry doesn't pay Wall Street salaries, which were now well north of $400,000, it's still one of the highest-paying sectors in the New York City economy. The average take-home pay for somebody in the film business is about $173,000, says the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, 50% higher than the average for all private-sector jobs. This is one important sector, yes.

Brigid Bergin: Wow, the average is $173,000? Do we know what the median is or is that--

Greg David: No, I don't personally know the median. You know why it's so high, right?

Brigid Bergin: Presumably because the top is making a whole lot. [laughs]

Greg David: No. Well, that's one reason, but because they're all union workers and union workers have good wages.

Brigid Bergin: There you go.

Greg David: I wrote a book more than a decade ago and I have a whole chapter on this industry. Even then, the people who were doing the costumes were making $80,000 and $90,000 a year.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Greg, when we think about New York's film and television industry, how does it compare to somewhere like the Los Angeles region, where we think of it as being one of the main drivers of their economy?

Greg David: Obviously, it's not as important as it is in California. Even in California, it's not the most important industry by any means. It is one of three industries that help to diversify this economy from Wall Street and finance over the last several decades. The other two are tech and higher education, all of which expanded dramatically, all of which pay relatively high salaries, and it played an important role in that. We're clearly the number two place for film and TV production in the whole country.

There are a lot of competition. There's a huge industry now in Georgia, but we're clearly the number two place. We have this enormous talent pool of people who work in the industry. People say it's either second only to California or just as good as California. The other thing that's really important about how the industry has become so much larger here is that like everyone else, actors, directors, especially the most important actors, want to sleep in their own beds at night.

When you're doing a film for a few weeks maybe, it's not a big deal to travel. If you're doing a television series where you're in production for six or eight months, you don't want to be living in another city. That's why shows that are shot elsewhere or based elsewhere like Chicago, like The Good Wife, were really shot in New York. Those things have all contributed to the rise of this industry in New York.

Brigid Bergin: Greg, the headline for your story at THE CITY is that it could take time for productions to get back up and going. Which work comes back first and what takes longer?

Greg David: Well, first of all, I'll be very interested if we do get any calls saying that people are back to work because my impression is almost nobody's back to work. The people who can go back to work are people who stopped shooting in the middle of something because they're in the middle of it. The scripts were written. Everybody was employed. Maybe they can get back to work, but some people are even skeptical that that's going to happen because this industry normally shuts down between Thanksgiving and New Year's.

It's unclear at the moment and I guess we'll know in the next couple of weeks whether anything is going to get back into production. Beyond that, it takes a while. You just don't turn on the lights at the head of Kaufman Astoria Studios to me. First of all, you've got to get the scripts written. Now, some of that could have been going on because the writers' strike settled. Then you've got to hire the management crew, then you've got to hire the cast, then you've got to make a deal with the studio, then you have to build the set. It's just incremental as things get going on. I don't think we'll be anywhere near back to the kind of production that we saw in our record year of 2019 or even 2021 until well into next year.

Brigid Bergin: Well, our board is filling up with some callers to help us report this story with you. We're going to go to Roberta in Manhattan. Roberta, thanks for calling WNYC.

Roberta: Hi. I'm a set decorator and I've been out of work since June. I was lucky because I was on a big show that I was on since December. I think the $170,000, you'd have to be working every day you could possibly be working. I'm not sure about that. There is shows up. All the Dick Wolf things are back. Blue Woods is back. They have standing sets, so they don't have to build anything. They only build one set each episode anyhow.

Brigid Bergin: Are you back to work, Roberta?

Roberta: We're supposed to go back in December. Our shifts are already up and built, so we could essentially go back. A lot of the prop houses are almost out of business. Who's going to rent stuff if we're not renting it? It's been very, very tough. Our skills don't translate into anything. Nobody I know can get jobs. Nobody wants to hire us.

Brigid Bergin: Roberta, can I ask you what show you work on?

Roberta: I'm working on a Marvel show.

Brigid Bergin: Great. Roberta, thank you so much for your call and for your question. Before we go to our next caller, Greg, some news there, I guess, that some of these television shows that are filmed here in the city seem to be back and/or going back. Is that a surprise to you at all? Anything you want to add to her question about that 170 number?

Greg David: Well, I'm a big believer in the stats from economist James Parrott, so I'm going to go with that.

Brigid Bergin: [laughs]

Greg David: Look, yes, the late-night shows could go back right away as soon as they got the go-ahead. The writers were willing to work and they could go back. Remember, there are two things I want to say here. First of all, what was the cost of the strike to New York? Gavin Newsom says the cost of the strike of California was $5 billion. In New York, nationally, we lost about 45,000 jobs. We could count 14,000 jobs in New York City.

You got to figure, the cost in New York was more than $1 billion. That cost was for people like the woman who called in who didn't get paid and especially for the small businesses. I talked to a catering firm that had to shut down in June. 40 employees were told, he said to them, "Go take a vacation. Go visit your country. I have nothing for you." Of course, he's self-employed, so he couldn't even collect unemployment insurance.

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Greg David: The costs were really great and mattered a lot to the people involved and the companies involved.

Brigid Bergin: Greg, as one of your former students way back in the early days of what we called CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I remember conversations about mean versus median or median versus average, but just for our listeners, can you just give your quick explainer so that as people are putting that $170,000 number in context, they understand what we're talking about?

Greg David: Yes, so the mean or the median means that 50% make more and 50% make less. The average is just taking all the wages paid to those people and dividing by the number of people. As you said early on, you're correct, in an industry which has some very highly paid people, the average will tend to be higher than the mean or median.

Brigid Bergin: Great. Let's go to Michael in Brooklyn. Michael, thanks so much for holding, and thanks for calling WNYC.

Michael: Yes, thank you. I've been a big fan of the show and following along with your reports on the industry. I'm a lighting technician, been in the union since '99. I'm basically a shop electric, so I'm on the ground floor of the-- when your guest mentioned the building of the sets. It's been super hard. We've been out trying to find other jobs. I've definitely been in the process of looking for other jobs.

People have said like, "Oh, well, we may have to find work outside of the industry." I was like, "I've already been looking since June." That's been pretty hard as far as just pivoting. It's also really good to hear those numbers too, about the amount of 5% of the employment because it's a huge amount of people out of work. TV is the bread and butter of New York and New Jersey. There is commercials and the live stuff did go back, SNL, and the talk shows. People were going on there.

As far as lighting that one department of crew, we're relying on either the cinematographers getting the jobs, then the gaffers, then they have their crews. I'm an anomaly because I'm from the ground floor of a bare stage. I'm getting a lot of calls from my fellow crew like, "Have you heard anything? Are you back?" It's like, "Well, you'll be the second to know." We're looking at a landscape. There was a super big gold rush of content and a lot of stages starting in other spots. Jersey has become a big thing.

They're getting a new Netflix stage. It's a little of that, figuring out where people are going to go. I've heard some articles saying people can't afford to live here, which is true, and moving to other cities like New York and New Jersey and Atlanta. It's like, "Well, New Jersey, that's not far away. That's within our jurisdiction as far as the unions go." That's just us coming up with ways to fill in these-- That's for us to decide, "Oh, you live in Jersey? Okay, you work on a Jersey job."

It's the shows that have ended. It's like your guest said, the shows that were stopped mid-season. I was on a show that finished during the picket dodgeball we were playing, which was also very difficult. It's the shows then that have seasons ready to go, the bread-and-butter shows like Blue Bloods, and then it will be the new shows. Everyone's trying to predict stuff and how we're going to get back.

Brigid Bergin: Michael, thank you so much for your call and I appreciate it. I hope you get back to work soon. Greg, I want to zero in on one of the issues that Michael started to raise and that was this idea of expanding capacity. The city, I understand, is now working to allow local studios like Kaufman Astoria and Steiner Studios to double their square footage. What's driving that? Is that in part because of, as Michael alluded to, this new studio that's being built in New Jersey for Netflix?

Greg David: The city has said that we would like to expand our studio capacity, double it to 60 million square feet. As a matter of fact, the mayor's out in Sunnyside today this morning. I came on this show rather than go to Sunnyside, where they're breaking ground for another studio.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you very much.

Greg David: It's the second groundbreaking in the last month or so. To be frank, it makes no sense to me. The caller raised an important issue. We are going to have a flood of productions because all the studios have to ramp up. Except for Netflix, everybody's losing money. Companies are under enormous pressure to get their streaming services, which is the key driver of the New York City business to profitability.

The prospects are for less content, not more, and the prospects are that there are going to be fewer people producing shows than there are now. If you're interested in this, I've been writing about it, but the morning newsletter from The New York Times took a run at it today. We're doubling our studio capacity when the prospects for content are that there's going to be less of it, not more of it. Now, I do want to be clear. The city is not paying for this. Most of this is private development money, though there are some tax breaks involved.

I've been raising this issue for more than a year now. We are making a big bet on an industry which has unclear long-term prospects. It doesn't strike me as the smartest thing to do. Now, I talked to Doug Steiner at Steiner Studios. He's breaking ground on a second major facility in Sunset Park, going to cost him $650 million to do. What he told me is, "Well, I'd rather cannibalize myself than have someone else cannibalize my business." He thinks we're going to do okay, but somebody's not going to do okay.

The second thing we should bring up here that we haven't tackled yet is why the industry has been so successful. One of the reasons is that we have one of the most lucrative tax credits around. We just increased the amount of the tax credit to $700 million a year. We made it easier to apply for. There's a very great tax credit that's fueled the rise of the film industry in Georgia and Atlanta.

California has been expanding their film tax credit. Many people ranging from the Citizens Budget Commission to Good Jobs First just hate these tax credits. They see no reason why we're subsidizing the film business as opposed to any other business, but the more studios we build, the more space we need to fill. I can assure you, there will be more pressure to expand the tax credit to keep them filled. These are the choices we're making. I believe it-- Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Brigid Bergin: That's okay, Greg. I don't mean to cut you off. I need to do one bit of business. If you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian Lehrer. I'm speaking with Greg David of THE CITY about the post-strike future of film and TV here in New York. You are listening to WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. This is New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, Greg, I apologize, if you have another point on the tax break and the pressure that lawmakers are likely to face to increase it given the expansion of these studios.

Greg David: Well, I just think that's coming down the road. If these studios open and they don't have anybody to fill them, I think that you're going to see a big campaign to try to increase it again. The politics of this are endlessly fascinating because Michael Gianaris, the very important deputy majority leader in the state Senate who was one of the key people in driving Amazon out of New York, represents Long Island City. Long Island City, of course, is the center of this business. His political future is tied to the tax credit, so he keeps getting it renewed. To me, it's one of the great ironies of New York politics.

Brigid Bergin: So interesting. I want to get a couple more of our callers in here so that we can hear some more on-the-ground perspectives before we let you go. Let's go to David in Brooklyn. David, thanks for calling WNYC.

David: Hi. How are you doing? Thank you for taking the call. Yes, no, I was just going to mention that I'm an actor and I work sporadically. That $173,000. Wow, that sounded nice. I wish I could be median because a lot of my friends are, in my experience, often not making that and doing lots of other jobs. I'm an active teacher and that's where I make a bread butter. Sporadically, I do get TV work and it's such a difference. Just this last one I did was Tulsa King and it's just amazing, the difference hourly even at just scale or whatever.

Anyway, now, I did get a gig three days before the strike happened, and then it was paused. I was actually a little disappointed that we went on strike because I was just about to do a gig. I've been told by my agent that it's going to start the 27th of this month. Just to let you guys know that it does look like certain things are ramping up to begin shooting. I'm excited that we got what we got and that I get to do that, yes.

Brigid Bergin: That's great. David, congratulations. Glad that you are getting back to it. Let's go to Christine in Long Island City. Christine, thanks for calling.

Christine: Hey. Actually, the industry started coming back after the writers' strike with SNL and the late-night shows starting production, which was a godsend to all the small businesses that support the TV and film industry, prop houses, caterers, set builders, and then also all the employees that work on those shows. That happened about a month and a half ago. Now, we have a lot of the shows that stopped when the actors went on strike and they're back in production.

This has been devastating to tons and tons of small businesses that really nobody is really talking to, to find out their stories. It's easy to call the stages and the studios, but the kind of businesses that support TV and movies here in New York City are these small mom-and-pop, multi-generational, and first-time businesses that have been devastated. This is just like the pandemic shutdown for all of these businesses.

Brigid Bergin: Christine, thank you so much for your call. Greg, I know in your reporting, you have talked to many of these businesses. Do you want to react to anything that you heard from either our actor or Christine in Long Island City?

Greg David: Well, I tried in both my stories. The Times has done some stories too about how important these businesses are and how difficult it was for these businesses and their employees. It trickled down, so the person I talked to who ran the catering company told his 40 employees to go do something else. You know what he did? He started cutting his own grass and he started painting his house. He took over jobs that he used to pay people to do. That's how it trickled throughout the economy.

There's one little footnote here that I think does tell us a lot about the industry. I spent a lot of time watching unemployment claims in New York because I thought we'd see a big jump in unemployment claims and we never did. I said that we thought 14,000 jobs at least were eliminated. We never saw more than 7,000 unemployment claims that we could attribute to the film and TV sector.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Greg David: You know what that means? That means that most people do not rely on this as their only source of income. After all, the work is episodic as the caller said, "Oh, well, I got a gig." Even if you're working a fair amount, it's not like the jobs you and I have where we're working five days a week, whether in the office or at home, and we get paid a set amount each week and we go from there. That was an interesting part about the whole-- it's just a very different industry. The people in the industry did have some other sources of income. It obviously was a clear blow to them, but they had enough income that they didn't qualify for unemployment insurance.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we're going to have to leave it there for now. I want to thank Greg David, contributor covering fiscal and economic issues at THE CITY and director of the Business & Economics Reporting Program and the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Thanks so much, Greg.

Greg David: Thank you.

 

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