Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse

Hayes Davenport (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal, and we're here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood.

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

It's 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.

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

And we're going to talk about the state of Hollywood and whether Hollywood exists in some form that we know it, whether it will continue to exist. So take a watch, take a listen, and enjoy.

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Hayes, thank you so much for being here.

Hayes Davenport (1:04)

Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to LA.

Tracy Alloway (1:07)

Thank you. I feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure.

Hayes Davenport (1:15)

You're in a city of podcast professional. You're in the right place.

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

There's a podcast lawyer in the audience.

Hayes Davenport (1:21)

I know who you're talking to. Yeah, that's right. We all know each other.

Joe Weisenthal (1:25)

Tracy was telling me before the show, her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy season 13

Hayes Davenport (1:31)

Family Guy season 13, it is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know if that's really it is.

Joe Weisenthal (1:35)

That's just a total coincidence.

Tracy Alloway (1:37)

Total coincidence. Wait, okay, so first question, is Hollywood just screwed at the moment? No, like honestly, you hear about 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?

Hayes Davenport (1:57)

If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about like shoot days in LA.

Joe Weisenthal (2:00)

Let's do the numbers.

Hayes Davenport (2:00)

The numbers that we look at are shoot days.

Joe Weisenthal (2:03)

Okay. That's the measurement.

Hayes Davenport (2:04)

That's for reality, for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in LA hit a high in 2016

Joe Weisenthal (2:11)

Okay.

Hayes Davenport (2:12)

About 40,000 shoot days. And from there, it sort of leveled out to around 37,000 by 2019 Okay. Right? Pandemic hits, 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 the 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.

Joe Weisenthal (3:06)

Maybe.

Hayes Davenport (3:06)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (3:06)

We actually will talk about the impact of COVID and the strike, and I guess we're unfortunately going to have to talk about AI. Is there a theory for the 2016 to 2019 decline? Like, if we started there, is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years?

Hayes Davenport (3:25)

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.

Tracy Alloway (4:15)

All right, so what happens to all the unemployed writers? Do they, I guess they all start podcasts?

Hayes Davenport (4:20)

Yeah, that has been sort of a safe harbor for a lot of us.

Some people move, like, an interesting thing happened is the membership in the Writers Guild grew a lot in the late 2010s. Okay. 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. 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 the 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 sure.