Los Angeles has a plan to restart Hollywood: County health officials have released a tiered “roadmap to recovery,” outlining a five-step process for one of the nation’s epicenters of entertainment to ramp up businesses after COVID-19 shutdowns.
While film and television production, as well as opening movie theaters, fall into step three, followed by reopening of entertainment venues including live theaters and sporting events. The fifth and final step launches operations at pre-virus levels—a still-distant reality.
The timeline for completion of each stage of reopening is yet undetermined, but Los Angeles County is currently on step two, allowing non-essential businesses such as bookstores and florists to reopen with social distancing protocols and curbside service in place. On May 13, beaches were opened for recreation but not sunbathing. On May 15, park tennis courts and community gardens reopened. However, depending on the outcomes of relaxing restrictions on public life, Angelenos could move forward or backward on the scale.
In late April, Los Angeles City Councilperson Mitch O’Farrell established a task force to assess the film and television industry’s reopening.
“I want to ensure that all levels of our economy return to a sense of normalcy as quickly and safely as possible—especially our signature entertainment industry—with all the necessary precautions to protect the health and wellbeing of our workforce,” said O’Farrell. “This pandemic has brought the entire industry to a halt, and we must prepare for a brisk, but refined and thoughtful plan to ‘Bringing Back Hollywood’ once it is safe for productions to resume.”
At a recent press conference with the 10 major entertainment industry unions, labor leaders who make up the Industry-Wide Labor-Management Safety Committee said that an inter-union coalition is meeting to determine modified safety standards, but a return to business, as usual, will be dependent on a vaccine.
“A vaccine is overwhelmingly viewed as the time when everything can go back to normal,” said David White, executive director of SAG-AFTRA. “And broad and reliable testing and tracing is the standard as to when we'll have some organized, sustained productions returning.”
The Motion Picture Association, representing major studios like Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, and Netflix released a statement in late March saying, “As an industry, we stand ready to assist efforts to protect the health and safety of our employees, our customers, and the public.” While all studios have delayed the premieres of anticipated blockbusters, no additional statements on reopening have been released.
With stay-at-home orders extending into the summer with no end date, studio restarts in the fall could be the most optimistic timetable.
The state-run California Film Commission has yet to provide any specific statement on the impacts of COVID-19 on the industry or signal of how reopening might be determined but instead redirects to the state’s site for business updates at-large.
In one pocket of Hollywood, likeminded art directors and production designers assembled a five-page document proposing modifications to how projects are shot from the perspectives of the artists who design them. Including considerations for personal protective equipment (PPE), disinfecting sets and props between shoot periods, budget alterations to account for longer timelines, isolation between departments, and enforcing maximum concentrations of people in designated areas, the unsigned document, initially reported by Deadline, aims to initiate revisions to the production process. While no public health officials or union decision makers were consulted in the document’s preparation, the guide clarifies that production will need to be agile in responding to state and local guidelines, which could include everything from temperature checks to physical distancing between actors.
The independent document has since been removed from the website where it was once posted “out of respect for the ongoing industrywide [sic] safety protocol negotiations.”
“For folks to think that there’s going to be some magic rule that makes it clear for everyone is folly,” Anne del Castillo, commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, told Backstage recently of the nation’s other major entertainment hub. “Production is constantly asking me: ‘Are you going to give us guidelines on how to run production?’ My response is, ‘Look, we’re waiting for guidelines from the health experts at state and local government.’ Those are probably going to be pretty broad.”
However, when it comes to the hazard of COVID-19 infections, New York City, considered a global epicenter for the virus, is not in the same boat as Los Angeles. Although the West Coast saw the earliest official cases of the novel coronavirus, it could be poised for a quicker recovery given its lower infection rates when compared to the East Coast.
In the meantime, trade unions and social service organizations like the Actors Fund are working to provide triage for unemployed entertainment workers on both coasts. Recently, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, a nonprofit wing of the union, revealed that they had dedicated $4 million in relief grants.
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