Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal, and we are here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood. 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, and we're going to talk about the state of Hollywood and whether Hollywood exists in some form that we know it and whether it will continue to exist. So take a walk. Take a listen and enjoy.
Hayes, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to LA.
Thank you. I feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure there. You're in a city of podcasts. It's like you're in the right place. There's a podcast lawyer in the audience, so I know who you're talking to.
Yeah. That's. Yes. We all know each other.
All right, Tracy, you were telling me before this show her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy. Season 13, season 13. It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know, that's just a total coincidence. Total coincidence? Wait. Okay, so first question. Is Hollywood just screwed at the moment? No, I was like, honestly, you hear about, you know, 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.
I mean, if you want to do the numbers, I can talk about, like shoot days.
Yeah, let's do the numbers.
The numbers that we look at are shoot days. Okay. That's the reality. That's for everything. Right? Shoot days in LA hit a high in 2016. Okay, 40,000 shoot days. And from there, it sort of leveled out to around 37,000 by 2019. Okay. 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, right, okay. 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 this 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 that movie. Yeah, we actually we'll talk about the impact of Covid and the strike. And I guess we're unfortunately going to have to talk about AI. Yeah. Is there a theory for the 2016 to 2019 decline? Like, let's if we started there, is there a is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years?
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 was shrinking around the same time. Okay. So that's how you get to like a, 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 like you, you, you can see just from the options that are sent to you as a writer, what is growing in terms of streaming and what is sort of falling away, which was cable.
I said, what happens to all the unemployed writers? Do they I guess they all start podcasts.
Yeah. That's, that has been sort of a safe harbor for a lot of us. Some people move, like an interesting thing happened is the, the membership in the Writers Guild grew a lot in the late 2010s 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 for 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.
I joked about it, you know, the and we're going to talk more about it later. But, you know, there is the sort of the the the influencer creator world. Yeah. And I'm curious like maybe from an economic footprint, does that ameliorate things? Is the influencer creator person doing stand up comedy in vertical video, etc.? Does that have positive spillover effect on some level?
I mean, so there's the industry here. Yeah. And there's the economy. Okay. And the industry is the studios, the networks like the traditional Hollywood. But the influencer network is absolutely part of the economy, okay. It is taking money from subscribers around the world and like putting it into the local economy. And so it's really, really important. And I look at things like I get jealous at places like New York, because what New York feels to me now as a social media user is a place where you just walk down the street and people ask you what you're listening to or where you get your confidence from, or what song is this?
Yeah, we don't have that here. I've never been. I'm actually really paranoid about like what? Some of what? Like being accosted by one of those people who is like, what do you pay in rent? Yeah, I it's like, can I, can I, can I come home with you. Can I come like, see where you live? And, you know, it seems like you have to say yes, a lot of it. You don't have to say yes. But I know a lot of people just, like, live in fear of just like one of those random like, what if they showed my clip of me saying no? Yeah, no, no, what do you look so bet everyone's saying, oh yeah. Like it's like I'm, I'm opting out. Yeah. The no comment. Like we don't have that say like I kind of wish we did that. Like honestly it's no. So I really it seems so stupid but like it tells a story about New York that is exporting it to the rest of the country, which is like what we have had in LA. We sort of had a we had that corner for decades, like every movie and show you'd see the Venice boardwalk, some like a girl on rollerblades, like we were we were exporting right? Yeah. And we're not doing that in the same way. When it comes to social media, we are on some things people know about Erewhon Smoothies in Central Europe because of our influencer economy. Yeah. But it's, we don't own it. Yeah. The same way as we did. We, we tried to get the Erewhon CEO for the show, by the way, and apparently they do Zero Media, which and yet have this and so like we're doing media for them. Oh, yeah. There we go. Yeah. All right. Since we're talking about, I guess, geographical comparisons when it comes to production, can you explain like why is LA actually losing out. Because I see headlines like Netflix is building a $1 billion studio in New Jersey. And no offense to New Jerseyans, but, you know, we come to LA seems pretty nice. The weather's nice. There's palm trees. I'm not sure what New Jersey has other than the tax breaks.
Yeah. That's a big one for sure. We it's been a bit of a race to the bottom across the country, and, I have worked on shows. So you mentioned Eastbound and Down. We were in North Carolina until they got rid of their tax break there. The governor sort of single handedly ended it. And then we just ran across the border to South Carolina for the for the last, for their next show that they did. It was a show called Vice Principals, the Eastbound team. We shot down in South Carolina, and they've kept doing Righteous Gemstones there. Like it follows the Great show, the tax break, great show. I ran a show. We did a pilot for TBS. It was in Vancouver. A lot of my friends are shooting in Vancouver now. It does. And what is kind of most surprising to me, game shows. Like if you see a Fox game show or a Fox. Yeah, like studio comedy, like a single cam, or a multi-cam comedy, you're you're in Dublin, you are watching a show that is filmed in Dublin. Is it Dublin? Dublin? Ireland? Dublin, Ireland? Yeah. So they're flying out Rob Lowe and an American gameshow contestant cast to that. You know, you used to like get go to Universal Studios and get to just like be it.
Is that a tax thing or is it just much cheaper.
It's a taxing labor thing. Yeah. Wow. And and meanwhile we have tons of studio space here. So you talk about that 2016 peak. Yeah. And shoot days. That's when a lot of studio space started to get financed. And so right down the street from here, there's a giant complex right on the, on the Santa Monica and the 101 that you saw starting to get built around like 2019 or so. That's when it got financed. There was a gigantic hole in the ground for for a really long time. And now it is done and the demand is not exactly what it was. And so we're seeing issues in the studio real estate.
Can I ask a question that has nothing to do with the contemporary economy or nothing to do with the downturn or anything, but just a question I've always wanted to ask. Yes. What is it about TV that is best written by a room of writers? I've always wanted to ask this question why kids? And it's not just someone who's like a play or a screenplay or whatever where you have a single writer. Why doesn't that work in TV?
I mean, that economy is sorry, you accidentally did ask a question about, about the current economy because it is shifting to, you know, what people talk about. It's like the Mike White model. Mike White goes and does The White Lotus by himself. Oh, he writes that show. I'm pretty sure I like DTF. Saint Louis I think is like done the same way a lot of prestige shows are kind of written by one, one, one person. The studios like that. Yeah. It is cheaper. Yeah. But, but historically it wasn't like that. Oh, yeah. Totally. And when it comes to, like, I worked on a show called Great News, which is kind of in the 30 Rock family. Yeah. Where the joke density family guy is the same white family. I had 30 writers when I was there. That does not exist any more and never, ever will again.
So this is the mini room phenomenon, right? People call these mini rooms where you have smaller teams of writers and everyone seems to hate them. Even though, you know, we live in New York, many rooms don't sound. We're used to them. But I guess in Hollywood, what a mini room used to mean to me on family Guy was a room of seven writers that would break off to go write one joke. Wow. And now that is a big room. Seven writers is like a big room for a show.
