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Why Hollywood Left L.A.


buy generic Latuda Hollywood left L.A. years ago. We just didn’t notice until the lights went out.

cheap Lurasidone The signs were all there: empty lots at Paramount, crews flying to Georgia, and shows set in Los Angeles but shot in Toronto. What used to be a boomtown for cameras and cables is now a ghost light waiting for a curtain call.

It wasn’t one single blow—it was a death by a thousand tax credits.

Georgia’s peach logo became more familiar than the Hollywood sign. New Mexico, Louisiana, the U.K., Canada—everyone learned our lines, stole our grips, and offered 30–40% off. We countered with bureaucratic paperwork and a smile. California created a tax incentive too little, too late. We told ourselves: the magic lives here. But turns out, magic follows money.

In 2016, over 60% of network dramas were shot in L.A. Now? Barely 25%. And many of those pretend they’re here while filming an hour outside Budapest. It’s no longer a creative exodus—it’s logistics. If you want to shoot a film in L.A., you’d better write it in Albuquerque.

The ripple effect? It’s a wave. Grip trucks sold off. Catering companies closing. Prop houses downsizing. Once, it took six months and two favors to find a stage in the 30-mile zone. Now, they’re empty, echoing. Union hours are drying up. One estimate says 18,000 industry jobs gone in just the last few years. That’s not a statistic. That’s an obituary.

Everyone points to the pandemic and the strikes of 2023 as the pivot point. But this train left the station earlier. Those were just the last passengers boarding.

The myth that Hollywood means Los Angeles is a vanity we haven’t earned in a decade. We still roll out the red carpet, but we forgot the cameras aren’t even here anymore. Even Ben Affleck—who’s made movies about Boston in L.A.—had to admit, “It’s cheaper to film in Ireland. California took the industry for granted.”

Now, we beg. The governor talks about bigger incentives, more infrastructure, expanding credits. Good. But we’re in a street fight with cities that already won. It’s not just about money. It’s about trust. Reliability. And L.A. hasn’t been that for a while.

Want to know how far we’ve fallen? They filmed Oppenheimer—a movie about a California scientist—across New Mexico and New Jersey. That’s like shooting Rocky in Miami.

The crews are still here. The sun still shines. The talent still wants to come. But the industry doesn’t care where the sign is. It cares where the savings are.

Hollywood isn’t a place anymore. It’s a brand. And Los Angeles, once its flagship store, has become just another outlet mall.

There’s always time for restructuring, for change. But that window closes quickly.

By the time California finishes fixing the script, the tax credits may have already rolled.

’Mountainhead’ Too Bro Heavy


Mountainhead wants to bite, but ends up gumming its audience.

Jesse Armstrong’s satire of tech titans marooned in a snowbound mansion arrives with all the right ingredients: a sharp-witted script, a killer cast, and a premise ripped from the headlines. But somehow, the thing never quite cooks.

Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith), the jittery creator of the misinformation-spewing social platform Traam, holes up with fellow billionaires Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) as society crumbles outside. The setup promises dark laughs and savage skewering.

It delivers some.

Armstrong’s dialogue crackles early. The actors land their lines with deadpan precision, and there are stretches where the film hums with the energy of Succession at its best. You sense what Mountainhead could’ve been.

But the characters drift toward cartoon. Their odd behavior, intended as a critique of tech-world narcissism, too often strains believability. Schwartzman’s Van Yalk, in particular, feels plucked from a different movie entirely—his manic energy clashing with the film’s cooler tone.

The story, too, loses its grip. What starts as a tight chamber piece begins to fray in the second half, collapsing into broad farce. The satire gets blunt. The tension leaks away.

Visually, the film does little to compensate. The single setting grows stale. By the final scenes, even the actors seem boxed in.

Which is a shame, because buried here is a sharper movie—one that skewers tech arrogance without slipping into caricature, one that sustains its bite from first frame to last.

As it stands, Mountainhead wobbles. Not a disaster. Not a triumph. Just another would-be satire stuck halfway up the hill.