Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal, and we are here live at the uh 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 gonna 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 gonna talk about the business of writing for Hollywood.
And we're gonna 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 watch, take a listen, and enjoy.
Hayes, thank you so much for being here.
Guys,
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 they're you're in a city of podcast professionals. Like you're you're in the right place.
There's a podcast
lawyer in the audience. I I know who you're talking to. Yeah, that's true. Yes.
By the way, Tracy was telling me before the show, her favorite ever season of T V was Family Guy season thirteen.
What’s the current state of Hollywood’s economy and why do writers feel “cooked”?
Family
Guy
season thirteen.
It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know if that's really total
coincidence. Wait, okay, so first question. Is Hollywood just screwed at the moment? No, 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 If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about like shoot days in LA. The numbers that we look at are are are shoot days. Okay. That's the metric. And that's for reality, for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in LA uh hit high in twenty sixteen. Okay. About forty thousand shoot days. And from there it sort of leveled out to around thirty seven thousand by twenty nineteen. Okay. pandemic hits, uh the the shoot days collapse obviously. There's a backlog and then in twenty twenty one they sort of skyrocket again. Twenty twenty two we're back to twenty nineteen numbers, around thirty seven thousand. The next year, twenty twenty three, the strikes hit. Shoot days fall again to twenty five thousand.
The next year people are sort of hoping for a recovery. They end up at twenty three thousand. Shoot days fall again. The mantra I think a lot of people heard in the city was survive till twenty five. That was like a phrase in in the entertainment industry here. And instead shoot days fell again to under twenty thousand. So that is half of what it was in twenty sixteen. So Maybe.
Maybe. Yeah. Actually, we'll talk about the impact of COVID and the strike, and I guess we're unfortunately gonna have to talk about AI. Is there a theory for the twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen decline? Like let's if we started there, is there a th is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years? I think you
saw uh 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. Uh and at the same time, a 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 a like a leveling out between forty thousand and thirty seven thousand. My first couple jobs were Comedy Central shows.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:01
2
What’s the current state of Hollywood’s economy and why do writers feel “cooked”?
2:01–8:59
3
How did shoot‑day numbers change from the 2016 peak to the post‑pandemic era?
8:59–18:38
4
What caused the decline in traditional network and cable production between 2016‑2019?
18:38–33:36
Speakers
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