Since he surged to the top of the California governor polls several weeks ago, Xavier Becerra has not offered his plan for how to save entertainment, even as various rivals did exactly that.
This will change Friday, as the former Biden H.H.S. Secretary and California AG will publish his proposals to save a Hollywood in crisis, joining fellow frontrunner Steve Hilton (R) and third-place contender Tom Steyer (D) in sharing their visions.
Among the most eye-catching of Becerra’s proposals is a “California Content Performance Disclosure requirement” — essentially, a law or rule that studios/streamers must provide “meaningful performance data” to everyone from directors to the crew. Such sharing would need to come in a “standardized form that gives workers what they need to bargain fairly.”
The Hollywood Reporter was shown a copy of the plan, which the candidate is expected to talk about next week on a final barnstorm through the state ahead of the June 2 primary.
A lack of transparency on viewer data for the small screen has long been a bête noire for creatives, who say they are left completely in the dark on how well their work is doing and, thus, what they should be paid. During the strikes three years ago many directors and actors called out this issue; they won streaming bonuses in the deal, but not a whole lot of them have materialized. Either “they’re all making a lot more money than anybody knows and that they’re willing to tell us … [or] they’re making a lot less money than anybody knows and they don’t want Wall Street to look under the hood,” Steven Soderbergh said. Matters have improved only in fits and starts.
Becerra is expected to explore statutory options in the fair-labor realm that would require streamers to release data to a wide swath of creative participants. At the moment many guild deals only require that a select few people who make a show are given hard numbers, with NDAs abounding, while crew members are almost never in the loop. Another potential lever would be to tie tax credits or permits to such disclosures, though gumming up the production pipeline is the last thing any California lawmaker wants to do right now.
Becerra sits at 22 percent in the latest poll, a hair behind Hilton’s 23 percent and suddenly comfortably ahead of Steyer’s 15 percent, with no one else threatening. If results hold, Becerra would get a slot against Hilton on the November ballot and, barring any October surprises, likely cruise to the governorship. Of course, these days surprises come in all months, as Eric Swalwell might remind.
In his plan, Becerra also says he will advocate for a “California Entertainment Summit,” a place where “guilds, crew organizations, producers, studios, streamers, and technology companies” have “a binding mandate: produce a public action plan, not a report.”
Such efforts are meant to combat a sense that the issue has generated too much talk and not enough action — a growing frustration in Hollywood vocalized by everyone from top directors to union leaders as jobs continue to exit the state.
“Each workstream will have a named lead and defined milestone,” the Becerra plan says.
Notably, Becerra will not call for an uncapping of the $750 million annual tax credit, as rivals including Steyer and Hilton have done. Nor will he suggest a specific ceiling-raise on credits for individual projects (Hilton wants it to sometimes go all the way to 60 percent from the current 35 percent-45 percent).
But Becerra does want the credit percentage to grow, just “guided by ongoing assessment of where we are losing work.” Among those likely areas, he said, were “post-production and VFX, independent productions [and] episodic television at scale” but also added he would be open to where the data led. Under such a system, a production might automatically be eligible for bigger credits if it could demonstrate it could provide jobs in one of those buckets. The move is slightly counter-intuitive, or at least counter-historical; generally states measure production gains and losses by the presence of massive franchises like the MCU movies, which bring in the most revenue. (Notably, the MCU movies have largely moved production from Georgia outside of the states, to the U.K. now.)
Unlike Steyer and Hilton, Becerra did not say tax credits should be expanded to above-the-line cost; until now credits have only focused on below-the-line. Unions have wanted to keep that earmark but producers, wishing to use the credits on stars and directors, have pressed for an expansion.
In contrast to the Hilton plan, which seeks to stimulate production with direct monetary benefits, Becerra’s plan focuses on more conceptual mechanisms, like homing in specific areas of job loss. Of course at some point a solution is out of the hands of all these plans, as one of the biggest reasons California has lost Hollywood productions is high housing, food and transit costs.
Like many of his rivals, Becerra’s plan also emphasizes, without an abundance of specifics, the importance of pushing for a federal entertainment tax credit, the loosening of shooting regulations, the ability of actors to control their AI likeness and a general need for AI oversight.
After staying silent for longer than his opponents, Becerra now seemed willing to pull few punches. He said the current system was “built for an industry that no longer exists” and, in justifying the government intervention, noted he believed that “the market alone cannot plan its way through disruption this broad and this fast.”
Leave a Reply