Since the beginning of the year, Brandy Hernández has requested almost 200 entertainment works.
The 22 -year -old film school graduate, who works as a receptionist at Ross Stores's purchasing office in downtown Los Angeles, said that for most of those applications, he never received an answer, not even a rejection. When he did follow -up interviews, he was almost always ghost later.
“I knew that it would not be a famous screenwriter or anything direct to the university,” said Hernández, who graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2024. But he thought that at least he would be qualified for a job of the film level of entry level.
“It shouldn't be so difficult,” he kept thinking.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a generalized production slowdown, the recovery of the entertainment industry has been delayed by Hollywood strikessome of The most expensive forest fires in the history of California and A contraction throughout the industry.
The studies struggling to reduce costs in the midst of turbulence rushed to reduce low level positions that historically obtained rookies at the door.
“You almost feel cursed,” said Ryan Gimeson, who graduated from the Dodge College of Cinema and Media Arts of the University of Chapman in 2023, in the first days of the writers' strike.
And although script writing has always been a competitive field, industry veterans attest that conditions have rarely been harder for young writers.
“In the last 40 years of doing this, this is the most disruptive I have seen,” said Tom Nunan, founder of Bull's Eye Entertainment and professor at the UCLA Theater, Cinema and Television School.
The landscape is especially dry in television writing, according to a WORK REPORT Launched last month by Writers Guild of America.
The television writing roles fell 42% in the 2023-2024 season that coincided with the strikes, according to the report. Around a third of those cuts went to lower level quotes.
It is far from the television business Liz Alper broke into 15 years ago.
Alper, a writer-producer with headquarters in Los Angeles and co-founder of the Movement of Fair Workers' Treatment #Payupphollywood, appeared in the early 2010 decade, when the opportunities on television with script were still abundant.
The CW, for example, was publishing three original shows of one hour per night, or around 18 to 21 original programming pieces per week, Alper said. That resulted anywhere between 100 and 200 writer slots.
But in the last five years or so, the emergence of the transmission has essentially done the opposite: cable cable subscribers, overcoming the episodic programming with series to the bingeable demand and cutting writing works in the process.
Work scarcity has driven those in entry level positions to stay there longer than they used to do. A 2021 #Payupphollywood survey I discovered that most support employees were over twenty years old, several years older than they were on average.
Without these employees move and believe vacancies, recent graduates have any place to come.
“I think you have a job, it seems that you have one of the lifeboats in Titanic, and you are not willing to give up the seat,” Alper said.
The entertainment labor market has also suffered the current exodus of California productions, where costs are high and tax incentives are low.
The legislation that would raise the state fiscal credit of the State to 35% of the qualified spending, above its current fees from 20 to 25%, is pending after Win unanimous votes outside the Senate Revenue and Tax Committee and the Arts and Entertainment Committee of the Assembly. Supporters say that the measure is essential for California to remain competitive with other states and countries, state legislators have argued.
Meanwhile, creative young people question whether it is the place to launch their careers.
Peter Gerard.
(Robert Hanashiro / for the Times)
Peter Gerard, 24, moved to Los Angeles from Maryland two years ago to pursue television writing. After graduating with a data science degree from the University of Maryland, he felt that it was his last chance to pursue his dream.
A few weeks after arriving at Los Angeles in April 2023, he got a handful of work interviews and even felt hopeful about some.
Then the writers' guild smells on strike.
“I came moments before the disaster, and I had no idea,” he said.
During the deceleration, Gerard fulfilled his time working in independent films, attending writing classes and building his wallet. It was fine without a full -time concert, he said, thinking that he would work for his magic in him eventually.
Such “cosmic choreography” touched producing writer Jill Goldsmith almost 30 years ago, he said, when she left her job as a public defender in Chicago to pursue television writing. After seven attempts months in Los Angeles, his fate turned when he met the “Nypd Blue” David Milch cooker in a Santa Monica chocolate store. Goldsmith sent her a script, the program bought it and she obtained her first loan in 1998.
Goldsmith, professor of the MFA program in UCLA at the Theater, Cinema and Television School, said he tells his students that only opportunities only arrive when they are in the middle of the destination.
But listening to veteran writers to cry their lost works and Bygone Glory of Los Angeles led Gerard to question his own commitment to success.
“I felt sorry for them, but it also made me realize, like 'Wow, there are many people who want to do this, and many of them are much further than me, with nothing to show,” he said.
Lore Olivera.
(Robert Hanashiro / for the Times)
As the writer of the youngest personnel in his current writer room, Lore V. Olivera, 26, has become accustomed to his senior counterparts who shave nostalgic about the “good old days.”
“I think they are definitely romantizing a little,” he said, “but there is something really there.”
Olivera got his first personnel writer work in 2023, a year after graduating from Stanford University. The process was simple: his representatives sent his samples to a showrunner, they liked, she interviewed and got the work. But Olivera said such success stories are rare.
“I was ridiculously fortunate,” he said. Even so, receiving staff is not a finish line, he added, just a 20 -week break about the panic of finding the next concert.
Olivera is also the only personnel writer in her current room, with all her colleagues with higher titles as editor or producer. It is a natural consequence, he said, of the showrunners who face pressure to fill limited positions with heavy hitters already proven capable of creating successes.
Olivera said he knows that not every 26 years were hired a few decades ago, but even his older companions agreed that the industry has lost an earlier air of possibilities.
“It is definitely a slap in the face when you arrive here and you are like, 'Yes, a few miserable years will pass, and then it might not do it,” said Olivera. “Not even because I am good or bad … but just because the industry is so dead and fears risk.”
Jelaya Gillams, who graduated from Chapman's Dodge College in 2023, said his class had sword talent. But the industry has given them any place to say it.
Instead, studies are investing money in Remakes, said the 24 -year -old, even when consumers have shown their appetite for the original material.
“I hope we move to a film era where it is new, new ideas and new perspectives and have an open mind to the voice of our generation,” Gillams said.
Until then, the filmmaker said she will continue to create work for herself.
During the strikes, Gillams and a production team without budget made the “sincere” short film, which won the Short Documentary Award at the Newport Beach 2023 Film Festival. While the search for a distributor for the DOC continues, it already has another project in process.
Disheveled from the “black hole” of employment requests, Hernández said she is also focused on giving life to her own work. In an ideal world, that leads to a film or two festival, maybe even the representation of the agency. But above all, what drives it is the pride of work itself.
“If I succeed in my mind,” said Hernández, “I'm happy with that.”
