The actor and show-business veteran Rob Lowe is the author of one of the most winning Hollywood memoirs around. Stories I Only Tell My Friends is a terrific read—wise and funny at the same time—and it’s probably the third-best book about Hollywood ever written, after the two that I wrote.

Lowe has been in show business a long time, so when he notices big changes in the way the entertainment industry is conducted, he’s someone to pay attention to. On a recent podcast, he talked about the game show he hosts and produces for Fox Broadcasting, The Floor. They shoot it in Ireland, even though it’s an American show with an American host and American contestants. “It’s cheaper,” he said, “to bring 100 American people to Ireland than to walk across the Fox lot in Los Angeles to one of the soundstages and do it there.” And then he added, “Crazy.”

Of course it’s not crazy. Not financially, anyway. The costs of shooting a show in Los Angeles—or California in general—far outweigh the costs of shooting in another state or even overseas. All in all, it’s cheaper to make Hollywood anywhere but Hollywood.

The host of the podcast, Adam Scott, pressed him further. Both of them were in the cast of the long-running comedy Parks and Recreation, which ran from 2009 to 2015—years people in show business look back on as the “fat years”—and Scott had a question: “Do you think,” he asked Lowe, “if we were doing Parks now, we would be in Budapest?”

Lowe answered without even pausing. “One hundred percent, we would be,” he said, adding, “It’s so weird that nothing shoots in Los Angeles. Nothing. Nothing. It’s just…just too expensive to shoot here.”

The question, of course, is why. Los Angeles is the headquarters of show business. It’s a sprawling city dotted with ugly squat stuccos boxes that since the 1920s have been constructed specifically for the manufacture of motion pictures. Los Angeles has stages and scenery mills and acres of costume shops, sound designers and composers just over the hill in Sunland and Pacoima—don’t bother looking those up, they’re in the far valley—and enough decent, unemployed writers and attractive waiters to make movies and TV shows into the 22nd century. Everything we know about economics and the principle of competitive advantage dictates that Los Angeles should be—must be—where everything gets made.

So, why? “There are no tax credits here,” Lowe said. “All of those other places are offering 40 percent,” he noted, referring to the amount that other states (and some countries, like Ireland) will rebate the production company, often directly off the top of the budget. “And then on top of that, there’s other stuff that they do,” he said. And in my experience shooting in New York State, that included actual cash rebates on the episodic budget—in my case, it was nearly $300,000 per episode that the kind taxpayers in the Empire State shelled out to encourage us to shoot in a retrofitted former Grumman aircraft plant.

“And that’s not even talking about the union stuff,” Lowe said, although when you say something like that’s not even talking about the union stuff, you’re saying an enormous amount about the union stuff. When the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild members went on a bruising six-month strike in 2023, a lot of people warned that something like this might happen. In show business, and every other business, when costs go up in one area, the other areas get squeezed. The memberships of the WGA and SAG may think they “won” the recent strikes—and in many ways, they got what they demanded—but if you’re a costumer or carpenter or one of those folks who lives out in Sunland, you’re the one making up the difference.

Lowe wrapped up his diatribe by calling for the leaders in California and Los Angeles to get with the tax-credit/cash-rebate/money-back schemes of their global competitors. “It’s criminal,” he cried. “Why have California and L.A. let this happen? It’s criminal! Everybody should be fired.”

Which is approximately when show-business finance expert Donald Trump weighed in with a rant of his own, calling for a 100 percent tariff on movies produced outside the country, which he promised would save Hollywood from “a very fast death.” And as usual, he kicked it up a notch: “There is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda.”

It’s unclear what he means by those last two items, though if it’s propaganda that he’s concerned with, he’d probably be happier with the messages coming out of Budapest than, say, Santa Monica. But he’s essentially aligned with Rob Lowe—and Rob, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry—and a lot of other people in show business who think that the solution to Hollywood’s economic distress is to have government regulatory help and taxpayer cash.

Here are the problems that Trump and Lowe overlook. In the first place, the largesse bestowed on the big studios by various states like Georgia and New York don’t actually help those states incubate a thriving film-production economy. And, worse, they create the expectation of film-crew personnel that production jobs will always be there. Film production is a boom-bust kind of thing, and the actual physical requirements of making a movie or TV show are few and getting fewer. Even if the business were growing, and it’s not, the number of people needed to shoot a one-hour episode keeps getting smaller. It would be like taxpayers funding the construction of a million Blockbuster video-rental stores in 1999.

And then there’s the infuriating fungibility of money. Let me tell you what happens when you give a movie studio some money: They use it to give themselves raises. In the same way that the union contracts of 2023 led to the Great Irish-Hungarian Exodus, the sugar that the state and global governments sprinkle on production budgets just helps us pay more to the above-the-line, high-salaried players. When I was shooting a show in New York State, for instance, the cash rebate allowed us to hire a lot of expensive writers (from Los Angeles) and a line producer (from Los Angeles) and a do-nothing non-writing producer (from Los Angeles) and an overpaid showrunner who ended up getting the show cancelled (me). When the show was done with, we moved out of the Grumman plant, and to my knowledge, it’s still empty. How, exactly, did the New York State taxpayer win?

And finally, there’s the impossible task of deciding what a “foreign” production really is. Rob Lowe’s show, The Floor, appears on American television with American contestants. It’s shot in Ireland, was developed by a Dutch company, and appears in versions all over the world. Is it Dutch? Is it American? Is it Irish? Do we slap Rob Lowe with a 100 percent tax? Or do we subtract the part of the budget that’s coming back to the United States and tax only the Irish portion?

Or do we just let show business figure out how to make stuff at home? Look, nobody wants to leave sunny, relaxed Los Angeles for rainy Ireland or spooky old Budapest. People in show business want to drive their cars from Brentwood to one of the studios and then head back to their giant kitchens with farmhouse sinks. What show business needs to do is what every other business needs to do, at some point, and that’s to come to grips with economic reality or go broke. What it doesn’t need—from the taxpayer, or the president—is help.

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