With simultaneous strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA crippling film and television productions, the trickle-down effect is being felt in every corner of the entertainment industry. But while Hollywood jobs only account for a small percentage of Los Angeles’ workforce, their absence impacts ancillary businesses big and small, from caterers to dry cleaners, florists and prop houses, cafes and specialty stores and beyond. Read some of their first-hand accounts below.
Carter Sexton Art Supplies
Longtime employee Chris Hauser purchased Valley Village art store Carter Sexton from the original family in 2009. Much of his clientele is in the movie industry, and just as business was getting back to normal after the pandemic, many of his customers are now finding themselves out of work.
“We do a lot of business in the industry and if the writers don’t work and the actors don’t work and the effects people don’t work it trickles down to us,” says Hauser. “We have a ton of makeup artist customers and their business has all petered out. There are items we have that are special for the industry, and while you might find some of the the stuff cheaper on Amazon you can’t get it today. People fly in here all the time because they need it at the spur of the moment. You can come in here and get 95 percent of what you need to finish the project.”
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A specialty of Hauser’s store is stocking the hard-to-find items. “Our customers are very loyal,” he adds, noting that some out-of-work are reinventing themselves and using their newfound free time to learn new skills. “Every day someone says, ‘Thank God you’re still here.’ People bring their grandkids in here. The store has been here for 80 years and it has a 1950s look and people film here. We always give them a discount because this industry has kept this store afloat and we try to give back however we can.” (5308 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood) — Chris Nichols
Chefs On the Run
With a high-end menu that includes such dishes as green curry mussels or chocolate souffle, Chefs On the Run has been providing meals on commercial, TV, and movie sets for the past eight years. Today, as writers and actors hit the picket line, Charlie Yusta, owner of Chefs on the Run, is out of work as well.
Pre-strike, Chefs would be hopping between two or three projects a day. Now with the strike, they are left with one private event per week, if that. “We would be at Universal Studios, then Warner Brothers and maybe a house in the Hollywood hills, and at each location we would be feeding about 80 to 100 people a day,” says Yusta. “Now I’ll maybe get a random job a week or maybe two days a week which is so different from running three trucks every day. It’s definitely tough on staff and on the owners.”
“We definitely won’t be going on any extravagant vacations this year.”
He clings on to every rumor about when the industry will return in full force. In the meantime, he’s considering how he could adapt his skillsets.
Says Yusta: “I’ve been thinking about maybe starting up culinary classes for people who like to cook at home. I wouldn’t want to get into dropping off meals. But I could teach around 15 people at a time; maybe rent out a small spot as a pop-up sort of thing. The class could show people how to make two salads, two entrees, two desserts, and just go over techniques of cooking which could make their lives a lot easier.”
There is a silver lining to having so much free time on his hands. “The saving grace of all of this is that my kids are home from college,” says Yusta. “It’s nice to be unplugged to a point where you can actually hang out with the kids … out in the backyard barbecuing. But we definitely won’t be going on any extravagant vacations this year.” — Cerys Davies
Goodnight and Co.
Beth Goodnight excuses herself to answer the doorbell to the 50,000 square-foot complex in Sherman Oaks that houses Goodnight and Co., a top Hollywood set construction firm.
“There isn’t anyone else to get the door,” she says apologetically. In the past few months, the set designer, who’s best known for creating backdrops for the Oscars, has been forced to lay off all but five of her 30 full-time employees. As a result of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strike, Goodnight and Co.’s robust production schedule — usually topping six million dollars a year — has nearly ground to a halt.
“I love my crew, and it breaks my heart to not have them here,” she says. “All I can do is try and get work back for them.”
Summer is historically a busy time for Goodnight, building sets for feature films, the upcoming television season and the Emmys — which are usually held in September. On the day of our visit, however, a lone craftsman uses a computer-controlled cutting device to build sets for Big Brother, CBS’s unscripted reality competition series, which is exempt from the strike. Goodnight has been working with a couple of business development people to fill the open schedule with non-industry work, including a high-end wedding, set pieces for a series of pop-ups for a wildly successful fashion house popular with Gen Z, and a life-sized model of a rocket for — well, we’d tell you, but then we’d have to kill you.
Goodnight and Co. is a signatory to 11 unions, including the Teamsters and IATSE. “Everybody’s union,” Goodnight says proudly. “I’m Local 800. That’s the Art Directors’ guild. And I’m a Construction Coordinator in Local 44, which is for craftsmen.”
Sometimes Goodnight will drive over to the studios and join the picket lines in solidarity.
A strike sign stands just outside her personal office, like a sentinel. “Girls just wanna have fund$,” it reads in Sharpie letters. It’s a WGA sign — a guild Goodnight hopes to join in the near future. She’s halfway through her Masters in Screenwriting at Cal State Northridge.
Denise Quan
“I’m going to school every night, and often working through the night to write my papers and my screenplays,” she says. “Writing is the hardest thing I’ve done. It’s the most challenging, and it’s the thing that I’d like to dedicate the rest of my life to. So yeah, I have that much respect for the craft.”
But for now, there are 25 employees she is desperate to get back on the payroll. In fact, a handful of them still regularly visit the shop, even though they’re not working.
“Beth is the leader, but she’s also a friend,” says Greg Young, a nine-year employee whom Goodnight calls her “Specialist of Special Things.”
Although Goodnight expects the strike to last through October, she’s optimistic. “I have a lot of faith,” she shares. “I pray for every one of my employees by name regularly, to make sure they’re okay. I check in with them.”
She’s silent for a moment, then can’t resist a barbed shot at the big streamers and studio heads. “That’s the big difference between a company that cares about their employees, and one that doesn’t even know who their employees are,” she says. (15035 Califa St., Sherman Oaks) — Denise Quan
JF Chen
Joel Chen, the Shanghai-born owner of Hollywood’s JF Chen, has been collecting furniture and antiques for almost 50 years. “I have everything and that’s why the movie industry comes to me,” Chen tells Los Angeles. “The store is 17,000 square feet and it’s very confusing. You need to be sophisticated or you won’t know what you’re looking at.”
But business has been down at his Highland Avenue shop, with many of his customers — he estimates 30% of his clients are in the movie industry — hampered by the strike.
“We did Severance for Apple TV+ and Beef for Netflix, and we’re losing a lot of rental fees in a very big way,” says Chen. “Beef took a lot of rare furniture, because in the story there was a billionaire woman residing in an incredible house and she had glass chairs by Lenci and art by Clare Graham. Ben Stiller is the director of Severance and, because they’re shooting in New York, there are lots of shoots and reshoots it takes months. They had to buy everything and ship it there and it was a bundle.”
Chen’s first Hollywood assignment was The Bodyguard starring Whitney Houston.”I was new to the business and very excited,” Chen recalls. “They borrowed all the expensive stuff and paid a lot of money and it got totally edited out of the film. That’s fairly common.”
Today, his celebrity clientele includes Barbra Streisand, Kanye West and serial house flipper Ellen DeGeneres, per Architectural Digest. “Rappers and singers buy a lot of stuff now, more than the actors,” he says. “Rockers used to party a lot and wreck the furniture, but a lot less now than 20 years ago. They’re more tame now.” (931 North Highland Ave.) — Chris Nichols
Sandy Rose Floral
A business known for making “Legendary Florals for Television and Film,” as its website boasts, Sandy Rose Floral describes the impact of the strike as “disastrous.”
“We’ve basically been closed down for the past two months,” says Sandy Rose Floral’s owner Corri Levelle. “What remains to be seen is if the SAG-AFTRA strike will now help speed the process — as far as negotiations — or if it’s going to help at all. It’s concerning to me that no one is at the table. That’s my biggest concern.”
The Sandy Rose Instagram features posts beseeching the AMPTP and WGA to “get back to the table so we can all get back to doing what we love.”
Says Levelle: “The far-reaching effects are going to be felt like shockwaves throughout Los Angeles for businesses. Think about every department that it takes to make a production work and the ancillary business that are their support services; it’s everybody.”
Levelle mentions prop houses, the costumers that buy from retail, the dry cleaners whose services are continuously used, and the catering businesses and local restaurants that survive from feeding large crews.
How Sandy Rose Floral can survive after these strikes is “an open-ended question.”
Adds Levelle: “All of us are coming off of COVID shut down. My company was shut down for seven months in 2020, and we’ve only just begun to recover from that. So I’ve taken in day by day – there’s no end in sight. I can’t even predict it, it’s out of my control. … I just keep going and paying my bills as long as I can, and I don’t know what that looks like, honestly. I went through the 2007-2008 writers strike. … That was 100 days and very difficult. We’re at the point now, almost at that length of these strikes but this is going to be much longer, I think — I can hold out a few more months but I have to come back with operating capital. Once we gear back up, I can’t be at ground zero or I won’t be able to run payroll or purchase supplies to make product. That’s where we’re at — it’s a bad situation, for sure. … I watched Fran Drescher’s SAG-AFTRA press conference the other day when they announced they were going on strike and she really described it so articulately.”
Though it’s a precariously dangerous situation, Levelle understands the magnitude of the big picture. “It’s not just this industry — this is a far reaching nationwide assault on workers,” Levelle adds. “It’s an assault by the upper 1%. There’s a lot of money that’s being made for shareholders that is not coming down to the people on whose backs the money is being made by. … I am not a union member, but I support these efforts because it affects me ultimately. The more the budgets are squeezed, the more it trickles down and affects production.” — Josephine Mayer
Stories Café & Books
Sympathy for the struggling artist is what got Claudia Colodro into the business of selling books and coffee in the first place. Fifteen years ago, Colodro and her business partner, Alex Maslansky, turned an empty Echo Park storefront into the caffeine and literature hub Stories Café & Books.
On a typical weekday, no sooner does the bookstore open its doors at nine than the local struggling artists order coffee and pile the tables with their laptops, books and saucers.
“For a while it was hard to notice who was even at the store but yes, writers have always been a staple,” Colodro wrote good-naturedly in an email to Los Angeles. “We will always be there for the struggling artist.”
The Summer 2023 strike wave in Hollywood may well determine the future of struggling artists everywhere — including many of Colodro’s regulars. As a small business owner beset with existential crisis since the pandemic, she feels in tune with the combative turn in the zeitgeist. “Just a strange je ne sais quoi in the air these days, an instability and all-be-damned collective reality.”
Even regular customers of the popular coffee-and-book establishment are feeling the pinch. “Yes, the strike seems to have affected us both morally and business-wise,” she says.
“We will always be there for the struggling artist.”
The year was already shaping up to be a difficult one for the bookstore owner. In January, Maslansky died. His death created a void they’ve tried to fill. “The crew and myself still struggle without him,” she says.
Now that the strikes of the Hollywood writers and actors have ground all studio production to a halt, customers are affected by the strike in ways not readily apparent. And not only members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. “We also have many production people in our orbit … severely affected. Wardrobe and grips and all aspects of film production, all those behind-the-scenes people who don’t write or act are out of work as well.”
Overheard in the shop these days are conversations about guild insurance and its “impossible-to-meet” quotas. It’s become a place to commiserate with others who are in the same boat — “currently being out of work, currently struggling with this giant unknown of being replaced by technology,” as Colodro describes it.
Still, buoyed from book purchases by well-to-do new homeowners in gentrifying Echo Park, the shop forges ahead. “We’d be having a much harder time without their support so it’s important to keep the books fresh and vital and interesting.”
“We aren’t as busy as pre-Covid, and haven’t been since 2020,” Colodro says. “But strike or no strike, Covid or no Covid, we continue on and provide a place for people to work when working and a community place to just be in.” (1716 W. Sunset Blvd.) — Jason McGahan
Alex in Wonderland
Prior to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike, Alex in Wonderland’s 5,000 square-foot Burbank facility was always buzzing — the demand for special effects, props, and costumes being a constant need for the film industry.
For owners Mike and Alex McGee, that has meant steady business. The couple has dedicated the last 20 years to their shop, focusing on making film fantasy a reality. Before the strike, a day at Alex in Wonderland would involve 20 phone calls, five project bids, and three to four ongoing jobs. Now, they are left with crumbs and are still expected to make their regular overhead payments of $15,000 to $18,000.
Mike says he is “afraid to take a vacation or do anything luxurious,” due to the lack of work. Despite being mainly film industry-focused, the company does offer services for live events, theme parks, and museums.
“Unfortunately, the strike happened after the theme park season because we typically do our theme park builds during the wintertime,” he says. “We are getting a couple of live events, but they are small compared to getting booked on a film. Museums and places like that won’t spend more than $3,000 or $4,000 on a job.”
Still, he empathizes with the strikers, especially as it pertains to AI and technological advances. “AI and digital production have been an enemy of mine for 25 years,” says Mike. “The fact that people can do things digitally always encroaches on our business because everything we do is practical. We do real-life, physical costumes, prop guns, miniatures, and all that sorts of stuff.”
In the meantime, Alex in Wonderland has been able to contribute to commercial sets in lieu of larger productions. Adds Mike: “Commercials are coming out of the woodwork right now. I didn’t know actors could still do commercials, so evidently, there are a lot of commercials trying to film now that people’s schedules are opening up. … It helps pay the light bill.” — Cerys Davies
