Cyrillic Partners

The Writer’s Guild strike, already more than two weeks in progress, could be costing the Los Angeles economy more than $21 million each day, according to the non-profit group FilmL.A. The Los Angeles Times has a breakdown of the various costs associated with the estimate:

The estimate is based on the average number of employees on these shows, and their typical budgets and shooting cycles.

For example, a single episode of a drama costs about $3 million to produce, employs 300 people and takes eight days to shoot. An episode of a half-hour sitcom costs $1.5 million, employs an average of 88 employees and has a five-day shooting cycle.

Sitcoms were the first to take a hit because of the shorter lead times in writing them. During the first two weeks of the strike, filming for sitcoms outside of studio soundstages dropped nearly 50% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to FilmL.A. Activity for TV dramas has been virtually flat, while on-location reality TV shoots jumped 23% recently.

FilmL.A.’s estimate is conservative because it only takes into account jobs in the industry, not the scores of jobs at restaurants, hotels and other businesses that service Hollywood. The entertainment industry accounts for almost 7% of Los Angeles County’s $442-billion economy.

Nor does it factor in job losses from the feature film sector. Studios already have scripts in hand for their 2008 slates, so only a few feature films have delayed production, including Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons” and Oliver Stone’s “Pinkville.”

It’s easy to poke holes in any cost-assessment, and the L.A. Times brings up a few good ones.

James “the genius” Surowiecki has a good piece in The New Yorker about strikes and why it is difficult to resolve them (read it here).

[Image from thepointmedia.com]

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