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XHollywood on Lockdown: How L.A. Quickly Lost 14,000 Entertainment Jobs as the Pandemic Spread
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.

Hollywood, an economic engine that has powered Los Angeles since the dawn of television screens and movie cameras, has been devastated by stay-at-home orders. With production at a standstill and sports halted, mass layoffs and unemployment have stopped the show.
Studios, theaters, production companies and entertainment venues have laid off or furloughed more than 14,000 workers in Los Angeles County over less than two months, according to state filings. The April and May records reflect only a sliver of the job losses in the entertainment industry, but they provide a window into just how widespread the pain has been felt by workers from Disney to independent production studios and sports networks.
One of the hardest hit employers, according to documents from the state's Economic Development Department, was the Los Angeles office of Fox Sports Productions, where 3,595 people were temporarily laid off at the end of April. The Labor Department reported Thursday national filings for unemployment claims totaled just shy of 3 million for the most recent reporting period, bringing the total to 36.5 million since the pandemic forced states into lockdown.
At Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS, 638 people were furloughed in late April and early May.
The long list also includes Sony Pictures and NBCUniversal. Even one of Tinseltown's strongest unions, the 160,000-member Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Arts, had to temporarily let go of 27 workers.
A look at some of the production companies that experienced temporary layoffs in April and May.
In mid-March the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which includes cinematographers and other below-the-line Hollywood workers, said at least 120,000 of their 150,000 members lost jobs.
All told, it's been a serious economic blow to the region. Last week Mayor Eric Garcetti said he is creating a working group to reopen industries including film and television.
The entertainment industry not only defines Los Angeles in the national imagination, but according to the Otis College Report, it employs around 258,000 people and fuels about a quarter of the region's economy - from the talent in front of the camera to the florists, caterers and lighting crews that serve the industry.
The data doesn't reflect the many contractors the Hollywood machine depends on, including writers, performers and others that work on on a project-by-project basis, noted Gene Del Vecchio, author of Creating Blockbusters and an adjunct professor at USC Marshall School of Business.
"When you look at studio layoffs, you're looking at a fraction of the people that have been hit," he said.
Between mid-March and June, Del Vecchio estimated that with theaters closed, Hollywood could lose about $3.8 billion at the box office.
"Where does that money go? Most of it goes to pay independent production companies. Even those hire a lot of independent contractors. All those people that we are talking about are flying under the radar."
FOX Sports Skybox: back and better
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The state's data also doesn't include companies with fewer than 75 employees, or those that have yet to report. The latter includes Disney, which has said it will pink-slip 100,000 workers - nearly half its workforce, as all of its theme parks — save the slowly reopening Shanghai park — remain closed. The future of the Happiest Place on Earth is murky, with most analysts thinking its corporate might will help it to weather the crisis, but with little clarity about how long the pain will last.
Released daily, the state filings offer a window into the depth of the crisis in the city that can't be gleaned from local unemployment number, which lag behind national figures. California won't produce detailed county-specific unemployment data for March until next Friday.
"There are so many people that live off of Hollywood," said Ivette Rodriguez, founder of American Entertainment Marketing, a Venice-based public relations firm specializing in film and music for the Latin market. Since stay-at-home orders took effect, her business has dried up.
"Right now you can't have conversations with studios," she said. "They are having their own troubles. It's a trying situation."
Although Rodriguez's business has stopped, her situation is unlikely to appear in any of the data as she hasn't collected unemployment or qualified for a loan.
File:Walt Disney Studios Park
Wikimedia Commons
"There's a lot of independent people that do what I do that will never be counted," she said. "We service Hollywood."
Rodriguez, who has done publicity for films from Disney and Netflix including Roma, the Academy Award-winning film by director Alfonso Cuarón and more recently Call of the Wild, said she's trying to diversify her two-decade old business to gaming and other platforms.
The most vulnerable jobs in the industry have been "the jobs where people are on-site doing the actual production," media analyst Dan Rayburn told dot.LA. In February there were 1,091 local film productions, according to FilmLA. By March 20, the day filming was halted, there were zero.
When production first shut down, writing jobs were widely considered relatively safe, since writers' rooms could operate virtually; but Rayburn noted that writers are now being laid off, too, with less content set for production.
And things may get worse before they get better.
Pre- and post-production roles that have been done remotely since before the pandemic have also been viewed as safer, but as the pandemic wears on, the amount of content for those roles to work on will shrink.
"That may mean a new wave of job losses," observed Rachel McCallister, Chair of MPRM Communications, a public relations firm with clients across the entertainment industry.
As for when and and if the lost jobs will return, that remains anyone's guess: "Nobody knows, because we don't know when stuff will get back into production," Rayburn said.
Numerous efforts have emerged around Hollywood to dampen the carnage. Netflix, which is increasingly entrenching itself in Los Angeles, set up a $100 million relief fund in mid-March, some of which went to support ongoing support efforts from unions and nonprofits.
The streaming giant has been among the relative beneficiaries of the pandemic so far, blowing past expectations in its last earnings call as viewing has climbed amid Stay-at-Home orders. So, too, have major potential buyers of Hollywood productions like Amazon and Apple TV, who have ample resources to acquire content now and once filming resumes, noted Bill Allen, chief executive of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.
The imbalance between the relatively unscathed and the ruthlessly clobbered could permanently rejigger Hollywood's landscape.
"If it gets bad enough, you may see a company that is doing well in this environment, like Amazon and Netflix, you might find them starting to buy other companies," Del Vecchio said.
A second wave of the virus in winter, as some have predicted, would crush Hollywood, he said.
"What you are seeing now is terrible. What you could see in the fall will destroy the industry."
Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @racheluranga. You can also email me.
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Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
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Diagnostics Startup Polygon Raises $4M To Test Kids for ADHD and Dyslexia
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Here’s how Jack Rolo describes his childhood: He was good at chess, and bad at spelling. He was good at math, and bad at reading. Rolo went on to study physics at Durham University in his native England—and despite often struggling in his courses, it wasn’t until after he graduated that he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a common language processing disorder that affects reading.
Rolo’s experiences informed his founding of Polygon, a Santa Monica-based diagnostics startup that emerged from stealth on Friday with $4.2 million in funding, and the goal of better diagnosing dyslexia, ADHD and other learning-related disabilities. The funding includes a $3.6 million seed round led by Spark Capital, as well as $600,000 in pre-seed funding led by Pear VC.
“It really is a product I wish I'd had access to at an earlier age myself,” Rolo told dot.LA.
After moving to California to earn his MBA degree at UC Berkeley, Rolo met his co-founder Meryll Dindin, who now serves as Polygon’s chief technology officer. Together, they’ve built a platform that aims to partner with schools to test children for a myriad of disabilities that may affect academic performance. (The startup claims it’s already teamed with schools in California, but did not disclose which.) Rolo says he envisions that these assessments become as ubiquitous as vision and hearing exams: that every student, regardless of age, background or academic performance, will be tested.
As is, testing for disorders like ADHD and dyslexia often depends on parents, teachers or pediatricians observing a child, detecting something amiss and intervening. There are problems with this method; for instance, girls are chronically underdiagnosed with ADHD because it presents itself differently than it does for boys. Teachers juggling crowded classrooms may not be able to perceive why a specific child is falling behind. And Black and Latino children are often overlooked when it comes to diagnosing disabilities.
“Common roots of referral are teachers, and typically that's flagged because they'll see the student failing,” Rolo said. “That's part of the problem—that this then becomes almost a wait-to-fail approach, when ideally you want to pick these things up proactively.”
Polygon employs full-time psychologists who evaluate students through a telehealth platform. After undergoing a range of standardized assessments and interviewing their parents and teachers, a student who is diagnosed will receive an "Individualized Education Program," a schooling curriculum tailored toward their disabilities.
Assessments start at $995, which Polygon says is up to five times cheaper than traditional disability testing alternatives. The company plans on driving that cost down further by collecting a large data sample of assessments and building machine learning technology to “pre-screen” students; those who are flagged would then undergo more extensive testing.
“Ultimately, what we're trying to move toward is a model quite similar to the optician, where everyone gets the evaluation,” Rolo said. “Yes, assessments are still not accessible for all families just yet—but this is the beginning, and we hope to drive this cost down way further over time.”
Polygon said the new funding will go toward expanding beyond California and growing its network nationally.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegel on How the Job Market Has Shifted
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
On this episode of Office Hours, host Spencer Rascoff talked with ZipRecruiter CEO and founder Ian Siegel about how he built his company, the lessons he's learned along the way and how he's seen the pandemic drastically reshape the job market—probably for good.
Siegel moved to L.A. to be a writer in Hollywood. But he quickly realized he hated it. Instead, he moved into the fledgling online division at Warner Bros., From there, he found himself working at a series of VC-backed startups that became successful. As a result, he became known in the industry as an expert in taking online businesses that had plateaued and figuring out a way to help them grow. He said he hated every minute of it.
“What you are in that situation is you're an agent of change. And what I learned is you can be good at that, but no one likes you because everybody fears change.”
Instead, Siegel worked up the courage to start his own business.
“Why do I let people pay me such a small amount of money to turn around these businesses?,” he asked himself. “If I'm so good at this, why don't I just start my own and build it right from the very beginning. And that's what ultimately gave me the conviction to go launch ZipRecruiter.”
His time working at young startups too small to have their own HR departments gave Siegel the idea. After posting the same job position across multiple websites and printing out every single resume submitted, he realized he was facing a problem technology is built to solve.
“I just wanted a magic button that I could push. And it would send a job to all job boards at once, and then all the candidates from all those different sites would go into one easy to review list. That's exactly what we built with the first version of ZipRecruiter,” said Siegel.
Over time, ZipRecruiter’s mission has changed, he said, from a company aimed at solving a single pain point to a company trying to reinvent how the labor market functions. That, he added, is orders of magnitude more difficult, because “you are retraining America or potentially the world on a new way to do something.”
“And now you are knife fighting in the jungle, you are trailblazing,” he added. “I don't worry about how anybody in the current ecosystem operates. I'm truly fundamentally trying to change the labor market in the United States right now.”
Siegel said he’s seen the job market drastically change over the past couple years, as the pandemic accelerated the move to remote work and hybrid and remote positions surged. Fewer than 2% of jobs on ZipRecruiter had the words “remote” in them before COVID-19 stuck. Now, 60% of applicants say they’re seeking remote or hybrid work, and 12% of the jobs listed on the site offer a remote option—and that number is growing.
That reality has changed how he runs his own business.
“What I've done at ZipRecruiter is accept change,” Siegel said. “We are fully embracing remote. I believe remote is not only here to stay, it's a huge benefit.”
That, he says, is because employees and employers both save time on driving and grooming. They save money on gas and parking. The office, he added, will still have a purpose, but it will probably be more for building culture, and less for work.
"It'll be a much smaller space entirely designed around fun," he said. "No one will ever go in there every day purely for the purpose of doing their job, probably ever again."
One of the lessons Siegel said he’s learned as a serial entrepreneur is to make sure the work you pick is meaningful to you.
“It turns out every business takes the same amount of time, which is all your time,” he said. “So be thoughtful about how you spend it. Pick work that's meaningful for you. Pick work that has scale opportunity to it and that you're going to be excited to go into every day,”
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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
Riot Games Doubles Down on Mobile With ‘Aim Lab’ Investment
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Riot Games has invested in virtual shooting range developer Statespace, accelerating the Los Angeles video game publisher’s efforts to dominate the mobile gaming space.
Riot did not disclose terms of the investment but told dot.LA it took a “minority stake” in New York-based Statespace.
Statespace’s main product is a platform called Aim Lab, a free-to-play virtual shooting range that first-person shooter gamers can use to warm up their skills before heading into a competitive match. Statespace CEO Wayne Mackey told the Washington Post that the plan is to leverage its relationship with Riot to bring Aim Lab onto mobile platforms—a transition that he said is “imminent” and could happen as soon as next month.
Riot, in turn, wants to integrate Aim Lab as part of its growing base of titles with hardcore fan bases, like its first-person shooter game “Valorant” or its multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game “League of Legends: Wild Rift.” The idea is that esports players could use Aim Lab to warm up with weapons used in the actual games, and also for a postmortem on a match that they lost by giving them a chance to review footage of their defeat and figure out how to improve, Mackey said.
“We look forward to collaborating with Statespace on developing innovative training and coaching tools for Valorant and MOBA players around the world to improve their skills at every level,” Jake Perlman-Garr, Riot’s global head of corporate development, said in a statement Thursday.
Riot has been doubling down on mobile gaming in recent years. The publisher has released three mobile games in the last two years—including “Wild Rift,” its most popular mobile title—and has invested in mobile gaming companies like Double Loop Games and Bunch. That focus has come as mobile gaming has emerged as one of the industry’s fastest-growing sectors.
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Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him