Spencer Pratt may be out of the Los Angeles mayoral runoff, but he is not going quietly, releasing a video this week vowing to expose corruption, threatening to release damaging recordings of one of the two remaining candidates, and promising that FBI agents in blazers will be kicking in doors across city hall. First Assistant US Attorney Billy said to expect voter fraud indictments in the next month or two. Tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya told the All-In podcast that the statistical odds of the vote surge that pushed Nithya Raman past Pratt in the final ballot count occurring naturally are approximately one in a trillion.
Against that backdrop, Chris Fenton, longtime media executive, producer, USC professor, and author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the collapse of Hollywood production, the push to bring the industry back to America, and his new film Bad Counselors, opening in theaters July 22nd through the 27th.
Fenton said the dysfunction Spencer Pratt describes in Los Angeles is not abstract for people who work in the entertainment industry or live anywhere near the city’s most troubled corridors. He said he lived in the Hancock Park area for years and dealt with slow police response times, potholes, and homelessness problems firsthand. He described a three-mile stretch near USC called the Blade, one of the largest sex trafficking areas in the country, where children as young as eleven and twelve are visible on the street and where city officials have done essentially nothing. He now lives in Manhattan Beach, its own municipality, so he does not vote in the LA mayoral race, but said the situation in the city is genuinely dire.
On the film industry, Fenton said Hollywood has been aggressively offshoring production outside the United States for the past decade and the trend has not reversed. In Georgia alone, production spending dropped from $4.4 billion to $2.3 billion over the last three years, nearly a fifty percent decline. Soundstages in the Atlanta area are seventy-five percent underutilized or completely empty. The jobs being lost are not executive positions but middle-class and upper-middle-class freelance workers, cameramen, gaffers, electricians, and other crew who might have worked three or four productions a year and are now down to one. He said the United States has the best-in-class tradespeople in the industry and the country should be keeping that work at home rather than exporting it.
On artificial intelligence and its impact on production, Fenton said the disruption is real but the extent of it remains uncertain. He said the film he just finished, Bad Counselors, employed twelve hundred people shooting in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, and that major Marvel productions he has worked on have had crews of seven thousand. The fundamental labor intensity of filmmaking has not changed dramatically yet. AI is enhancing special effects and will reduce the number of extras needed in crowd scenes, which will lower some costs and eliminate some jobs, but the craft and technical workforce for physical production remains largely intact for the near term. USC is developing curriculum to address where the technology is heading and how it will reshape the industry.
Bad Counselors, opening July 22nd through the 27th with tickets already on sale at badcounselors.com, is a fish-out-of-water summer camp comedy about two fraternity brothers who need to complete one hundred and twenty hours of community service to graduate on time. Their only viable option is becoming counselors at a sleepaway church camp, despite having no religious faith, which produces the film’s central comic premise. Fenton said Chris Klein, known to audiences from the American Pie franchise, plays the pastor who runs the camp and delivers a strong performance. He described the film as appropriate for parents and kids as young as eight or nine while having enough edge for college audiences, whom they have already tested it with to positive results.
His pitch for the film doubles as his pitch for what Hollywood should be making more of: escapist entertainment with no political ideology, something that works for secular audiences and people of faith alike, and that gives people a reason to go back to movie theaters and remember why they enjoyed the experience. He said after years of trying to figure out how to please Beijing and realizing how corrosive that was to the industry’s creative output and American values, his current focus is simply on making good content that everyone across the country can enjoy without being lectured.