He should be pitching himself aggressively to the unions in the entertainment business.
Spencer Pratt has done a lot of work calling out Los Angeles government for its failures in the wildfires that devastated Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods. He’s called out the homeless-industrial NGO complex for essentially profiting from homelessness while doing nothing about it. And he’s called out L.A. for a lack of common sense when it comes to drug addiction. For all this he’s become a top-tier candidate.
It’s going to be difficult for him to win, however. Los Angeles is in California. He’s going to face big-money Democrats who don’t want an independent like him. He’s going to face unions that are empowered to harvest ballots.
I wonder if he should try to split them over the issue of Hollywood outsourcing. “It’s cheaper to bring 100 Americans to Ireland than to walk across the lot at Fox,” Rob Lowe said on his podcast last year when explaining why the game show he hosts is filmed in Ireland.
The United Kingdom is offering such attractive studios that even Marvel Studios, which invested massively in Georgia and its tax relief, has moved production to Blighty. The U.K., Ireland, and Hungary have taken a huge bite out of Hollywood, which was already under heavy pressure as Canada and New Jersey build out studio space or expand tax incentives for production.
Hollywood still has natural advantages, especially over Ireland and the United Kingdom, namely climate. Los Angeles, a city on the Pacific coast, also is within driving distance of mountains and deserts, and Southern California gets about twice as many sunny days a year as Ireland does. Legislators in Sacramento and D.C. have been slow to address the bleeding in Hollywood; they don’t want to be seen bailing out rich actors and producers. However, there is a massive spillover effect. People who really know Los Angeles know that it’s also a middle-class city and that the florists, set designers, technicians, electricians, seamstresses, and caterers depend on showbiz production.
Pratt has said he wants to make Los Angeles “picture ready” again. He should have credibility saying this because The Hills, the silly reality TV show he was on over a decade ago, was stupefyingly beautiful. The photography and lighting of those shows, done more like The O.C. and other soap operas, was truly top-notch.
One reason that Pratt is gaining traction as a candidate is that the last time people saw him regularly, Los Angeles was able to produce, as a background, some of the most gorgeous B-roll and establishing shots ever broadcast. He should be pitching himself aggressively to the unions in the entertainment business.