Eric Kenehan got the news that several of his peers in TV editing have received in recent years: He’s out of what looked like a stable job.
Last year, the veteran editor with more than a dozen years of experience landed a job working on the Fox reality series “Extracted,” which follows a group of survivalists isolated in the Canadian wilderness and challenged to survive for as long as they can.
The show premiered this past February and was renewed last month, but Kenehan and his fellow editors were told that they would not be brought back for Season 2. Their post-production work was being moved to Canada so that it could be counted towards tax credits the show was benefiting from for shooting up north.
It’s a sort of outsourcing that Kenehan finds bitterly ironic. Countless blockbusters and prestige TV shows have moved both filming and post-production outside of the U.S. to take advantage of tax breaks in an increasingly global production landscape, but those top-tier titles are often made for a global audience. That’s not the case with “Extracted.”
“The show opens up explaining the premise as ‘12 Americans stranded in the wilderness.’ It’s a show that stars Americans and is made for an American audience, but the crew that’s making it isn’t American,” he said.
Kenehan reached out to other editors who have worked in the unscripted TV space and started making a spreadsheet based on what he heard back and on his own internet research. He’s counted 38 shows so far that either have never done post-production work in the U.S. or are in the process of or planning to outsource it.
Among the shows on the list are 18 Fox series, including “Next Level Chef,” which moved out of the U.S. starting in Season 2, and “MasterChef,” which will still post its upcoming Australia-shot 15th season in the U.S. but which has informed its current staff it may move post-production out of the country in upcoming seasons.
It shows how the anxiety over job losses gripping Hollywood’s local entertainment industry isn’t just limited to the jobs on set. The days where post-production workers — which include editors, sound designers and mixers and film scoring composers and musicians, among others — in Los Angeles could count on a steady stream of work from productions filmed both locally and abroad are coming to an end, as governments in the production hubs that have become California’s biggest competitors are offering additional perks in their tax incentives to productions that keep post work in their states and countries.
“These are extremely challenging times for post-production, as they are for our union kin across the board in the film and TV industries. We have been pushing hard with our IATSE family and allied unions to lobby for big improvements in California’s tax incentives, and we look forward to seeing those needed changes enacted,” said Scott George, national executive director of the Motion Picture Editors Guild. “The post-production professionals we represent remain the most talented, productive and experienced in the world.”
In New York, the recently expanded tax incentive program allocates $45 million of its $800 million budget cap specifically towards post-production work that studios can take advantage of whether or not that work is being done on productions shot in the Empire State. That flexibility is designed to help the state’s entertainment industry stem the tide as neighboring production hubs such as New Jersey and Canada have become increasingly competitive.
But it is also an incentive that has had an impact on post workers still in Hollywood like Karen Baker Landers, a sound supervisor and editor who has won two Oscars for her work on “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Skyfall.” Despite her credentials, she too has struggled to find work in Los Angeles recently and tells TheWrap that she lost a post-production job she had lined up after it was moved to New York to take advantage of the tax break.
“It’s not just New York. States like Louisiana, Georgia, Ohio, they all have standalone tax credits,” said Landers, who has organized with the grassroots Stay in LA campaign to preserve entertainment jobs in the Southland. “California productions are still doing post in California, but it’s a lot of the rest that we’re losing.”
California’s revised tax incentive program, which is expected to be approved with a raise of the program’s cap to $750 million, does not have financial incentives specifically allocated towards VFX or other post-production work. But post-production work does count as qualified spending eligible for a tax credit, so productions that shoot in the state are incentivized to complete them locally as well.
There are also special “uplift” bonuses for the qualification process offered to productions that do specific areas of post-production in California such as film scoring, which has been heavily promoted by the American Federation of Musicians as part of an increased collaboration with IATSE and other Hollywood unions during the recent lobbying campaign to overhaul the incentive program.
“Like with the rest of post-production, it has become remarkably simple to record a score somewhere else,” said Stephanie O’Keefe, president of AFM Local 47. “Ten years ago, 20 years ago, it required the composer and his crew and the director to fly to another location and record with a full orchestra. Now, with it no longer necessary to have an orchestra recording in the same room, productions have access to a global network of non-union, non-American musicians available for lower rates.”
O’Keefe says that has led to lower occupancy rates for scoring stages on Hollywood’s backlots; stages that for decades were the epicenter of film and TV composing. In 2006, Paramount demolished its scoring stage to make way for additional post-production infrastructure on its Melrose backlot, and O’Keefe is concerned that other scoring stages on backlots like Warner Bros., Sony and Fox may be next if the tide isn’t turned.
That’s where the uplift bonus for film scoring comes in. AFM says that most California productions from major studios take advantage of the scoring uplift already, so it’s likely that more work for Californian AFM musicians will come from those productions lured back to the state with the increased tax credit cap — 4,400 jobs are expected to be brought back to the state as a result. That’s just a fraction of the roughly 20,000 jobs in entertainment that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates were lost from 2022 to 2024, but with the situation that Hollywood’s working class finds itself in, any additional employment opportunity will be welcome.
What AFM is hoping for is a further increase in the uplift bonus for independent productions at various budget levels, as the union found that the biggest opportunity for increased work for their members would come if productions from studios and producers that aren’t signatory to the union’s contracts get a bigger incentive to employ musicians in Hollywood and California at large.
It’s unclear if that will happen, at least in this round of changes to the tax incentive program. The state assembly and senate bills that outline the changes to the program have passed their first floor votes and are now heading to opposite houses in the Sacramento legislature.
Authors of the bills tell TheWrap they are working with legislative leaders to find ways to expedite the bills and have them passed and sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom for approval sometime this summer rather than at the end of the legislative session in September, hoping to implement the expanded program as quickly as possible.
That leaves California’s post-production workers in a situation where a higher number of incentive-approved productions could provide a respite in their search for work, but it will be unclear for some time how many of those productions would have filmed elsewhere – and posted elsewhere to take advantage of another jurisdiction’s incentive – if not for those Golden State credits. Answers to that won’t come likely until 2027, after unions and state economists are able to log the number of work hours that production and post-production workers in the state have earned under the new incentive.
In the meantime, Landers is continuing to organize with other Hollywood post-production workers, both through Stay in LA and their IATSE locals, with the hopes that Sacramento lawmakers will consider in the future carving out a chunk of the expected $750 million program exclusively for post-production work, following in the footsteps of New York and other states.
“To be clear, I’m not saying to add more money. But there should be some from the money that they’ve already added for any production, no matter where they film, to post here where we still have the best in the field,” she said.
