‘$1,500 a Day for a Guy to Sit in a Car’: Indie Producers Warn Los Angeles Is a ‘Hostile’ Place to Film

Dustin Harris can remember his most frustrating day shooting in Los Angeles. It was 2019, and he was producing the independent film “Malibu Horror Story” in Griffith Park. Per the permitting regulations laid out by the city government and its contracted permit office, FilmLA, he had to have a fire marshal inspect his shooting site before cameras could roll. 

So what did this inspection involve?

“He shows up, looks around, says ‘great,’ and then spends the rest of the shoot sitting in the car doing crossword puzzles,” Harris tells TheWrap. “As a resident, I understand the need for fire protection and to preserve our parks, especially now. But there’s got to be a better way to do this. I’m paying almost $1,500 a day for a guy to sit in his car for most of the time.”

Harris, who founded the independent production company Posh Mouse, pulled out the permit paperwork he filed with FilmLA for the three days his team shot in Griffith Park. Along with the $685 permit application fee he paid to FilmLA – that fee is $931 today – Harris also had to pay fees like $2,964 for a required monitor from the Department of Parks and Recreation, a $456 “reporting fee” for that monitor, and a $1,350 film use fee. 

Then there was another $4,536 for the fire safety officer sitting in the car, and an $85 “spot check surcharge” to the fire department. In total: $10,119 in permitting and inspection fees. 

“That’s $10,119 that has nothing to do with our film, a film that had no major lighting and no major stunts. We were running on a putt-putt generator,” Harris said. 

For a major studio production shooting in Los Angeles like Peacock’s “Bel-Air” or Amazon’s “Fallout,” such permitting costs could be absorbed, especially with the expanded production tax credit program approved by California legislators this past July. 

But for the independent producers of film, television and even commercial projects trying to get the most out of every dollar, these costs are part of the reason why they are pulling up stakes and moving to other states for their shoots. It is why, with the state tax credit expansion now secured, local permitting costs and regulations have become the next front in the fight to stop Los Angeles’ decline as a major production hub. 

These indie productions don’t bring a vast number of jobs when compared to major studio projects like HBO’s “The Pitt,” which are the primary beneficiaries of those tax incentives. But for the handful of crew workers and working class actors who do work on each one and don’t have the connections or experience to get on those big studio projects, they can mean the difference between being able to keep paying rent for several months and qualifying for their union health plan as SAG-AFTRA or IATSE members. 

It is those workers that the grassroots campaign Stay in LA is urgently advocating for as it has pleaded with officials in City Hall to cut through the red tape that has kept projects away from Hollywood, a devastating trend that the state is trying to reverse with those tax credits. But the damage has already been done, with the number of shoot days logged in FilmLA’s most recent quarterly report coming in at just 4,380 days, 37% below the five-year average and roughly half of the 8,674 shoot days recorded in the third quarter of 2022. 

“If you go to other parts of the country, they get excited when they hear you’re making a movie. It’s not like that in L.A.,” said Harris. “I live here. I want to shoot here. But sometimes it feels like a hostile place for filming.”

Fees are just the beginning

Stay in LA was founded at the start of 2025 in response to the January wildfires and the fear that they would hasten the departure of even more Hollywood productions. The organization’s primary focus has been to call attention to the various fees and bureaucratic complications that come with on-location shoots in Los Angeles that are either reduced or nonexistent in other major American cities. The organization’s head of legal affairs, Kate Holguin, and IATSE 706 member/makeup artist Cale Thomas used New York’s basic permit application fee of $500 for a two-week filming period as an example, comparing it to $931 for a one-week period in Los Angeles.

“A production has to pay $1,862 for the same amount of time for an on-location shoot that New York offers for less than a third of that cost,” said Thomas. 

Reducing those costs is a top demand for Stay in LA, but it is far from the only one. Another major issue facing productions are special conditions, which are regulations around shooting not just for public areas like airports and schools but also for the 88 incorporated cities within L.A. County and the neighborhoods within the city of L.A.. 

The FilmLA webpage on these special conditions is sprawling, filled with dozens of links to PDFs for requirements specific to neighborhoods from Abbott Kinney to Windsor Square. It even gets down to rules for filming on portions of streets like 1800-1900 Micheltorena St., the residential area surrounding Silver Lake’s famous Paramour Mansion, which became a popular reality TV and music video shooting location in the 2000s. 

Those special conditions became a hurdle for Chad Engel, who co-founded Posh Mouse with Harris and who produces commercials for social media. Finding ways to make his productions as low-impact as possible and avoid the litany of L.A. regulations and special conditions became a key part of his job. But even with his full attention, some of those regulations still pop up. 

“We had a spot that was going up on TikTok, and we shot it in a small bathroom in a private residence in Sherman Oaks,” Engel recounted. “But because the house was in a neighborhood where the road was on a small incline, we had to be assigned two police officers who were $1,500 a day even though we were shooting indoors, plus a site rep. We just had 10 people on that film crew but now my personnel is up by 30%.”

Thomas says that what makes the special conditions so frustrating is that it isn’t always clear where they come from. Some are for public safety requirements, but others are implemented by city council members on behalf of residents or business owners filing complaints. 

“They’re decades old,” he said. “No one has opened up the books and asked ‘What is this code? Where did this ordinance come from? Do we still need it?’” 

But beyond the bureaucracy is something that the producers who spoke to TheWrap say is a cultural difference between Los Angeles and much of the rest of the U.S. Despite the entertainment industry defining the city’s global image, Harris, Engel, Thomas and Holguin all say that there is a common sentiment among the city’s residents of on-location productions being a nuisance and, in some cases, a way to get money through “inconvenience fees,” demanding payments from productions for shooting on streets that can interfere with local business. 

With retail space rentals and other business operating costs rising in Los Angeles like everything else, losing parking space that customers use or having to close outright for a day can be detrimental to a lot of small business owners. But the producers say that they’ve found that “inconvenience fees” have gone too far and can become a millstone for independent projects. 

“Obviously you want to make sure the businesses who are losing some customers because something is shut down get paid equitably,” said Holguin. “But I think that they have to understand that production is a really good thing for them, not just in terms of the tourism that the film industry brings but because these are jobs for your fellow residents, your neighbors, perhaps even your potential customers. I think even in other California cities like San Diego, the residents and businesses welcome filming in a way that L.A. doesn’t.” 

“If the Department of Water and Power or a street repair crew has to do work on a street, businesses aren’t asking for $10,000 from them even though they might take up the same street space as a film crew,” added Thomas. “If the 2028 Olympics shut down a street for the marathon, they’re not going to tell them to pay all these businesses along the route. This just doesn’t apply to anybody else but film shoots.” 

The long, winding fix

One of the people who is key to fixing these and other problems with on-location shooting is Denise Gutches, the CFO and COO of FilmLA. In January, she will take over as CEO of the permitting org from outgoing chief Paul Audley. 

While other major cities have film offices as part of the local government, the Los Angeles City Council and County Board of Supervisors decided in 1995 to merge and privatize their respective film offices to streamline the application process. This past summer, the city council renewed its contract with FilmLA through 2030.

Gutches told TheWrap that FilmLA has been in contact with producers, studios and other entertainment stakeholders in Los Angeles including Stay in LA, as well as the constellation of city departments and officials that affect the permitting process, from Mayor Karen Bass and her newly appointed film liaison Steve Kang, to the Board of Public Works, the L.A. Department of Transportation, LAPD, LAFD, Parks and Recreation, and more. 

“I and our VP of external relations are talking with the film liaison and his staff monthly and are actually working with them almost weekly on resolving issues,” she said. “I think we have the attention of the city and the sense of urgency now seems to have finally picked up, even though it took a few months to get there.”

While the program is proposed for productions with a maximum of 10 cast and crew members, Gutches says that number is not set in stone. FilmLA may increase that limit to 15-20 workers, though Stay in LA says it is lobbying for that limit to be raised to as much as 40 to maximize the number of indie productions that can take advantage of it. 

“We’ve gotten a lot with support from LAPD, LAFD, and Parks and Rec to reduce or eliminate certain fees for this type of permit and to ensure that it’s something that we can actually push through pretty immediately,” Gutches said. 

When it comes to inconvenience fees, FilmLA will be ramping up a public information campaign this winter around them, reaching out to communities and businesses to stress the importance of film shoots to the local economy and to try to find common ground on compensation for street closures.

“These payments are for legitimate business loss offset. If you can’t justify that by showing actual records, there really isn’t a reason for you to be putting your hand out,” said FilmLA’s communications VP Philip Sokoloski. “An inconvenience payment of $500 a day is a day’s wages for someone on the crew.”

Other coming reforms FilmLA points to are expediting the street closure process with LADOT to get permits approved faster as well as working with LAPD to cut down on special conditions that require police officers to be present, meaning fewer fees. 

And beyond the permitting fight, California’s expanded tax incentive program will soon bear fruit as well. While FilmLA’s latest report showed another decline in shoot days for the third quarter of the year, it also noted that 18 TV projects that received tax credits from the California Film Commission are set to roll this winter, which should lead to a turnaround in local production and jobs starting early next year. 

So help is on the way, and FilmLA is confident that 2026 will bring at least some degree of a turnaround in the county’s production decline. What isn’t as clear is the extent to which quarterly shoot day counts will recover or how many working-class actors, writers and crew workers will leave Los Angeles despite that help as their ability to handle high living costs with whatever financial reserves they have finally expires.

Stay in LA, meanwhile, has released its own list of demands for permitting reform, calling on various city departments to waive their fees for indie productions and for the city to shift the LAFD’s film unit to a civilian employee supervised by a fire captain rather than assign leadership of that unit to a fire captain that has to change every three years under union rules, leading to inconsistent enforcement of fire safety rules.

And in the months ahead, Holguin, Thomas and other Stay in LA organizers are expected to show up at city government meetings, whether it is to call on the city council to revise and reduce special conditions or meetings of the Board of Public Works or Department of Transportation to get them to dial back on fees, even at a time when Los Angeles’ fiscal crisis makes it tempting to keep enforcing those fees to fill depleted city funds.

“This is an emergency, and the future of a key industry of LA is at stake,” said Holguin. “We are trying to tell the city, ‘Hey, just cut the fees, let indie productions save the money they would have sent to the city to instead pay crew workers, and let’s see how much filming that brings back in one year.”