Coronavirus Spike Puts Hollywood’s Back-to-Work Plans in Serious Jeopardy
From VARIETY.COM
On Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading expert in infection diseases in the U. S., testified before Congress amid growing alarm surrounding the 80% spike in confirmed COVID-19 infections in the past two weeks. About halfway through the session, Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked Fauci for a direct assessment of where the country could be headed if the surge in cases is not abated. He did not mince words.
“We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day,” Fauci said. “I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around. And so I am very concerned.”
The implications of Fauci’s alarming forecast are clear to anyone who lived through the previous three months: hospitals moving perilously close to over-capacity, states retrenching into strict quarantines, and an already tattered economy plunging deeper into the abyss. That potential future is especially dire for the entertainment industry, which already has record levels of unemployment as the pandemic all but halted production throughout film and television, effectively freezing the content pipeline and cutting off millions of livelihoods.
The shutdown had just started to soften this month, as a handful of U. S. productions — ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” CBS’s “The Bold and the Beautiful” — began slowly getting back to work, with others quietly preparing to start up again in the coming months. Those plans were predicated, however, on the assumption that COVID-19 cases were either leveling off or dropping nationwide, providing a safer environment for productions to move forward.
Instead, cases have exploded. On Monday and Tuesday, California hit record numbers of daily confirmed cases, led by Los Angeles county, which has hit over 103,000 total cases of the over 230,000 total cases statewide. Cases are similarly skyrocketing in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, while the popular production hubs of Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico are seeing a precipitous rise as well.
The facts on the ground are swiftly placing the industry into an excruciating double-bind between literal and figurative life and death.
“From the studio’s perspective, from a bunch of people who are looking at their quarterly numbers and not going to be on set, there’s a tremendous desire of ‘We’ve got to go go go go go.'”
Senior executive at production company
One top film executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that production is something “the town is going to have to power through, unless an outbreak shuts them down.” The executive pointed to a large volume of “existential-level anxiety” — but rather than about contracting COVID-19, about “committing to making content for our livelihoods in spite of it.”
Another senior executive at a major production company, also speaking anonymously in order to be candid, had a more ground-level view of the issue. “Obviously, from the studio’s perspective, from a bunch of people who are looking at their quarterly numbers and not going to be on set, there’s a tremendous desire of ‘We’ve got to go go go go go,'” said this exec. “Your natural bent as a producer is, like, ‘Great, let’s go!’ We want to get stuff going. But, you know, I think the producers, and certainly the filmmakers and the actors are all like, ‘OK, it’s all well and good to have these hypothetical ideas, but safety is paramount.'”
Much of the past three months have been spent on exactly that concern, as various industry bodies fashion a latticework of health and safety guidelines meant to make production safer. The results so far, however, have been haphazard.
On June 17, Variety reported that the CBS soap “The Bold and the Beautiful” — one of the very first major productions to return to work — had to pause filming a day after restarting to “better accommodate the large volume of testing needed,” according to a spokesperson for the show’s production company. Six days later, the show blamed “several false positive” COVID-19 results for the temporary shutdown.
Testing is clearly a critical barrier for many productions getting back into full gear.
“It’s all predicated on testing and having so much testing and fast testing available,” said “Ozark” showrunner Chris Mundy in Variety‘s “A Night in the Writers’ Room” roundtable discussion on June 24. “It feels like you could see a way forward, day-to-day checking in on people. I don’t know what happens if one of your leads gets sick, that’s a whole different scenario.…I don’t know what the reality of that is in terms of that level of testing.”
If a production is able to adhere to necessary health and safety protocols, it still has to find a location that is safe enough for the dozens or hundreds of people required to be on set — and live nearby — especially in states like Georgia and Louisiana. Both have aggressively tried to reopen, sometimes against the advice of public health officials.
“People are really suspicious of the political leadership in those states,” says the production executive. “Frankly, what’s the compliance going to be now that this whole wearing masks thing has become politicized? So I think the... (Read more)
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