LA lawmakers push sweeping film-permitting reforms amid production slowdown

When filmmaker and screenwriter Austin James Wolff was scouting locations for a recent movie, Los Angeles should have been the obvious choice. Instead, navigating different permit rules, fees and public safety requirements across multiple cities made shooting locally difficult—and in some cases unaffordable.

“L.A. as a metro area is made up of many different municipalities, and they don’t all talk to each other,” he said. “The permitting process for one can be different from L.A. itself, and that made location scouting extremely difficult for us.”

That kind of experience is exactly what Los Angeles lawmakers say they are now trying to change.

As the City Council returns from holiday recess, a package of nine motions introduced in December by Councilmember Adrin Nazarian is moving through committees, marking the city’s most sweeping push in years to streamline film production rules and keep film and television jobs from leaving Los Angeles.

The proposal would reduce fees, standardize filming rules and permitting requirements, ease certain police and fire staffing mandates, improve coordination across jurisdictions and request a City Controller audit of the city’s film-permitting process, including FilmLA.

The effort comes amid a prolonged slowdown in local production, as studios have increasingly shifted projects to other states and countries in recent years, drawn by faster permitting processes, lower costs and generous tax incentives.

In Los Angeles, filming nearly ground to a halt in 2020. It rebounded unevenly in the years that followed, and was disrupted by the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes. While the rapid expansion of streaming platforms briefly fueled a surge in new shows and films, studios have since scaled back spending amid concerns about profitability, leaving many crews facing fewer local jobs.

State and local officials have taken steps to reverse that trend. Last year, Gov Gavin Newsom unveiled a $750 million expansion of California’s film and television tax credit program — more than double the state’s previous annual cap — alongside other legislative changes aimed at making the incentive more competitive globally.

Mayor Karen Bass also issued an executive directive instructing city departments to lower filming costs, speed up permit reviews and reduce staffing requirements for certain shoots.

FilmLA, which tracks “shoot days” — a standard industry measure of on-location filming activity, reported that production in Greater Los Angeles continued to decline in 2025, despite early signs of stabilization tied to incentive-backed projects. From July through September, on-location production fell 13.2% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to FilmLA.

Nazarian’s office said the nine motions build on earlier efforts, including a permitting streamlining motion he advanced last year, and reflects a year of meetings with unions, studio executives, writers, producers and independent filmmakers to identify obstacles to filming in L.A.

“For too long we took our signature industry for granted and allowed other cities and countries to attract production and take away the jobs that so many L.A. families depend on,” Nazarian said in a statement. “This is a fight to keep the jobs of our families, friends and neighbors here in Los Angeles, where they belong.”

His office said further proposals related to film production are being planned in the coming weeks.

Among the proposals is a plan to make many non-specialized city-owned facilities — such as parking lots and yards — available to productions for a nominal $1 per day fee, unless additional staffing or exclusive use is required.

Other motions would reduce or waive certain fire “spot check” fee, which productions pay for fire department compliance reviews, create a civilian film safety officer role for situations that do not require sworn police officers, and direct city departments to align their practices with the mayor’s existing executive directive.

For Wolff, those changes would have made a real difference.

When his team considered filming inside a Los Angeles library, the cost of renting the space, combined with requirements to hire a police officer and bring in additional equipment, quickly exceeded their budget. Ultimately, they shot elsewhere.

“The very first time I saw that, my heart leapt out of my chest,” Wolff said, referring to the proposed $1 city facilities fee. “I was like, there’s no way this is true. If the $1 measure had been in effect last year, we definitely would have shot more in L.A.”

The package also includes a proposal to negotiate memoranda of understanding with neighboring cities and regional governments, an effort aimed at reducing confusion for productions that cross municipal boundaries in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Industry advocates say those cross-jurisdictional differences have long been a barrier to filming locally, forcing productions to navigate multiple permitting systems with different rules and costs.

Cale Thomas, a special makeup effects artist who works on policy issues with the industry advocacy group Stay in LA, said the lack of coordination across cities has made filming in the region unnecessarily complex.

“Eighty percent of all filming that happens in our region happens on location,” he said. “If we don’t reform our on-location standard of practices together, we are not doing ourselves a service to the region, and we’re not going to be competitive.”

Thomas said his group has been urging city and county officials to reduce fees and make greater use of underutilized public spaces for crew parking and base camps, a shift he said could keep productions from leaving the region.

He pointed to Culver City, which recently approved a pilot program offering free production parking at certain city-owned structures, as an example of how reducing fees and easing access can make a city more competitive for film production.

“L.A. needs to … update its operating system, if you will,” Thomas said.

FilmLA, which administers the city’s film permits under contract with the Board of Public Works, said it supports efforts to streamline the process and is prepared to cooperate as the proposals move forward.

“We share city leaders’ interest in further streamlining the permit process to make on-location filming as affordable, accessible, and straightforward as possible,” Denise Gutches, CEO of FilmLA, said in a statement, adding that the organization would cooperate fully with any controller review of the city’s filming ecosystem and FilmLA’s performance under its contract.

For Wolff, the significance of the proposal goes beyond policy details.

“It actually does look like more is being done,” he said. “I think this is very good for L.A. filmmakers.”