‘LA is not film friendly’: how Hollywood’s woes became a political cudgel in mayoral race

The fight for the future of Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, usually plays out in the grand art deco offices and committee rooms of city hall. But in an election year full of surprises, the most consequential battle may in fact have begun on a beach. And not just any beach: we’re talking about the fantasy sandbox inhabited by buff gym rats and sun-kissed bikini babes on Baywatch and its multiple spin-offs. In February, Los Angeles welcomed the latest incarnation of the hit TV show back to southern California after a long hiatus, including detours to Hawaii and Georgia. City officials heralded its return as a sign of better times for local film and television production following years of decline and tens of thousands of job losses in the heart of Hollywood. But trouble soon beckoned. The producers, who had built a new lifeguard station on Venice Beach in preparation for what they anticipated to be a multi-season reboot, learned they were not allowed to use the camera drones they were counting on, or to shoot at night. They had a $21m tax credit from the state and what they thought was the full blessing of the local authorities. But a handful of regulatory agencies, notably the county beaches and harbors department, had other ideas, and within four days shooting ground to a halt under a barrage of unexpected restrictions involving everything from the sand they could shoot on to the parking arrangements. “Suddenly, everything was ‘no’,” one member of the production wrote in a widely read anonymous Instagram post that quickly morphed into a political flashpoint. “Los Angeles is not film friendly.” Such a verdict appeared potentially devastating to a city that has struggled mightily for years to stop productions fleeing to cheaper locations – Atlanta, Toronto, London, Budapest – and has seen businesses around the industry from catering to costume rental flounder and fail. In an election year, the prospect of losing Baywatch so soon after luring it back brought the knives out for LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, who leads in the polls but has had a bumpy time defending her record in a city ravaged by housing shortages, soaring living costs, tent cities on the streets and last year’s devastating wildfires. View image in fullscreen Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, at a mayoral debate in Los Angeles, California, on 5 May 2026. Photograph: Chris Torres/EPA Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star challenging Bass from the right, blamed the Baywatch mess on what he called “political fecklessness” and “a perfect storm of self-inflicted wounds”. “This is not an isolated production snafu. It is the new normal in a city once synonymous with the dream factory,” he thundered in a Substack post. Nithya Raman, a city council member challenging Bass from the left, also mucked in with a campaign video highlighting the near-50% loss in shooting days in Los Angeles since 2018. She has also denounced “ridiculous conditions” that, she said, made it difficult to attract productions. “For too long, Los Angeles has treated Hollywood as an inconvenience rather than an asset,” she wrote in X. Bass, for her part, jumped on the Baywatch calamity like a five-alarm fire and worked with other members of the city council, the state coastal commission and FilmLA, a non-profit permitting office that acts as a liaison between film producers and the many jurisdictions and agencies across Los Angeles county, to fix it as fast as possible. By mid-April she was able to announce that Baywatch was staying in Venice after all and promised that the city of Los Angeles would “always clear bureaucratic barriers, making it easier and more affordable to film in the entertainment capital of the world”. View image in fullscreen An open casting call for Fox’s Baywatch on 18 February 2026 in Marina del Rey, California. Photograph: Frank Micelotta/Fox/Getty Images She and her city council colleagues did not stop there, taking measures to coordinate permit regulations better between agencies, speeding up certification of new soundstages so they can be available faster and waiving all fees for what are known as “microshoots”, small independent productions involving just a few people. FilmLA, meanwhile, announced a si month pilot program to cover the cost of permits for what it calls “low-impact” productions that are small enough not to cause disruption to traffic or street access. By the end of April, Bass was further buoyed up by new data showing the first significant uptick in shooting days in the Los Angeles area since the Covid pandemic – a 10.7% increase in all productions from the last quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, with a particularly pronounced boom in feature films, which saw a 45% increase in shooting days over the same period. “We have a long way to go, but after years of decline, Hollywood is finally turning a corner with more productions and more jobs,” Bass proclaimed. “We have worked hand in hand with industry partners to make fil