Hollywood Was Cooked Before AI, and Now It's Only Getting Worse

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1:59Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

2:04Tracy Alloway:And I'm Joe Weisenthal. And we are here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood. It's our first ever live show in Los Angeles. And we have an incredible lineup. So first up, we're going to be speaking with Hayes Davenport. He was a writer for shows like Eastbound and Down and Family Guy. He is now the creative director of LA Material and co-host of the podcast Hollywood Handbook. And we're going to talk about the business of writing for Hollywood. And we're going to talk about the state of Hollywood and whether Hollywood exists in some form that we know it and whether it will continue to exist.

2:40Tracy Alloway:So take a watch, take a listen and enjoy. Hayes, thank you so much for being here. Hi guys, thank you so much for having me. Welcome to LA. Thank you. I feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure. You're in a city of podcast professionals. You're in the right place. There's a podcast lawyer in the audience. I know who you're talking to. Yeah, that's right. We all know each other. Tracy was telling me before the show, her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy season 13. Family Guy season 13. It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on.

3:16I don't know if that's related. It's a total coincidence. Yes. Total coincidence. Wait, okay, so first question. Is Hollywood just screwed at the moment? No, like, honestly, you hear about, you know, the stats about writers not earning as much income, fewer shoots and production actually taking place in L.A., the threat of AI. Is everyone cooked? If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about, like, shoot days in L.A. Yeah, let's do the numbers. The numbers that we look at are shoot days. Okay. Like, that's the measure. And that's for reality. for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in LA hit high in 2016.

3:53About 40 ,000 shoot days. And from there, it sort of leveled out to around 37 ,000 by 2019. Pandemic hits, shoot days collapse, obviously. There's a backlog and then in 2021, they sort of skyrocket again. 2022, we're back to 2019 numbers, around 37 ,000. The next year, 2023, the strikes hit. Shoot days fall again to 25 ,000. The next year, people are sort of hoping for a recovery. They end up at 23 ,000. Shoot days fall again. The mantra I think a lot of people heard in the city was survive till 25. That was like a phrase in the entertainment industry here. And instead, shoot days fell again to under 20 ,000.

4:40So that is half of what it was in 2016. So maybe. Maybe.

4:48Tracy Alloway:Actually, we'll talk about the impact of COVID and the strike, and I guess we're unfortunately going to have to talk about AI. Is there a theory for the 2016 to 2019 decline? If we started there, is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years? I think you saw an increase, obviously, in the streaming economy. There were more shows on Netflix and Amazon, entire new networks being built. I remember when House of Cards started when I was first a writer and we called it a web series. We didn't really know what it was. And at the same time, a decline in the number of network productions and cable.

5:29Cable was shrinking around the same time. So that's how you get to like a leveling out between 40 ,000 and 37 ,000. My first couple jobs were Comedy Central shows. Comedy Central does not really do new shows anymore. uh and so that like you you you can see just from the options that are sent you as a writer uh what is growing in terms of streaming and what is sort of falling away which was cable all right so what happens to all the unemployed writers do they i guess they all start podcasts uh yeah that's uh that has been sort of a safe harbor for a lot of us uh some people move uh Like an interesting thing happened is the membership in the Writers Guild grew a lot in the late 2010s.

6:16Okay. Because of people moving out. Because everyone who had worked on a cable show was still a member of the Writers Guild. And many more new shows were starting that were bringing new people into the business. And I think it is a lot of the newcomers that then as production has been cut in half since then that are not seeing the same opportunities. so I mean I know people who have moved home for sure uh and have taken on uh you know I work with a news outlet now we did a piece about people that have taken on different survival jobs around the city uh so it it it varies but yeah people are struggling for sure I joked about it you know

6:57Tracy Alloway:the and we're going to talk more about it later but you know there's this sort of the the the influencer creator world. Yeah. And I'm curious, like maybe from an economic footprint, does that ameliorate things? Is the influencer creator person doing standup comedy in vertical video, et cetera, does that have positive spillover effects on some level? I mean, so there's the industry here and there's the economy. Okay. And the industry is the studios, the networks like the traditional hollywood but the influencer network is absolutely part of the economy okay it is taking money from subscribers around the world and like putting it into the local economy and so it's really really important and i look at things like i get jealous of places like new york because what new york feels to me now is a social media user is a place where you You just walk down the street and people ask you what you're listening to or where you get your confidence from or what song is this?

8:05We don't have that here. I've never been asked that here.

8:08Tracy Alloway:I'm actually really paranoid about, like, being accosted by one of those people who is like, what do you pay in rent? Can I come home with you? Can I come, like, see where you live? It seems like you have to say yes. There's a lot of that. You don't have to say yes. A lot of people do. I live in fear of just one of those random... What if they showed my clip of me saying no? Yeah. No, no, what do you do? I look so bad. Everyone else said yes. We need some protocol for like, it's like, I'm opting out. Yeah. The no comment. But we don't have that... I kind of wish we did. But like, honestly, it seems so...

8:46I really do. It seems so stupid. But like, it tells a story about New York that is exporting it to the rest of the country. Interesting. Which is like what we have had in LA, we sort of had a, we had that corner for decades. Like every movie and show, you'd see the Venice Boardwalk, some like a girl on rollerblades. Yeah, yeah. Like we were exporting, right? Yeah, that's right. And we're not doing that in the same way when it comes to social media. We are on some things. People know about Erwan smoothies in Central Europe because of our influencer economy.

9:20Tracy Alloway:Yeah. But we don't own it the same way as we did. We tried to get the Erwan CEO for this show, by the way. And apparently they do zero media and yet have this incredible... Oh, they have so many people doing media for them. Oh, yeah, there we go. It's part of it, yeah. All right, since we're talking about, I guess, geographical comparisons, when it comes to production, can you explain, like, why is L.A. actually losing out? Because I see headlines like Netflix is building a$1 billion studio in New Jersey. And no offense to New Jerseyans. But, you know, we come to L.A., it seems pretty nice. The weather's nice.

9:57There's palm trees. I'm not sure what New Jersey has other than the tax breaks. Yeah, that's a big one for sure. It's been a bit of a race to the bottom across the country. And I have worked on shows. So you mentioned Eastbound and Down. we were in North Carolina until they got rid of their tax break there. The governor sort of single-handedly ended it. And then we just ran across the border to South Carolina for the, for the last, for their next show that they did, it was a show called Vice Principals, the eastbound team. We shot that in South Carolina and they've kept doing righteous gemstones there.

10:34Like it, it followed the tax break. Great show. I ran a show. We did a pilot for TBS. It was in Vancouver. A lot of my friends are shooting in Vancouver now. And what is kind of most surprising to me, game shows. Like if you see a Fox game show or a Fox studio comedy, like a single cam or a multi-cam comedy, you're in Dublin. You are watching a show that is filmed in Dublin. Did you say Dublin? Dublin, Ireland. Dublin, Ireland. Interesting. So they're flying out Rob Lowe and an American game show contestant cast. You used to go to Universal Studios and get to just be on a game show. Wait, is that a tax thing?

11:21Or is it just much cheaper to operate? It's a tax and labor thing. Yeah. Wow. And meanwhile, we have tons of studio space here. So you talked about that 2016 peak in shoot days. that's when a lot of studio space started to get financed and so right down the street from here there's a giant complex right on the on the Santa Monica and the 101 that you saw starting to get built around like 2019 or so that's when it got financed there was a gigantic hole in the ground for a really long time and now it is done and the demand is not exactly what it was and so we're seeing issues in the studio real estate.

12:07Tracy Alloway:Can I ask a question that has nothing to do with the contemporary economy or nothing to do with the downturn or anything, but just a question I've always wanted to ask. What is it about TV that is best written by a room of writers? I've always wanted to ask this question. Why isn't it not just someone who's like a play or a screenplay or whatever, where you have a single writer? Why doesn't that work in TV? I mean, that economy is, Sorry, you accidentally did ask a question about the current TV economy. Because it is shifting to, you know, what people talk about is like the Mike White model. Mike White goes and does the White Lotus by himself.

12:45Tracy Alloway:He writes that show. I'm pretty sure, like DTF St. Louis, I think, is done the same way. A lot of prestige shows are kind of written by one person. The studio's like that. It is cheaper. Yeah, but... But historically, it wasn't like that. Oh, yeah, totally. And when it comes to, like, I worked on a show called Great News, which is kind of in the 30 Rock family, where the joke density, Family Guy is the same way. Family Guy had 30 writers when I was there. That does not exist anymore and never, ever will again. Wait, so this is the mini room phenomenon, right? People call these mini rooms where you have smaller teams of writers.

13:25And everyone seems to hate them, even though, you know, we live in New York. mini rooms don't sound terrible we're used to them but what i guess in hollywood what a mini room used to mean to me on family guy was a room of seven writers that would break off to go write one joke huh wow and now that is a big room seven writers is like a big room for a show the last show i helped out with was the the two creators of the show had a budget to had have one person come in and just outline the season for a couple weeks and then they went and wrote it themselves so like the rooms are getting smaller and smaller part of it is a result of the strikes where if you have a room now it has to be of a certain size and for a certain number of weeks oh so if they trigger a writer's room then it is required to be a certain size and that has changed the calculus a little bit but i'll say with a show like great news with a show like family guy it isn't almost impossible to come up with a show like to write a show like that as one person and you have a spot in the script for a joke and people are just pitching in a room setting and you see what gets a laugh.

14:36Tracy Alloway:Wow. On Family Guy, you would have to be able to do the accents. You would have to be able to do the voices. So that the people in the room could understand how the joke would land. If you can't do Lois, your joke will not get in. Can you do Lois? No. It's a bizarre, it makes no sense. Wait, which character did you write the most jokes for looking back? The hardest voice to do was Chris. Seth Green is like, it's amazing what he can do. I would say probably Peter. Brian is hard. Brian is subtle. But Peter, you know, Peter's very easy and fun to write for.

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17:30Tracy Alloway:You know, it's interesting, like, family guy memes are like the lingua franca of the internet. Like, there's, like, more than any, like, way more than many other shows, there's so many, something about that show is just, like, designed for, like, memetics. and templates and you like, you know, put up some other caption. But that's a threat to the new TV shows as well. The fact that we are still competing against Family Guy every time we do a new show, that did not used to be the case. The entire library is competition, not just what's on the other network at the same time. This is something that I wanted to ask you, but in the age of AI and now that there's so much existing content out there, do you get the sense that libraries are becoming more or less valuable?

18:23Because you could kind of see it going either way, right? Yeah, I mean, individual shows are definitely still really valuable. Family Guy, The Office, like those will still command like a big price. But yeah, I think in the same way that new shows are competing against the old ones, the old ones are competing against each other. and some big chunks of the library, I think, are also becoming less and less valuable as well.

18:52Tracy Alloway:As of 2026, what are the norms about essentially the use of AI within creation? You know, I don't speak for the whole city. I think this is one of the least AI-friendly cities in the country, I would guess. when it comes to generative AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, it's pretty widely used, like everyone else, as a search engine. Yeah, sure, yeah. The way everyone uses it. There is still a lot of stigma. On my podcast, we had a guest on recently who had been involved in a project that had one piece of it that had apparently been done with some AI, and there was like a pushback about that just because it right now it is such a threat yeah uh to jobs to like the the below the line economy in the city we call it like uh is uh but what is what does that mean the below the line there like anyone who works on the production side oh i see yeah um and so hair and makeup uh people like set design grips things like that like Like that is sort of on an immediate precipice when it comes to AI.

20:15And just when it comes to the local economy of LA, that is a really huge issue. That level of job loss is a huge issue. It does, like I worked in City Hall for a while. It has huge ripple effects on the rest of the economy. I think people here have a sense of that. And it has made it a line that a lot of people say you just do not cross when it comes to productions. So I read that the new WGA contract, the Writers Union contract, has some AI protection guardrails in it. How effective would you expect those to be? And I guess how long until the studios just find workarounds for those? I have not heard of a show that has been written by AI yet.

21:00So at LA Material, we did a story about how short stories are very popular IP now and not like Harper's type short stories, like things that are posted on Reddit or in some cases like totally unpublished short stories by anonymous writers. Were those written by AI? It's really hard to tell. But when it comes to the work that writers are doing, obviously you can't police what people do in their own homes.

21:28Tracy Alloway:Yeah. But it has not come for writers' rooms in the same. Studios aren't saying, like, we got this. We're just going to have AI take care of this. So far. Do they want to? Like, do you feel it? Like, either the studio's hoping that maybe there's some model. None of them are funny yet. But are they, like, you know, hoping that there could be a model that can produce jokes? Or do you see the presence of, like, startups coming to pitch studios and say, like, this thing they can play? Like, are there people banging at the gate trying to, like, break through and I guess, like, you know, break the, eventually hoping that the dam will break on this?

22:08You know, the genre that is the most alive in Hollywood right now is horror. Yeah. Some great horror movies. They're great. And so many people, you know, like Zack Kreger used to be on Team Comedy. We lost him to Team Horror. And Jordan Peele also was a comedy guy. This is where a lot of great filmmakers are moving into.

22:34Tracy Alloway:What is it about horror that is having this moment? You can make a mid-budget movie that is commercially viable, that a studio will put out because they know it will make more money. It started with studios like Blumhouse that made Paranormal Activity for, whatever,$20, and it makes millions. Comedy does not have the same upside potential. doesn't have the same perceived theater going potential right now. So that's like to answer your question, like comedy is hardest for AI to do, but it can do other genres more easily. It can do outlines right now. And so I think whether or not studios want to do it, they haven't felt like they can now, but it is it's right there like it's not in like the distant future that it'll be able to do that stuff and comedy like comedy is hardest for it to do but comedy is in decline in terms of the productions that are getting done for sure have you experimented at all with AI comedy writing you know just for fun like would you ask it to produce a Peter voiced family guy kind of joke that's how I'll make my way back to family guy I think I'll pitch as like the AI guy No, I haven't really done that.

23:54My dad does send me a lot of AI-generated content. Does he, like, send it to you? Oh, yeah. He's like, check out what I just did on ChatGPT. Yeah. I mean, like, he's been interested in AI for a long time and, like, and has been saying, he's a business professor and has been saying for years that this is something that they're going to, that AI is going to be able to do. I've always dismissed it, and he was right. But it's, I do kind of, this may be naive, I think writing and acting will be among the last categories that AI, but this is the thing. in fiction in tv and film we have already been competing for years against the sum of all human creativity yes produced and distributed for free yes algorithmically sorted exactly to your specifications you can't really scare us no this is what i always say about journalism too because

25:01Tracy Alloway:people like oh do you think um ai is gonna like be bad for newspapers or whatever and i was like you're talking about an industry that's been buffeted in every direction over the last 20 years yes so like possible but like man if there's one industry that has just taken it on the chin over and over and over again by google news by everything else it's like at this point it's like there isn't a whole lot left to like and you like you talk about ai being cheaper it is not as cheap as free. And like the free content that we all produce for everyone else's consumption all day long. And, you know, we still only have so many consumption hours in our lives.

25:44Tracy Alloway:You know, by the way, every time a new model comes out, one of my tests is I'll have it say like, write 10 tweets in the style of Joe Weisenthal. And it's never very good. Yeah. But you are one of the harder ones, I think, to pin down. But there was one tweet and it said, the 10-year yield doesn't care about your feelings, and frankly, it doesn't care about mine either. And I was like, I wouldn't tweet that, but I was like, it's kind of a good tweet. I was like, I kind of like that tweet. Wow. Does it ever say that it doesn't troll? It hasn't said that, so it doesn't normally. Was that scary? They got, they got...

26:21No, I was like, I was like... They're in the area.

26:23Tracy Alloway:Yeah, I was like, that's kind of a good tweet. but it wasn't my voice. So I was like, it wasn't there yet. Yeah. So you were done a lot with, like, housing and real estate. Yeah. Have there been a ripple effect from this decline of shoot days in terms of, like, how you see it manifest in, quote, the rest of the real economy here? I, yes. Okay. I was in City Hall from 2021 to 2024. Okay. So during a lot of that decline, during the strike, so I was in City Hall. And I got to see, you know, like, working with a lot of small businesses i we say here a lot that that hollywood is not la and it's not the la economy it's like 20 of the economy or something but it's it is all it's not a silo it is very very closely connected there's a ton of money flowing into the hollywood business that was keeping a lot of restaurants afloat i watched restaurants that had been taken right to the edge by the shutdown get shoved over by the decline in production.