At first glance, not much seems amiss at Milt & Edie’s dry cleaners, a stone’s throw from the Warner Bros studio where a long summer of labour turmoil in Hollywood has brought production to a shuddering halt.
The decor is an optimistic Barbie-pink, the counters are jammed with customers, even on a weekday morning, and the cavernous rear of the store is so stuffed with freshly pressed clothes snaking along the line it’s hard to spot any obvious portents of trouble.
Then Robert Shapiro, the manager, takes a moment to explain what has happened since Hollywood’s writers stopped work in May, followed by actors earlier this month.
First, he said, the studio stopped sending its chatshow guests for alterations or last-minute cleanings because, without writers, the chatshows could no longer go on the air.
Then, when the actors stopped working, the usual nightly loads from film and television productions dried up. So did the regular stream of tailoring and cleaning jobs that come in ahead of galas and premieres, because the actor’s union has forbidden its members to do publicity for as long as the strike endures.
“Business is down 20% because of the hit we’ve taken to our studio accounts,” Shapiro said. And it’s not just Warner Bros. Disney is barely a mile away, and Universal about two.
Milt & Edie’s is an institution (“Over 70 years cleaning clothes in southern California,” says a sign on top of a 1940s-era cleaning truck stationed in its parking lot), which means it has a lot of loyal customers. Even institutions are not immune to the Hollywood strikes, however, especially in the workaday city of Burbank, where more than 1,000 companies employing 30,000 people depend in some way on the entertainment industry.
When the studios lay off large numbers of security guards because their lots are empty and are likely to stay that way, that hits the dry-cleaning business. When company executives are no longer dressing up for meetings, that hits the dry-cleaning business. Shapiro said loyal customers worried about paying their rent have started asking him for work, but of course as long as the strike persists Milt & Edie’s isn’t hiring.
“What really sucks,” Shapiro said, “is that business was finally back to normal [after the pandemic]. We were finally hitting our pre-Covid numbers.”
It’s a similar story across large swaths of Los Angeles. The industry is not confined to the area of the city called Hollywood (home to the Walk of Fame and the Kodak Theater that hosts the Oscars), but is spread across a much larger geographical area, from the flatlands of Burbank and Glendale behind the Hollywood Hills, through the mini-malls of the suburban San Fernando valley, and over the mountains to Culver City (where MGM once made its classic musicals and it is now home to Sony).
In many of these places, businesses with an industry clientele – whether they service Hollywood directly as drivers, caterers and makeup artists, or are part of a secondary economy of restaurants, coffee shops, photo studios, hair and nail salons, and so on – are experiencing the strike as a double whammy after Covid and its aftershocks.
“You couldn’t put Los Angeles in a worse position,” said Angela Marsden, an outspoken restaurant owner whose Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill in the San Fernando valley regularly hosts musicians and comedians and has industry clients on both sides of the dispute.
“We went through all the horrendousness of Covid. Then we had a crime wave, and prices were going through the roof … Finally we thought we were getting a little bit of a reprieve, then bam! I was set to raise my prices this month, but now the actors and writers who support us are on strike. Maybe they still have savings, but they’re going to start feeling it soon and they’re not going to be able to spend money.”
Visits to popular industry coffee shops, bakers and cafes appeared to bear out Marsden’s analysis that real trouble may be only starting. Managers at spots in and around Burbank said they were seeing no signs yet of a drop-off in lunch custom, but they were experiencing unusual dead spots during the mornings and were thinking about cutting staff.
For businesses that depend more directly on film and TV production, the impact has been much more immediate. Jordyn Palos, who owns a public relations firm, said the strike was worse than Covid because at least then there was room to pivot to new ways of doing the job in cyberspace. “Now,” she wrote in the industry publication Variety, “we are being told we cannot do our jobs at all.”
Ken Fritz, who has a fleet of 900 cars he rents to the industry, said he’d just been robbed of $250,000 worth of catalytic converters, and with his income now down to a trickle he had no way to pay for replacements. Greg Twiford, the head of a Hollywood animal trainers’ association, said his members didn’t know how much longer they could go on feeding their animals – everything from snakes and house pets to lions and elephants, many of them kept on ranches in the northern reaches of Los Angeles county where the mountains meet the desert.
“The animals are starving,” Twiford said. “There’s a saying in this industry: ‘One day you’re eating chicken, the next day you’re eating feathers.’”
Assessing the overall damage of a protracted strike is difficult. Los Angeles has a highly diversified economy, people who work multiple jobs and consumers who can easily switch their spending to other things – sports, or video games – if, say, they run out of content that interests them on Netflix. One widely cited estimate put the economic cost of the 100-day writers’ strike in 2007-2008 at more than $2bn, though other experts suggest that figure is greatly exaggerated.
For now, at least, community support for the strike is strong, and despite the economic upheavals – social media is rife with stories of people facing eviction or defaulting on their debts – it is difficult to find Angelenos outside studio executive suites who oppose what the writers and actors are fighting for.
Initially, a perception took hold in some quarters that this was a dispute pitting Hollywood millionaires against each other, but that has shifted as the strike leaders have articulated their grievances and more people understand that the vast majority of actors and writers struggle like everyone else to make a decent living.
At the Warner Bros picket line one day last week, drivers zipping past in everything from a big food delivery truck to a beaten-up two-seater sedan honked in support. Some local businesses have started distributing free iced water or offering discounts even though they are tightening their own belts. “People need help,” said Patricia Rivera, who owns Tequilas Cantina & Grill and offers 15% off to any struggling union member, not just those on strike. “When it was difficult for us, during the pandemic, many customers were there for us. This is about helping the community.”
Konstantine Anthony, the mayor of Burbank who is a former actor and a regular presence on the picket lines, said he’d had several conversations with skeptical business owners and helped them understand that their own financial wellbeing was at stake, too. “They realize that if the actors and writers get less and less, they won’t have money to spend,” Anthony said. “They see that they have more in common with the strikers than they thought.”
It certainly helps that many restaurants and bars employ aspiring actors. It helps, too, that unions across different economic sectors have been vocal this summer about taking a stand against their employers and seeing all their struggles as one. Hotel workers, truck drivers and even strippers have shown up on the Hollywood picket lines, all of them arguing they are in the same fight for basic fairness against corporate executives who care about their shareholders more than their employees.
Marsden, the outspoken restaurant owner, likened the fight to an attention-grabbing moment during the Covid lockdown when she erupted in fury at local elected officials because they wouldn’t let her open her outdoor patio to diners, even though a Hollywood production was serving food to its workers in a parking lot less than 50ft away.
“I was calling out the big people who were picking and choosing who’s essential and who isn’t. That’s the fight the actors and writers are in now,” she said. “I don’t think they have a choice … If they give in, the industry’s not going to need them at some point. There are businesses that won’t make it through if this goes on. But I do stand by them in their fight. I hope every other union will join them.”
