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

Is Hollywood just screwed? Writers are earning less. There are fewer shoots taking place in Los Angeles. And people are freaked out about AI. But according to Hayes Davenport, things were starting to feel bad in Hollywood before chatbots showed up to the scene. Davenport — who’s written for shows like Family Guy and is now creative director of LA Material and the co-host of the fantastic Hollywood Handbook podcast — joined us on stage at the Vermont to give us a history lesson on Hollywood's steady decline from the pandemic to now. We also get into the changing norms of AI use among entertainment professionals and why Davenport is jealous of New York right now. Read more: Jon Voight Spent Months Courting Trump on Tax Help for Hollywood https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-20/jon-voight-spent-months-courting-trump-on-tax-help-for-hollywood?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Paramount to Settle Lawsuits, Paving Way for Warner Bros. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-21/paramount-to-settle-lawsuits-paving-way-for-warner-bros-merger?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News http://bloomberg.com/ subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast Subscribe to the Odd Lots Newsletter http://bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Join the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots https://discord.gg/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

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• 2:02Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:06Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal, and we are here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood.

• 2:12Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 2:35Joe Weisenthal?

  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. So take a watch, take a listen, and enjoy.

• 2:46Tracy Alloway?

  Hayes, thank you so much for being here.

• 2:47Speaker 05

  Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to LA.

• 2:50Tracy Alloway?

  Thank you. I feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  You're in a city of podcast professionals. You're in the right place.

• 3:02Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a podcast lawyer in the audience.

• 3:04Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 05

  I know who you're talking to.

• 3:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:07Speaker 05

  We all know each other.

• 3:08Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, Tracy was telling me before the show, her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy, season 13.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Family Guy, season 13. It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know if that's related.

• 3:19Joe Weisenthal?

  That's just a total coincidence.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:21Tracy Alloway?

  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 LA, the threat of AI. Is everyone cooked?

• 3:39Speaker 05

  If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about like shoot days in LA.

• 3:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, let's do the numbers.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  The numbers that we look at are shoot days.

• 3:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  That's the metric. And that's for reality, for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in LA hit a high in 2016. About 40,000 shoot days. And from there, it sort of leveled out to around 37,000 by 2019, right? Pandemic hits, the 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.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  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. So that is half of what it was in 2016. So maybe.

• 4:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe. Yeah. We 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? Like, let's, if we started there, is there a conventional wisdom about what happened in those three years?

• 5:08Speaker 05

  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. Cable was shrinking around the same time. So that's how you get to like, like a leveling out between 40,000 and 37,000. My first couple of jobs were Comedy Central shows. Comedy Central does not really do new shows anymore. And so that, like, you can see just from the options that are sent you as a writer,

• 5:53Speaker 05

  what is growing in terms of streaming and what is sort of falling away, which was cable.

• 5:58Tracy Alloway?

  So what happens to all the unemployed writers? Do they, I guess they all start podcasts?

• 6:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that has been sort of a safe harbor for a lot of us. Some people move, like, an interesting thing happened is the, the membership in the Writers Guild grew a lot in the late 2010s. Okay. 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, and have taken on, you know, I work with the news outlet now.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  We did a piece about people that have taken on different survival jobs around the city. So it varies, but yeah, people are struggling, for sure.

• 6:57Joe Weisenthal?

  I joked about it, you know, the, and we're going to talk more about it later, but you know, there is the sort of the influencer creator world.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:08Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm curious, like, maybe from an economic footprint, does that ameliorate things? Is the influencer creator person doing stand-up comedy and vertical video, et cetera? Does that have positive spillover effect on some level?

• 7:26Speaker 05

  I mean, so there's the industry here, and there's the economy.

• 7:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  And the industry is the studios, the networks, like the traditional Hollywood. But the influencer network is absolutely part of the economy.

• 7:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  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 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?

• 8:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 05

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

• 8:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm actually really paranoid about like, some of the, like, being accosted by one of those people who is like, what do you pay in rent?

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can I, can I, can I come home with you? Can I come like see where you live? It seems like you have to say yes.

• 8:25Joe Weisenthal?

  There's a lot of that. You don't have to say yes, but.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  A lot of people do.

• 8:28Joe Weisenthal?

  I like live in fear of just like one of those random, like.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  What if they showed my clip of me saying no?

• 8:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. No, no, what do you do?

• 8:37Speaker 05

  I look so bad. Everyone else said yes.

• 8:38Joe Weisenthal?

  We need some protocol for like, it's like, I'm opting out.

• 8:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:41Joe Weisenthal?

  The no comment.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  But we like, we don't have that. Like, I kind of wish we did. But like, honestly, it seems so, I 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.

• 8:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Interesting.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Which is like, what we have had in LA, we sort of had a, we had that corner for decades.

• 9:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  Like, every movie and show, you'd see the Venice Boardwalk, some like, a girl on rollerblades.

• 9:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Like, we were, we were exporting, right?

• 9:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  And we're not doing that in the same way when it comes to social media. We are on some things. People know about Air One Smoothies in Central Europe because of our influencer economy.

• 9:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  But it's, we don't own it the same way as we did.

• 9:29Tracy Alloway?

  We, we tried to get the Air One CEO for this show, by the way. And apparently, they do zero media, which, and yet have this incredible like-

• 9:38Speaker 05

  Well, they have so many people doing media for them.

• 9:39Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah, there we go.

• 9:40Speaker 05

  It's part of it, yeah.

• 9:41Tracy Alloway?

  All right, since we're talking about, I guess, geographical comparisons, when it comes to production, can you explain like, why is LA actually losing out? Because I see headlines like Netflix is building a $1 billion studio in New Jersey. And no offense to New Jerseians, but you know, we come to LA, it seems pretty nice. The weather's nice, there's palm trees. I'm not sure what New Jersey has other than the tax breaks.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a big one, for sure. We, 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. Like, it followed the tax break. Great show.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  I ran a show, we did a pilot for TBS, it was in Vancouver. A lot of my friends are shooting in Vancouver now. It does, and what is kind of most surprising to me, game shows. Like, if you see a Fox game show, or a Fox, like, studio comedy, like a single cam, or a multi cam comedy, you're, you're in Dublin. You are watching a show that is filmed in Dublin.

• 11:07Joe Weisenthal?

  You're saying Dublin?

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Dublin, Ireland.

• 11:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Dublin, Ireland. Interesting.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  So they're flying out Rob Lowe and an American game show contestant cast to, that, you know, you used to like, get, you'd go to Universal Studios and get to just like, be on a game show.

• 11:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, is that a tax thing, or is it just much cheaper to operate?

• 11:26Speaker 05

  It's a tax and labor thing, yeah.

• 11:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 11:28Speaker 05

  And, and meanwhile, we have tons of studio space here. So you talk 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, for a really long time. And now it is done, and the demand is not exactly what it was. And so, we're, we're seeing issues in the studio real estate economy.

• 12:09Joe Weisenthal?

  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?

• 12:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 12:17Joe Weisenthal?

  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?

• 12:31Speaker 05

  I, I mean, that economy is, sorry, you accidentally did ask a question about, 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.

• 12:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  He writes that show. I'm pretty sure, like, DTF St. Louis, I think, is like, done the same way. A lot of prestige shows are kind of written by one, one, one person. The studios like that.

• 13:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Got it.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  It is cheaper.

• 13:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  But-

• 13:04Joe Weisenthal?

  But historically, it wasn't like that.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, totally. And when it comes to like, I worked on a show called Great News, which has kind of been the 30 Rock family.

• 13:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  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.

• 13:21Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, so this is the mini-room phenomenon, right? People call these mini rooms where you have smaller teams of writers. And 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 I guess in Hollywood.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  What, 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.

• 13:43Tracy Alloway?

  Huh.

• 13:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  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 have, have one person come in and just outline the season for a couple of 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.

• 14:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  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.

• 14:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  And you're, you have a spot in the script for a joke, and people are just, like, pitching in a, in a room setting, and you see what gets a laugh.

• 14:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 14:39Speaker 05

  On Family Guy, you would have to be able to do the accents of the different, you would have to be able to do the, do the voices.

• 14:46Joe Weisenthal?

  So that the people in the room could understand what the, how the joke would land?

• 14:48Speaker 05

  If you can't do Lois, your, your joke will not get in.

• 14:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Can you do Lois?

• 14:53Speaker 05

  No.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  It's a bizarre, it makes no sense.

• 14:58Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, which character did you write the most jokes for, looking back?

• 15:03Speaker 05

  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 to fun for everyone.

• 15:33Joe Weisenthal?

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• 18:03Joe Weisenthal?

  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 are so many, something about that show

• 18:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:18Joe Weisenthal?

  is just like, designed for like, memetics and templates, and you like, re, you know, put up some other caption.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  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, is competition, not just what's on the other network at the same time.

• 18:42Tracy Alloway?

  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? Because you could kind of see it going either way, right?

• 18:59Speaker 05

  I, yeah, I mean, individual shows are definitely still really valuable. Family Guy, The Office, like, those will still command, like, a, like a big price. But yeah, I think-

• 19:12Speaker 05

  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.

• 19:25Joe Weisenthal?

  As of 2026,

• 19:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:27Joe Weisenthal?

  what are the norms about essentially the use of AI within creation?

• 19:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  You know, I don't speak for the whole city. I think this is one of the least AI-friendly cities in the country.

• 19:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 05

  I would guess, when it comes to generative AI.

• 19:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  I think, you know, it's pretty widely used, like everyone else, as a search engine.

• 19:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, sure, yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  The way everyone uses it.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  And there was like a pushback about that, just because it, right now, it is such a threat.

• 20:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  To jobs, to like the below-the-line economy in the city, we call it, like, is.

• 20:29Joe Weisenthal?

  But what does that mean, the below-the-line?

• 20:31Speaker 05

  There, like, anyone who works on the production side.

• 20:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I see, yeah, yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  And so hair and makeup, people like set design, grips, things like that, like, that is sort of on an immediate precipice when it comes to AI. And 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, it has made it a line that a lot of people say you just do not cross when it comes to productions.

• 21:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, 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?

• 21:27Speaker 05

  I have not heard of a show that has been written by AI yet. So 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.

• 22:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  But it has not come for writers' rooms in the same. Studios aren't saying, like, we got this, we're just gonna have AI take care of this, so far.

• 22:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Do they want to? Like, do you feel it? Like, in this, like, either the studios hoping that maybe there's some model, they're not, 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 that you 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?

• 22:41Speaker 05

  You know, the genre that is the most alive in Hollywood right now is horror.

• 22:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  And.

• 22:49Tracy Alloway?

  Some great horror movies.

• 22:51Speaker 05

  They're great. And so many people, you know, like Zach Craig, who used to be on Team Comedy, we, we, we, we lost him to Team Horror, and like Jordan Peele also was a comedy guy. Like, this is where a lot of great filmmakers are.

• 23:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Why? Why? What is it about horror that is having this moment?

• 23:09Speaker 05

  You can make a mid-budget movie that, like, is commercially viable, that a studio will put out because they know it will make more money. 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, like, to answer your question, like, comedy is hardest for AI to do.

• 23:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  But it can do other genres more easily. It can do outlines right now.

• 23:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  And so I, I, I think whether or not studios want to do it, they, they haven't felt like they can now. But it, 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.

• 24:09Tracy Alloway?

  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?

• 24:19Speaker 05

  That's how I'll make my way back to Family Guy, I think. I'll pitch as, like, the AI guy. No, my, I haven't really done that. My dad does send me a lot of AI-generated content.

• 24:33Tracy Alloway?

  But does he, like, send it to you?

• 24:35Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:35Tracy Alloway?

  He's like, check out what I just did on ChatGPT?

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, he, he, 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 gonna, that AI is going to be able to do. I've always dismissed it, and he was right. But it's, um, I, I do kind of, this may be naive. I think writing and acting will be among the last categories that AI could. But this is the thing. In fiction, in TV and film, we have already been competing for years

• 25:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  against the sum of all human creativity

• 25:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  produced and distributed for free,

• 25:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  algorithmically sorted, exactly to your specifications. You can't really scare us with AI compared to this.

• 25:30Joe Weisenthal?

  This is what I always say about journalism, too. Because people are like, oh, do you think 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.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:44Joe Weisenthal?

  So, like, possible, but like, man, if there's one industry that is just taking 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.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  And you, like, you talk about AI being cheaper. It is not as cheap as free.

• 26:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 05

  And like, the free content that we all produce for everyone else's

• 26:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  consumption all day long. And, you know, we still only have so many consumption hours in our, in our lives.

• 26:16Joe Weisenthal?

  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.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:25Joe Weisenthal?

  But.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  You are one of the harder ones, I think, to pin down.

• 26:29Joe Weisenthal?

  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."

• 26:38Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 26:39Joe Weisenthal?

  And I was like, I was like, I wouldn't tweet that, but I was like, it's kind of a good tweet.

• 26:43Tracy Alloway?

  That's pretty close.

• 26:44Joe Weisenthal?

  I was like, that's kind of, I kind of like that tweet.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 26:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Tracy Alloway?

  Does it ever say that it doesn't troll?

• 26:49Joe Weisenthal?

  It hasn't said that, so it doesn't know that yet.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Was that scary? They got, they got.

• 26:53Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I was like, I was like.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  They're in the, in the area.

• 26:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I was like, hmm, that's like, yeah, it's kind of a good tweet, but it wasn't my voice. So I was like, it wasn't there yet.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:02Joe Weisenthal?

  So you've done a lot with, like, housing and real estate.

• 27:05Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, had 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?

• 27:15Speaker 05

  I, I, yes. I was in City Hall from 2021 to 2024. So during a lot of that decline, during the strikes, 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 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, 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

• 27:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  get shoved over by the decline in production. Things that seem as, like.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  Small as writer's room, you know, we get lunch in writer's rooms. They order lunch for us.

• 28:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  So much lunch, sometimes dinner. And and that is like when you have a bustling studio, a bustling lot with like, you know, the stereotype people dressed like legionnaires, like walking through the studio and stuff like that, you know, what you used to see in old movies and like cowboys walking by.

• 28:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  Uh, they are all eating food from local restaurants and or even from the uh, like from on the lot, like it it has enormous ripple effects and on tourism as well, just like the what we're presenting to the rest of the country changes with the slowdown in in in production. Shows like Insecure like had huge impacts on like parts of the city that that show like really brought to life and people move to like to live that experience. Um, there's a movie I love called Ingrid Goes West. Did you ever see that movie?

• 29:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it sounds familiar.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  It's a great movie.

• 29:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's here.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, uh, but it's about a woman with some mental health issues who falls in love with a version of it with an influencer and a version of LA.

• 29:26Tracy Alloway?

  It's Aubrey Plaza, right?

• 29:27Speaker 05

  Aubrey Plaza, yes, and Mary Elizabeth Olsen is the influencer that she discovers on Instagram and goes out to Venice and Abing Kitty and buys a big hat and like goes to all the different boutiques and like immerses herself in this, go to Joshua Tree and like that whole lifestyle. That movie is like a time capsule now. It is an artifact of like a certain time in LA that does not exist the same way as it did.

• 29:55Tracy Alloway?

  Huh.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  I um, we all know Emily Sundberg.

• 30:00Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  From Feed Me.

• 30:01Tracy Alloway?

  We've had her on the show.

• 30:02Joe Weisenthal?

  A guest at a previous show, yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  Uh, I I got to meet her earlier this year, uh, and I hope she won't mind me sharing this story, but you know, she goes out, she writes this newsletter called Feed Me that's about life in New York and yeah, Feed Me is great. Uh, and like she goes out, like I did, like she goes to events and like talks about who's there and what she sees. And she was in LA and I was like, well, what are you doing tonight? And she said that she was just gonna stay in her hotel because she didn't know of anything that was like going on. And that is unfortunately a thing that has happened to an extent in LA. The recovery is still happening when it comes to nightlife and events.

• 30:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  But Hollywood parties in the hills are not the, it's not the same culture as it used to be. There's a real DoorDash nightlife culture uh, in in in the city. Uh, and you know, I I'm hoping that we can provide things for Emily Sundberg to do when she comes here.

• 31:10Tracy Alloway?

  Is writing comedy good prep for working in City Hall? And I'm being kind of facetious with that question, but also when you think about local government, often the image that comes to mind is one of perhaps not comedic dysfunction, but certainly dysfunction of some sort.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  It's, I would say like what's weird about, you talk about writing comedy, like the writer's room environment, like just the experience of writing comedy, the meeting is the entire day.

• 31:38Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  You sit in one, you sit in the same chair every day. It'd be weird if you went and sat at a different interest chair. Uh, you, everyone gets used to each other's smell and kind of like a good way, I guess. Um, uh, and like working in the city was much more driving around, like different things in different places in a way. That's part of why I went to go do it. I I was, it's like a total lifestyle change. It can be very absurd in the in the same way.

• 32:12Joe Weisenthal?

  When you said tourism, this reminded me of something so classic tourist thing to do in LA is to see the walk, the stars, right? That are literally the sidewalk.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Last time we were here, I didn't go on it, but Tracy took a bus, one of those bus trips where you see, but uh.

• 32:26Tracy Alloway?

  We took our producer on a TMZ tour.

• 32:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, but I was like.

• 32:30Tracy Alloway?

  Don't judge.

• 32:31Joe Weisenthal?

  I went for a scooter. But what I'm curious is about is like, like the production of movie stars that we all know, like sort of came to an end, right? So it's like, there are still stars and there are people with millions of followers, but it's like, uh, it doesn't seem like a new George Clooney has emerged, et cetera. Like, is that weird that like, like genuinely mainstream cultural production came to some weird end in the 90s and now like there are very few people, you know, Taylor Swift, there are a handful of people that everybody still knows, but it's just there aren't that many anymore of like those truly like stars we all know.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  The the monoculture has definitely like gone away. Uh, we we still have a, there's a phenomenon here where you can be sitting in a restaurant and everyone in the restaurant, every, it'll feel like everyone else is like paying attention to someone and you don't know, you're like, what is the deal with that person? Like, who is that? People are going up and like getting pictures with them. You're like, should I do that too, like just in case? Uh, but yeah, I mean, we, it, it's, it's, there's an LA Times feature called Sunday Fun Day. Has anyone read Sunday Fun Day? Woo! Uh, uh, I I read it so obsessively because it's celebrities talking about what they do

• 33:51Speaker 05

  in their ideal Sunday and I just wanted to know where they are. I'm just curious what they're what they're doing. And they are all doing, I'm generalizing, but they all do kind of the same things. They hike, they go to one of three farmers markets, uh, and they watch something at home with their spouse at night. And so like when it comes to like the LA of like celebrities out at the Trocadero or Sardi's or whatever it was, like that is not the same as it used to be. I mean, George Clooney lives, we have a George Clooney.

• 34:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, he's still here, yeah, and he's still making movies.

• 34:25Speaker 05

  And all, everyone who was a movie star in the 90s is still.

• 34:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Tom Cruise is still a big star.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  Is still allowed, everyone is still here. We've just kind of added new people. Everyone got to stay. Uh, but we, we, we don't see them the same way as we used to, except at the farmer's market. Hollywood farmer's market is like, you see ushered in it. It's, it's, it's amazing.

• 34:48Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Hayes Davenport, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 34:52Tracy Alloway?

  Really appreciate it.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  We could've talked for two more hours, but that was great.

• 35:08Tracy Alloway?

  So that was our interview with Hayes Davenport, recorded live at the Vermont in Hollywood. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 35:15Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our guest Hayes Davenport at Hayes Davenport and follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armit, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

• 35:30Tracy Alloway?

  And for more Odd Lots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash Odd Lots.

• 35:36Joe Weisenthal?

  And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 35:42Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please like the video or leave a comment or better yet, subscribe.

• 35:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks for watching and listening.

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