Hollywood Begins to Reopen After Coronavirus

a plan to get back is the entertainment industry. What we do know is that whatever the plan is that eventually comes out, it will be expensive to restart production. There will be shorter shooting days and longer shooting schedules. Cass and crews will be put in quarantine. There will be breaks for temperature checks and COVID testing, a new personnel dedicated to health and safety. Adam be Very, senior entertainment writer at Variety, joins us for the pricey plan

to restart production. Thanks for joining us, Adam, thank you for having me. You know, we're continuing to talk about reopening America, getting back to normal, and one of the biggest things that was still looming, is how Hollywood is gonna get back, How movie TV production, which happens across the whole country, how was that gonna be handled? Because it's an industry that has a lot of close contact and all aspects of production, and it was just gonna

be a huge undertaking. And you know, they had a huge hit too to the industry. Everything got halted with regards to the entertainment industry. So one of the first big things that came out just recently was Tyler Perry. He announced that he's going to be beginning production in Atlanta and his studios on two shows that he was

working on, starting on July eight. And he has this plan of testing and re testing people, quarantining the cast altogether so that hopefully nobody comes down with it while they're in production. Let's start there and then we'll get into what's happening industry wide, because there's a lot of stuff that still yet has to be nailed down. So Tyler Perry has his own sound stage facility outside Atlanta called Tyler Perry Studios. It's a decommissioned army compound that

he converted into a giant sound stage complex. And because of the nature of that facility. He can house people there while they're making his shows, and he converted his largest sound stage into the sort of mess hall where people can socially distant while they're eating their lunch. He's said that he will fly past who's out of town. Is private planes. They don't have to deal with commercial

air travel. So the biggest thing that he's doing really is implementing a whole sort of roster of protocols that have at this point still remained at least in the United States, largely theoretical as ways to start production back in as much of a safe and healthy environment as can be managed given what's going on now. Georgia was one of the first states to start reopening. Obviously Atlanta is there. Have they signed off on Tyler Perry's plans

so far? Yes. He was very clear that he had been working with the state of Georgia on coming up with plans that would be safe for the state, and then also coordinating with the network that broadcasts his shows, b ET and their parent company Viacom CBS, Because what we looked at in our cover story was that all of these protocols and changes that are going to be implemented across the entire and entertainment industry are not going

to come cheap. That there's going to be an added cost to all of this to make sure that people can make content safely. So the entire period worked with Viacom CBS to make sure that they would back him up in paying for these procedures. The cost is going to be so crazy, the extra stuff, because a lot of places are going to be scaling back on certain parts of the crew but increasing other parts of the

crew health advisors and consultations and things like that. So the effects of this, you know, there might be shorter shooting days, but longer shooting schedules. Casting from are going to be put in these quarantines, temperature checks, breaks for these things will interrupt shooting and filming and all that and then all the COVID testing and a lot more

special effects. Is what people are saying too. But the industry as a whole is still waiting from guidelines from the a MP T p D Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. What do we know about what their plans are and when they might be released. That is a question that is being asked across the entire industry

right now as we speak. You know, when we published this story, the AMPTP was still working with a sort of industry group that included the Screen Actors Guild SAGA, AFTRA, the Director's Guild of America IATSI, which is the union that represents essentially all of the kind of crew members that are the backbone of any production, to come up

with guidelines that could be industry wide. Unfortunately, what's ended happening is that each of those guilds were also working with their own experts and internal teams to come up with guidelines that made sense for their specific disciplines. And what seems to be happening is that there's some real disagreement about how to move best to move forward with

what those guidelines look like. So what we may end up seeing in the next few weeks is not one set of guidelines, but perhaps several, and hopefully they'll still be in parallel and they'll fit together in harmony and

there won't be any confusion. But what the mp PTP is really spearheading here as sort of an industry wide group that was the plan was that they would take these guidelines to the governors of New York and California to get you know, a government sign off, to make sure that the governments and public health officials were happy with the way that they were going to be proceeding.

Not to get to in the weeds, but one of the major sticking points here, and something that is as yet really unresolved aolved, is the size of the cruise that will be going into production. Because for decades, every job that you could do on a major studio film or television set was very clearly delineated in longstanding union contracts and best practices, like to the point where a director couldn't move the chair that they sat in, that

was somebody else's job. And you know, director couldn't operate the camera unless he was also part of the cinematographer skill. It was. It's a whole, very clearly delineated set to protect the jobs of as many people as possible. Well, on a set where you want to minimize the number of people who are in a closed space together, that could possibly mean that people are double or tripling up on jobs in sort of contradiction to some of these contracts.

So that is something that I think is going to be a major sticking point and as far as I understand right now, there's no wheel clear or sense of how that is going to be able to move forward. There's so much involved in this, and as you wrote, a lot of this is going to be a shift in mindset. There is going to be risks throughout this whole process. It's about minimizing it and really just kind of making things as safe as possible. We've already seen that a lot of pre and post production can be

done from home. My wife works in prose production and she's luckily thankfully been working still throughout some of this, and that part can be done. But the filming obviously is the tricky part with so many people involved in there. We're talking about costs major movies can see as much as increases. We talked about health departments, expanded health departments that could be fifteen or more extra people involved in

all this. So this is a lot of stuff. Let's talk about briefly, large scale productions versus smaller scale productions and TV on the larger side, these big productions are gonna be harder to come by, and as you wrote as well, some people are saying we could see a resurgence of indie filmmakers because of this. This is one of the examples of how the current circumstances the industry

is facing. There's no real clear good options because on the studio side, you've got the studios have been making all of these giant hundred two hundred three hundred million dollar movies that require hundreds of people to make them happen and often historically have shot in multiple locations across

the world. Those kinds of productions, it's almost basically prohibitive to be able to move that kind of production forward in the current environment, or at the very least, the costs to make those productions safe we're going to be enormous or possibly taking on like an untenable degree of

personal risk. On the flip side, you've got these independent productions that are leaner, smaller, often kept to just a few small locations that are much easier to control, and you can see that being very attractive to people who want to turn out content so that there's stuff for people to see. The issue there is that all of those productions have to get in short before they can

move forward. They have to buy insurance for a whole host of reasons that we're getting into but the companies that sell that insurance are not putting in any provisions where they cover a shutdown based on a COVID outbreak. So you're then assuming in a great deal of risk as a producer, because there's a fairly good chance that a lot of these productions will have to shut down, at least temporarily if one or more of the people working on them tests positive for COVID while they're in production.

So that becomes for these small independent films that are running on a very lean budget and tight margins, it's unclear whether that's going to keep them from also being able to move forward. So it's in both directions. The circumstances of the COVID nineteen pandemic are really putting the industry in a tight bind. You spoke to dozens of people throughout the entire industry, studio exacts, actors, directors, producers.

All that tell me a little bit about kind of the difference in mindset where maybe some studio executives might be wanting to get production back and going, I know there's some that are saying we're moving a little too fast though, and where the actors are, because obviously they will bear a big brunt of this, whether they're doing romantic scenes really up on somebody or I think you spoke to Zoe Kravitz, who was going to be in the new Batman movie, talking about getting in the catwoman

suit and having multiple people toucher just to get started with the day, not even the acting part of it. That is a common experience for any actor. Zoe Kravitz, she was talking about how she's had more people touching her than she's ever had in her career, in part because she cannot get into the cat suit alone for that movie. She needs people to help get her into

that costume physically. But it really is just a very common experience for any actor, any actor working in Hollywood, how people touching their bodies multiple times a day as a matter of course, whether it's touching up makeup or their hair or helping with a costume fitting. And so I think zag After especially is really looking hard at

how to minimize that experience for actress. Is they're moving forward the first part of your question on the studio side, everyone wants to get back to work as soon as possible. It is an enormously painful financial hardship for everyone to not be working. Just figuring out how to do that in a way that's safe is the question that everyone's asking.

One studio exact told me that he thought that what might end up happening is movies that can be done in a sort of more self contained way on a sound stage where it's like with your an emotion capture suit and you're in front of it, or you're in front of a lot of green screens where a lot of the work is done in post production and visual effects, that you're able to do that more safely, that kind of movie may end up becoming more common, at least in the next year year and a half as things

begin to open up again. You were talking about minimizing kind of exposure to a lot of people in some of these plans, and even in Tyler Perry's plan, it just seems like it does make sense to have the cast and crew basically living together a period of time while they're filming, and some of these movies can take a long time to shoot at Somewhere in the article that mentioned something about six months possibly that could be

really tough for a lot of people. That's what I sort of was getting at when I was talking about these big, big, big movie productions are too big to get made right now. They require that kind of person power and time frame to get made. It just doesn't seem possible to then also house them for that long.

And television it's even more dire because even for shows that have a sort of shortened season from the twenty two episode seasons that we were used to on network television, even when you're looking at a show like that has a ten episode season, those shows still often take many months to shoot per episode, and you've got casts in every episode for that who then have to commit to

being in isolation for the duration of that. And that's going to be also a big thing for the industry to sort of sort out as to how to do that in a way that is both safer people's physical health and also their mental health, you know. As a shorthand, the entertainment industry is often referred to as Hollywood obviously, but it's countrywide and worldwide of industry. How's this playing out in other countries? Because I've seen things that are

gonna be opening up soon in the UK. I've seen things about France starting possibly up in June and July and we've been talking about these big productions. A lot of the globe trotting productions might be put on hold for quite some time, but they're still already gearing up to get started as well. Several different territories, especially in Europe, have been moving forward with their own sets of guidelines. Some countries have already started production up again. Sweden and

Denmark film film television production is already underway. The soap opera Neighbors, which is hugely popular, long running soap opera in Australia that started up production in April. British Columbia, which is the province in Canada that basically where Vancouver is, which is a huge hub for production, they announced that

that production could begin studying in June. But anybody who's coming into the country for those kinds of productions have to go through a two week quarantine before they can go anywhere, so that might delay things starting up there. Are they taking some of the same precautions, let's say,

for example, as Tyler Perry Studios might be taking. Yeah, you're seeing a lot of very similar styles of precautions in trying to maximize testing and safety and minimize social interaction and very similar kinds of things across the board, with a little bit of variation here and there. But there's a difference between a globe trotting production which going over multiple countries or multiple locations, and some of these productions that are starting up that are staying put there,

starting in an international location, but they're staying there. This is such a huge conversation just because of how big the industry is, how many people they employ, and then beyond that, the entertainment value that it provides the people. There's so much that goes into this. The last question I have for you is what about all these productions that were halted when the pandemic started and hit really hard rehiring people Because we're talking about costs, it's just

such a huge part of this. What about rehiring all those and restarting those productions. That is a really good question that I think a lot of people are trying to sort out. You had a movie like one of the Marvel Studios movies, Shoung Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, that was in the middle of production in Australia when the pandemic hit and its director destined. Daniel Creton even announced that he went into self quarantine because he had been exposed to somebody who had tested

positive for COVID. He did not end up testing positive for COVID. But when your director has to take two weeks off, that automatically shuts things down at least for those two weeks, and that production hasn't started up again yet. Any production that shuts down you have to then rehire people, you have to re establish your location. Sometimes that can piles on costs on top of everything else you're doing.

On a smaller scale, we talked to a producer in the UK who estimated that the costs of halting a show and then starting it up again based in Manchester, who's going to run her three dollars roughly in American money, and that's just a small television show. You can compound that amount of money several times over for the bigger productions.

Like I said, there's so much going to this. We're starting to get back and seeing the plans formulate, but it's still very much seems like it's going to be a slow rollout for the entire industry to get back up to whatever the new normal will will be for the time being. As soon as we get started again, so we'll definitely have to see how this rolls out. Adam b Very, Senior entertainment writer at Variety, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for

having me. I'm Oscar Ramrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast