To make Nathan Haskell angry, sad, and passionate all at the same time, ask him what the Hollywood strikes have done to his business.
“Nobody is talking about all the other people that are not working because of this, and we don't get anything from it,” says Haskell, who manages The Hand Prop Room, one of the biggest prop houses in LA.
Haskell says he hopes striking writers and actors get what they want, but he acknowledges the strikes have left him feeling bitter. He feels people don’t understand the wider economic damage of the work stoppage.
“When SAG and the writers make their deals, the only thing that does for me is being able to operate a business again,” Haskell says. In the meantime, “when you have a business like ours, I don't get anything unless the movie industry is moving.”
The Hollywood strikes of 2023 have really hurt Haskell’s business, along with many others that provide goods and services to film and television production, from flower shops and food stylists to costume rentals and production truck rental companies.
“There's so many people that are just getting buried right now because they can't work,” says Haskell.
The Hand Prop Room’s labyrinthine warehouse along Venice Boulevard is stuffed full of every kind of object imaginable that can be used in movie and TV productions, from suits of medieval armor and gladiator swords to old time telephones and suitcases.
“Luggage is a huge renter for us,” says Haskell. “You see an airport scene in a movie and you don’t see all the people in the background walking by with suitcases. Someone is going to come and rent 50 to 60 pieces of luggage, and that’s a good rent for us.”
Haskell, who grew up in the prop business, says that compared with other industries, Hollywood has an unusual ability to weather bad times because, even during recessions and wars, the public still wants to be entertained.
But there is one exception to that economic rule: “The only things that really hurt us are strikes,” says Haskell.
So far, he says he has avoided laying off employees by focusing on busy-work like inventory and repairing broken props. But Haskell points out that that can only keep people employed for so long: “It's just, after a while, you got to stop the bleeding at some point.”
More: Small businesses cut hours during writers’ strike
Other businesses that serve the now-dormant film and television industry have already made deep job cuts. They include the Western Costume Company, which has supplied costumes to Hollywood since the days of silent movies.
“We laid off 45 people,” says the company’s president Eddie Marks. “Once the actors went on strike, there was no other alternative for us other than to do a complete shutdown.”
On the floor of one of Marks’ very big and very quiet warehouses, a visitor is surrounded by thousands of pieces of clothing, but no other people. Marks says if the strikes continue, his skeleton staff will be further reduced.
“We turn the lights off,” says Marks. “We've got a small group of people working in our manufacturing department. When their jobs are finished, they'll join the unemployed.”
They’ll have plenty of company in people like Kate Shorter, a now-unemployed veteran Hollywood makeup artist whose regular clients include performers like Melissa McCarthy.
Shorter says the strikes have forced her and her hair-and-makeup colleagues to tighten their belts as they face varying degrees of financial pain. For Shorter, that means cutting back on eating out and letting go of her housekeeper, but for some of her friends in the business, the financial picture is much bleaker.
“A lot of the people that I work with, they're the sole breadwinner for their families,” says Shorter. “Their spouses don't work. When something like this happens, their income is gone.”
But Shorter takes some comfort in the grit of film and television workers. Show biz people, she says, are used to having chaotic work lives and stretches of joblessness between movie and TV gigs.
It’s all good training for life during a strike.
“You know, people talk about us like being carnies, or carnival people,” says Shorter. “We're used to a lot of change. We're used to [both] not having work and having work, so most of us are pretty adaptable that way.”
But when the strikes do finally end, and Hollywood starts heading back to work, many of the film and TV industry’s vendors and craftspeople don’t expect the pain to end instantly.
Eddie Marks of the Western Costume Company says it will still take weeks to hire back many of his laid-off employees as productions slowly rev up again.
Many KCRW staff are members of SAG-AFTRA, though we are under a separate contract from the agreement at issue between actors and studios.
