Reporting the Americas and the World
Independent Editorial Journalism
For eighteen months, Jon Voight, Steven Paul, and President Trump have argued that American filmmaking can be won back. The evidence is starting to agree with them.
The numbers tell a brutal story. Shoot days in Los Angeles fell from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025. Roughly 42,000 industry workers left the business over that same stretch, and countywide motion picture and sound recording employment slid from about 142,000 jobs to around 100,000. Scoring stage bookings, which once logged 127 days a year, fell to just eleven. Analysts have started comparing Los Angeles to Detroit after the auto industry left, a comparison that would have sounded absurd a decade ago and now shows up in serious financial reporting.
The causes are not mysterious. Tax credits in London, Toronto, and the Gold Coast pulled budgets, and jobs, away from Los Angeles faster than California or Washington could respond. By early 2025, with soundstages sitting empty and crews going months between paychecks, nobody was arguing about whether the industry had a problem. The only question was whether anyone in power actually planned to fix it.
Eighteen months later, the answer is yes.
In January 2025, days before returning to office, Trump named three of Hollywood's own as special ambassadors to the industry: Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson. Their job was to bring production back home. Of the three, it is Voight, working alongside his longtime producing partner and manager Steven Paul, who has done most of the work. Stallone and Gibson have kept a lower profile. Voight and Paul spent months meeting with studios, streamers, guilds, and unions before they ever set foot in the Oval Office, and that groundwork shows in the plan they eventually built.
That work led to a detailed proposal that Voight and Paul, along with SP Media Group president Scott Karol, delivered to Trump at Mar-a-Lago in May 2025. It reads less like a wish list and more like a working blueprint. Among its pieces: federal production incentives meant to stack on top of state programs, a push to revive lapsed federal deductions such as Section 181 and Section 199, treaties that would allow productions to be made jointly with other countries, infrastructure subsidies for theater owners and production facilities, workforce training, and one narrow trade measure, a proposed 120 percent tariff tied to the value of any foreign incentive a production could have skipped by filming in the United States instead. That same week, President Trump put forward a more sweeping measure of his own: a 100 percent tariff on films produced abroad. The proposal unsettled the industry, but it also compelled Washington to confront runaway production as the urgent problem it had become.
Skeptics like to point out that Hollywood ambassadors do not greenlight movies. Steven Paul answered that directly. He bought one. In May 2025, Paul acquired Avenue Six Studios, a Van Nuys production facility with four soundstages and a backlot dressed to pass for a New York City block, so he could shoot more of his own slate at home instead of sending it elsewhere. SP Media Group has since used the facility on projects starring Voight and Kelsey Grammer, filming additional scenes on location in El Segundo and Manhattan Beach rather than in a cheaper city that could pass for Southern California. His business partner has estimated the added cost at roughly a third to half more than filming somewhere built to double for Southern California. Paul made the call anyway. It is a bet that the incentives he is lobbying for will eventually make that math work for everyone else too.
What sets this effort apart from past Hollywood trips to Washington is who is now standing next to Voight and Paul. By May 2026, their advocacy had grown into a genuine Capitol Hill campaign, with meetings held with Motion Picture Association chief Charles Rivkin, House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, and members of Congress from both parties, including Laura Friedman and Nicole Malliotakis. The coalition now backing a federal production tax credit includes the Motion Picture Association, the Directors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, the Teamsters, and the Writers Guild of America East, groups that rarely agree on anything, let alone with a Republican White House. Even Democrats who have clashed with Trump on nearly everything else, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Adam Schiff, have publicly backed the goal of bringing production home. They disagree only on how to get there.
The clearest sign the strategy is working is not a press release. It is the production data, and it has finally started moving in the right direction, even if not in a straight line. California's expanded film and television tax credit program, now worth $750 million over five years, has already funded work on 170 productions, including titles like “Jumanji,” “Heat 2,” and “Baywatch.” In the first quarter of 2026, feature film shoot days in Los Angeles jumped 52 percent year over year, the strongest reading the region had posted in that category in years. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called it Hollywood “finally turning a corner.” FilmLA's own chief executive has framed the recovery in similarly direct terms: this is about bringing the work back to the region that built the industry, and getting experienced crews back on payroll. The recovery is not clean. Reality television is still shrinking, and overall shoot days dipped again in the second quarter after that first quarter gain. But the direction of travel, and the money now chasing it, has genuinely changed.
None of this means the job is finished, and a fair account has to say so. Section 181, the only federal production deduction that existed, expired at the end of 2025 when its planned replacement, the CREATE Act, stalled in Congress. As of this summer, no federal tax credit bill has actually been introduced, and some insiders now expect real movement to wait until 2027, after the midterms reshape Capitol Hill. Washington has managed to create a standoff out of its own good intentions. Lawmakers say they are waiting for a signal from the White House, while the administration says it is waiting for Congress to write the bill. Critics on the right question why taxpayers should subsidize the industry at all. And there is a pointed irony in Paul's own back catalog. SP Media Group has shot a number of titles in Bulgaria, which offers a 25 percent rebate, the very kind of foreign incentive this plan is meant to counter.
Those are real obstacles, and they deserve to be taken seriously. But they do not change the basic picture. This is the first time in a generation that an administration, a united industry coalition, and lawmakers from both parties have all pointed at the same solution at the same time. It is also the first time a Hollywood ambassador has backed his own advocacy with the deed to a studio. That kind of momentum does not guarantee a bill gets signed on any particular date. It does mean the direction is set. The 42,000 workers who left the industry between 2022 and 2024 are the reason this fight matters, and they are also the reason it will not be allowed to stall. Jon Voight, Steven Paul, and President Trump did not just diagnose Hollywood's decline. They built a coalition, put real capital behind it, and started moving the numbers before Washington caught up.
Can they save Hollywood? Yes, of course they can. And they will.
