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

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

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 HollywoodParamount to Settle Lawsuits, Paving Way for Warner Bros. Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News 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 Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal, and we are here live at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood. 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 L.A. Material. and co-host of the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. And we're going to talk about the business of writing for Hollywood.

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. Hayes, thank you so much for being here. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Welcome to L.A.

Thank you. I feel kind of intimidated to be talking to a fellow podcast professional. I feel like there's more pressure. You're in a city of podcast profession. Like, you're in the right place. There's a podcast lawyer in the audience. I know who you're talking about. Yeah, that's right.

We all know each other. Well, when Tracy was telling me before this show, her favorite ever season of TV was Family Guy season 13. Family Guy season 13. It is the best one. It's the one that I worked on. I don't know what that's related. That's just a total coincidence.

Yes. 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 L.A. the threat of AI. Is everyone cooked? If you want to do the numbers, I can talk about like shoot days in L.A. The numbers that we look at are shoot days. Okay. That's the metric. And that's for

reality, for commercials, that's for everything, right? Shoot days in L.A. hit high in 2016. Okay. About 40,000 shoot days. And From there, it sort of leveled out to around 37,000 by 2019. Okay. 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. The mantra, I think a lot of people heard in the city was survived 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. Maybe. Yeah. Well, 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.

Yeah. 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? 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 a leveling out between 40,000 and 37,000 my first couple jobs were comedy central shows uh comedy central does not really do new shows anymore and so that like you you you can see just from the options that are sent you as a writer uh what is growing in terms of streaming and what is sort of falling away, which was cable. So what happens to all the unemployed writers? Do they, I guess they all start podcast? 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 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 still. that we're 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 a news outlet now. 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. I joked about it, you know, the, and we're going to talk more about it later, but, you know, there's the sort of the influencer creator world.

Yeah. And I'm curious, like, maybe from an economic footprint, does that ameliorate things? Is the influencer creator person doing stand-up comedy in vertical video, et cetera? Does that have positive spillover effects on some level? I mean, so there's the industry here and there's the economy. Okay. And the industry is the studios, the networks, like the traditional Hollywood.

But the influencer network is absolutely part of the economy. Okay. 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 walked down the street and people ask you what you're listening to

or where you get your confidence from or what song is this? We don't have that here. I've never been I'm actually really paranoid about like some of what like being accosted by one of those people who is like what do you pay in rent

and what it's like can I can I come home with you? Can I come like see where you live? It seems like you have to say yes. There's a lot of it. You don't have to say yes, but... A lot of people do. I, like, live in fear of just, like, one of those random, like...

What if they showed my clip of me saying no? Yeah. No, no, what do you do? I look so bad. Everyone else said yes. Yeah. It's like, I'm opt-down. Yeah.

The no comment. But we, like, we don't have that... Like, I kind of wish we did. They're, 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.

Interesting. Which is, like, what we have had in L.A., we sort of had a, we had that corner for decades. Yeah. Like every movie and show, you'd see the Venice boardwalk, some, like, a girl on rollerblades. Yeah, yeah. Like, we were exporting, right? Yeah, that's right.

And we're not doing that in the same way when it comes to social media. We are on some things. People know about Arawan smoothies in Central Europe because of our influencer economy. Yeah. But it's, we don't own it. the same way as we did. We tried to get the Airwant CEO for the show, by the way.

And apparently they do zero media, which and yet have this incredible. There's so many people doing media for them. Oh, yeah, there we go. All right, since we're talking about, I guess, geographical comparisons, when it comes to production, can you explain, like, why is L.A. actually losing out?

Because I see headlines like Netflix is building a $1 billion studio in New Jersey and no offense to New Jerseyans. But, you know, we come to L.A. Seems pretty nice. The weather's nice. There's palm trees. I'm not sure what New Jersey has other than the tax breaks.

Yeah. That's a big one, for sure. It's been a bit of a race at 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 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. It followed the tax break. Great show. 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, a Fox, like studio comedy, like a single cam or a multi-cam comedy, you're in Dublin. You're in Dublin. You're watching a show that is filmed in Dublin. Do you say Dublin? Dublin, Ireland.

Yeah. So they're flying out Rob Lowe and an American game show contestant cast that, you know, you used to like go to Universal Studios and get to just like be out of games. Wait, is that a tax thing? Or is it just much cheaper of opera? It's a tax and labor thing. Yeah. Wow. 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 Santa Monica in 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 a really long time. And now it is done. And the demand is not exactly what it was. And so we're seeing issues in the studio real estate economy.

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

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 person. The studios like that. Got it. It is cheaper. Yeah, but. But historically, it wasn't like that.

Oh, yeah, totally. And when it comes to, like, I worked on a show called Great News, which is kind of in the 30 Rock family. Yeah. Where the joke density, family guys, the same way. Family guy had 30 writers when I was there. That does not exist anymore and never, ever will again. 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. Many rooms don't sound terrible. We're used to them. But I guess in Hollywood. 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. Huh. Wow. 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 two creators of the show had a budget to have one person come in and just outline the season for a couple 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. 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 the Charlotte family. family guy, it is almost impossible to come up with a show like to write a show like that as one person. Yeah. 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. Wow. On family guy, you would have to be able to do the accents of the different, you have to be able to do the voices.

So that the people in the room could understand how the joke would land. If you can't do Lois, your, your joke will. not get in. Can you do Lois? No. It's a bizarre, it makes no sense. Wait, which character did you write the most jokes for, looking back? 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 and fun to the right one. The music you love I heart radio stations Everywhere you go

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Visit Bloomberg.com slash ask radio to send questions to our hosts. You may just hear them asked on the air. Exclusively for Bloomberg.com subscribers. Get answers on today's headlines. Breaking earnings news and big market moves. Visit Bloomberg.com slash ask radio to join the conversation right here on Bloomberg Radio. 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's so many, something about that show. Yeah. It's just, like, designed for, like, memetics and templates, and you, like, re, you know, put up some other caption. But that's a threat to the new TV shows as well. The fact that we.

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 competition, not just what's on the other network at the same time. 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? Yeah, I mean, individual shows are definitely still really valuable. Family Guy, the office, like, those will still command, like, a big price. But, yeah, I think 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. As of 2026, what are the norm? about essentially the use of AI within creation? You know, I don't speak for the whole city. I think this is one of the least AI-friendly cities in the country, I would guess, when it comes to generative AI. I think, you know, it's pretty widely used, like everyone else, as a search engine.

Yeah, sure, yeah. the way everyone uses it. 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. And there was like a pushback about that just because right now it is such a threat. Yeah. To jobs, to like the below the line economy in the city.

we call it, like, is... But what does that mean below the line? They're, like, anyone who works on the production side. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. 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 L.A., that is a really huge issue. That level of job loss is a huge issue. It does, like, I work. 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 made it a line that a lot of people say you just do not cross when it comes to productions.

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 in? I guess how long until the studio is just fine workaround? for those? I have not heard of a show that has been written by AI yet. So in 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 the writers are doing. Obviously, you can't police what people do in their own homes.

Yeah. But it has not come for writers' rooms in the same. Studios aren't saying, like, we got this. We're just going to have AI take care of this so far. Do they want to? Like, do you feel it, like, in this, like, either the studio's 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, like startups coming to pitch studios and say like this thing they can play like are there people banging at the gate trying to like break through and I guess like you know break that eventually hoping that the damn will break on those you know the the genre that is the most alive in Hollywood right now is horror yeah and some great horror movies they're great and so many people you know like Zach Krieger used to be on team comedy, we lost him to team Hart.

And Jordan Peel also was a comedy guy. Like, this is where a lot of great filmmakers are moving into. What is it about horror that is having this moment? 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's like to answer your question, like comedy is hardest for AI to do. But it can do other genres more easily. It can do outlines right now. Yeah. And so I think whether or not studios want to do it, they haven't felt like they can now.

But 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's hardest for it to do, but comedy is in decline in terms of the productions that are getting done, for sure. 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? That's how I'll make my way back to family guy, I think. I'll pitch this, like, the AI guy. No, I haven't really done that.

My dad does send me a lot of AI generated content. Does he, like, send it to you? Oh, yeah. He's like, check out what I just did on chat GPT. Yeah. I mean, like, he's been interested in AI for a long time and, like, and has been saying, for he's a business professor and has been saying for years that this is something that they're going to, that AI is going to be able to do.

I've always dismissed it and he was right. But it's, I do kind of, this may be naive. I think writing and acting will be among the last categories that AI. But this is a thing. In fiction, in TV and film, we have already been competing for years against the sum of all human creativity produced and distributed for free, algorithmically sorted exactly to your specifications.

You can't really scare us with AI compared to this. This is what I always say about journalism too, because people are like, oh, do you think AI is going to 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. Yes. So, like, possible,

But like, man, if there's one industry that has just taken 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 less to like. And you like, you talk about AI being cheaper. It is not as cheap as free. Yeah. And like the free content that we all produce for everyone else's consumption all day long. And, you know, we still only have so many consumption hours in our in our. lives. 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 Wisenthal. And it's never very good. Yeah. But you are one of the harder ones, I think, to pin down. 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. And I was like, I was like, I wouldn't tweet that, but I was kind of a good tweet. That's pretty close. I was like, I kind of like that tweet. Wow. Yeah.

Does it ever say that it doesn't troll? It hasn't said that, so it doesn't know me yet. Was that scary? They got, they got, they got, they're in the, in the area. Yeah, I was like, but it wasn't my voice. So I was like, it wasn't there yet. Yeah. So you've done a lot with, like, housing and real estate.

Yeah. Have there been a ripple effect from this decline of shoot days in terms of like how you see manifest and quote the rest of the real economy here? Yes. I was in City Hall from 2021 to 2024. So during a lot of that decline, during the strike, so 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 L.A. And it's not the L.A. economy.

It's like 20% of the economy or something. but it's it is all 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 yeah get shoved over by the decline in production things it seem as like small as writers room you know we get get lunch in writers. They order lunch for us. Yeah.

So much lunch, sometimes dinner. 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 is it? What used to see in old movies and like a cowboys walking by, like whatever. They are all eating food from. local restaurants and or even from the uh like from from on the lot like that 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 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? Yeah, it sounds familiar. It's a great movie. Yeah, it's here. Yeah. Uh, but it's about a woman with some mental health issues who falls in love with a version of, with an influencer and a, with an influencer. It's Aubrey Plaza, right?

Aubrey Plaza, yes. And Mary Elizabeth Olson is the, is the influencer that she discovers on Instagram and goes out to Venice and Avon Kitty and buys a big hat and, like, goes to all the different boot. teaks 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. I, um, we all know, Emily Sundberg.

Yeah. From TV. He's a guest at our previous show. I got to meet her earlier this year. 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.

And, like, she goes out. Yeah, yeah. Like, she goes to events and, like, talks about who's there and what she sees. And she was in L.A. And I was like, well, what are you doing tonight? And she said that she was just going to 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 L.A.,

the recovery is still happening when it comes to nightlife and events. 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 in the city. And, you know, I'm hoping that we can provide things for Emily Sundberg to do when she comes here. 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. It's, I would say, like, what's weird about, you talk about writing comic, like the writer's room environment, like, just the experience of writing comedy.

the meeting is the entire day. Yeah. You sit in one chair, you sit in the same chair every day. It would be weird if you went and sat at a different interest chair. You, everyone gets used to each other's smell and kind of like a good way, I guess. 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 was, it's like a total lifestyle change. It can be very absurd in the same way. When you said tourism, this reminded me of something. So a classic tourist thing to do in L.A. is to see the walk of the stars, right?

That are literally the sidewalk. Yeah. 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 we took our producer on a TMZ YouTube. Yeah, yeah. But I was like, don't judge. But what I'm curious is about, it's like,

like the production of movie stars that we all know like sort of came to an end right so it's like there's still stars and there are people with millions of followers but it's like it doesn't seem like a new george cluny has emerged etc like is that weird that 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. The monoculture has definitely gone away. We still have a, there's a phenomenon here where you can be sitting in a restaurant and everyone in the restaurant. 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 that. You're like, should I do that, too? Like just in case. But, yeah, I mean, we, it's, it's, there's an LA Times feature called Sunday Funday. Has anyone read Sunday Funday? Woo.

I read it so obsessively because it's celebrities talking about what they do in their ideal Sunday. And I just want 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 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 George Clooney. Yeah, he's still here. And you're still making movies. And all everyone who was a movie star in the 90s is still is still allowed. Everyone is still here. We've just kind of added new people. Everyone got to stay. But we don't see them the same way as we used to, except in the Farmer's Market. Hollywood Farmer's Market is like, you see Usher there. It's amazing.

All right, Hayes-Davenport. Thank you so much for coming on all of us. Really appreciate it. We took a talk for two four hours, but that was great. That was our interview with Hayes-Davenport recorded live at the Vermont in Hollywood. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. Weisenthal, you can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Hayes Davenport at Hayes-Davenport, and follow our producers, Carmen Armand, Dashill Bennett, at Dashbot, Kale Brooks and Kail Brooks, and Kevin Lazzano at Kevin Lloyd-Lisano.

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