Los Angeles elected officials spent several hours on Wednesday grilling city leaders on ways to streamline the region’s film and television production processes, and the answer largely came down to more funding.
“I have approached this work with a simple principle: when a production wants to film in Los Angeles, we work with urgency to find a path to a solution and make that process as easy as possible,” the city’s chief film liaison Steve Kang said to the council members before providing an update on his work over the past year.
Led by chair Adrin Nazarian, the newly formed Ad Hoc Committee on Film, Entertainment and Creative Industry summoned Kang and leaders from the Los Angeles fire and police departments to its first meeting at city hall on Wednesday afternoon. The committee also includes vice chair Traci Park and member Imelda Padilla.
Kang, who is also the President of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, was appointed by LA Mayor Karen Bass in August 2025 to develop a comprehensive strategy for keeping production in Los Angeles and, potentially, luring back productions that had left. Much of that work revolved around reducing friction in the permitting and regulatory processes, including with FilmLA and other nearby jurisdictions.
In large part, city councilmembers reiterated the concerns of their constituents: progress is being made, but not very quickly. During his presentation to city councilmembers on Wednesday, Kang tried to explain the lengthy timeline for cleaning up LA’s production regulations and leaned on the success the city eventually found with Fox’s Baywatch reboot as proof that his efforts are working.
“It was quite a feat, and we have learned quite a bit of lessons, because in the beginning there were hiccups, of course,” Kang explained to local lawmakers. “In Venice, you needed not only the city, the county, [and] the state coastal commission. You needed the lifeguards, beaches and harbor, the film commission, and so much more, and at the end of the day, we came together as one, including our councilwoman, the mayor, and our supervisor, and many other stakeholders, to hold weekly meetings with Fremantle to discuss what their issues were, and I think we delivered pretty much every one of their requests in real time.”
As vice chair Park pointed out, the question plaguing lawmakers currently is how to replicate that experience with more productions, particularly independent productions with fewer resources.
“Now we know Baywatch is going to be back for Season 2…are there some things that we took from that experience, changes that we can make, and operational changes that might be helpful?” she asked Kang.
Stakeholders spent more than two hours working through the early stages of an answer on Wednesday.
Kang described the “concierge service” that Baywatch received not only to highlight the lengths he’s gone to but also to point out how difficult it would be to scale that level of service for all productions in need of navigating the current thorny system while local agencies work out redundancies and unnecessary roadblocks — especially when the city’s entire film office is one guy: him.
Over the long term, it’s clear that the city needs to make the permitting and other regulatory processes simpler and more consistent. In the short term, Kang says he’s been putting out productions’ individual fires as they arise, as was the case with Baywatch.
“Here at the local level, [we] would love your support in identifying additional resources to really staff up the concierge service, and thank you all for your help in granting an extra position within the Board of Public Works. But unfortunately, that position was frozen until January due to some budgetary forecasts,” he said. “So, would love some additional support in the concierge service and ensure that we really move forward and work together to bring more filming back to Los Angeles.”
Nazarian acknowledged the staffing concerns and vowed to address them, though the committee did not take any votes on Wednesday about these updates, nor the updates provided by LAPD and LAFD. The police and fire departments presented on their own permitting processes and fee structures.
The efforts from local leaders come at a time when all eyes are on U.S.-based production. President Donald Trump recently backed a federal film tax incentive after more than a year of behind-the-scenes advocacy from key groups, but that effort still faces quite a few political hurdles before it might become a reality.
At the state level, lawmakers scrambled last month to allow film and television studios a few key exemptions from a recently enacted statewide restriction on corporate tax credits. The amendment allows studios to recoup old tax credits faster, but it doesn’t exempt the companies from the restriction altogether like production advocacy groups wanted. Stakeholders argue that it undercuts last year’s $750 million expansion of the California Film & TV Tax Credit Program. Also, the post production community is pushing for its own tax incentive despite little funding in the state budget.
“There’s more more productions applying than the money is available. So I am seeing that we need to at least double or no cap. So $1.5 billion is more suitable for our region versus $750 [million],” he said, calling the bump “a good start.”
“So those are some of the problems that we’re having and we’re trying to solve with our state legislators as well,” he said.
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