One of the things that makes Los Angeles, where I grew up and moved to Iowa from, different from all other "sprawl" cities like Phoenix, Houston, and so on is the ubiquitous entertainment industry. Half the people you meet in L.A. are aspiring actors or screenwriters. I wasn't at all tied into the entertainment industry, and yet I know a number of people who are listed on imdb. A guy who was in a movie starring Deborah Foreman worked at the test prep company I worked for, and a woman who worked in the word processing unit at the law firm I worked at has had a reasonably successful career guest starring in TV shows ranging from "CSI" to "The Practice" to "Boston Legal." I've had college classmates who were recognizable extras in the Val Kilmer movie "Real Genius," and I once walked past Eddie Murphy when scenes from "Beverly Hills Cop 2" were filmed at Caltech.
In fact, for L.A. lawyers, you can't help but work on "entertainment law" if you go to one of the major law firms. (Of course, entertainment law is mostly contract drafting and contract litigation, as far as I could tell from the associate's point of view.)
That's why this story is bad news for L.A.: the number of TV pilots being filmed there is decreasing as other cities compete with tax breaks and other benefits. Since at least the early 1990s, Vancouver, Canada, had emerged as a plausible alternative -- notably, "The X-Files" was produced in L.A. but the filming in seasons 1-5 took place in Canada. Like L.A., Vancouver has a (somewhat) temperate climate that allows year-round filming, and the architecture is sufficiently generic that it can pass for most North American cities.
For however much fun people make of L.A. about the purported shallowness of the entertainment industry (but hey, I don't see how San Franciscans are in a position to mock Angelenos when one look at the newspapers of the respective regions would suggest that the latter are much more sophisticated), it's a very real part of L.A.'s character.
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