Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman, who unseated Karen Bass this week, has promised to build a full film office inside City Hall to win back Hollywood work. She takes office Dec. 14, as filming on city streets continues to shrink.
FilmLA's latest quarterly report on location shooting found that shoot days on Los Angeles streets fell another 4.8% from a year earlier in the third quarter and sat 29% below the five-year average. The slide has continued in 2026 even after California sharply expanded its production incentive, which has lured major Disney and DreamWorks animation projects back to the city and helped fill soundstages.
Raman's film office would build on the film liaison post Bass created when she appointed Board of Public Works President Steve Kang, who does the job as a volunteer. Raman argued that a full office could coordinate better with Los Angeles County and other agencies when productions shoot in places with overlapping jurisdictions.
Paying for it is the first hurdle. Raman must fit the office into her first proposal for the city's budget of more than $14 billion, due in April, while the city recovers from a fiscal emergency last year that led to layoffs after the 2025 wildfires.
She will also need a City Council that largely opposed her. Raman won without a single endorsement from her council colleagues, 13 of whom backed Bass, and the council approves the budget and confirms mayoral appointees.
Disagreement is inevitable, but dysfunction is a choice, and we do not have the luxury right now of dysfunction.
Katy Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles councilmember
The council's committee on production flight is chaired by Adrin Nazarian and includes Traci Park and Imelda Padilla, both of whom clashed with Raman over housing and homelessness. Nazarian, though, named keeping film and TV production in Los Angeles among the priorities he shares with the mayor-elect.
Much of the groundwork is already underway. The council recently approved free permits for microshoots and $1 rental fees for city-owned lots used for base camps and crew parking, and it is weighing cuts to fire and safety inspection fees. FilmLA has extended through April a pilot offering faster, cheaper permits to small-crew productions, saving qualifying independent shoots more than $1,000 on average.
Raman is expected to press Sacramento to widen the state incentive to capitalize on a federal film tax credit likely to clear Congress by year's end. Outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked Governor-elect Xavier Becerra and next year's legislature to raise the program's cap from $750 million to $1 billion.
Hollywood helped elect her. Her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a veteran writer-producer, and her donors included Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Adam Scott and Colin Jost.
On industry policy, the sharpest split between the two candidates came over Paramount Skydance's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Bass urged California Attorney General Rob Bonta to settle his lawsuit blocking the merger, while Raman wanted it to go to trial; Bonta ultimately sided with Bass.
