California will present its plan for the resumption of television and cinema filming next week, but Los Angeles, the main home of Covid-19 in this state, will have to wait, the governor announced on Wednesday. The studios have been deserted since California took containment measures to stem the spread of the pandemic in mid-March.
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The majority of the 58 counties in the state "will have the capacity" to organize the resumption of filming by implementing certain measures which will be detailed on Monday, said Governor Gavin Newsom. But the county of Los Angeles, where Hollywood is located and which has nearly 900,000 jobs in the entertainment industry, is too affected by the Covid-19 to consider such a recovery immediately.
I don't want to gild you the pill (...) We have an increase in the number of cases in the LA region and because of that we are going to be late.
The director of cabinet to the governor of California."Even today, the number of deaths recorded affects this county disproportionately," noted Governor Newsom, estimating that he would probably be several weeks behind the other areas. In total, nearly 86,000 Covid-19 cases and 3,485 deaths have been reported across California. Los Angeles County alone has nearly 40,000 cases and more than half of the deaths (1926).
"I don't want to give you the pill (...) We have an increase in the number of cases in the LA region and because of that we're going to be late," warned the governor's chief of staff, Ann O 'Leary, in a videoconference meeting with officials from the entertainment industry.
Netflix machine revives
The person in charge of the contents of Netflix, who participated in this meeting, for his part estimated that "taking liberties with security" would have "terrible long-term effects" . Sarandos ruled that productions requiring only light crews, like documentaries, could resume more quickly, but that filming with crowd shots would require "a lot of security and significant logistics" .
Netflix has already relaunched productions in some countries, such as Iceland, Sweden and South Korea. According to the director Ava DuVernay ( Selma ), the film crews should be divided into “cells” of reduced size whose presence on the sets would be alternated to reduce the risks of contagion. As for the star of This Is Us , John Huertas, he stressed that the television series, filmed in Los Angeles, may not resume before January in the event that a "second wave" epidemic occurs this summer.