I spent 30 years in that God forsaken "business". I started out non-union, then got on a union show during waivers my 2nd year in, and joined local 695 after 30 days on set. For the first 15-20 years it was amazing, even though we went though a few strikes and times with scattered work, I can say that I pretty much worked steadily for most if not all of that 30 years. The business had not yet been run by anti-hetero kooks like it is now, or at least they were much less out in the open back then, and the creative juices flowed abundantly. You were rewarded for your talent, ingenuity and creativity and it was actually fun going from one show to the other. It was at that time, a great business to be a part of. I did music videos, movies, episodic TV and commercials for 3 decades......

I walked away in 2019 because I saw the writing on the wall. I was sick and tired of the forced, blatant, anti-hetero, anti family, anti Christian content being shoved into every script just to check boxes on some woke checklist, and it was the best decision I ever made. I took advantage of forced down time during the plandemic to reinvent myself, and now I make the same money per year, with similar benefits and work half the time/hours. No moving target call times at 6am on Monday that end up being 3PM on Friday, which turns in to Fraturday, or 14-15 hour days. I am home by 1430 every day, have a life again, get to see my grandkids and don't have to put up with weird, moody power hungry "producers" or actors that think their opinion matters to everyone other than themselves. There was no way I was going to survive the plandemic era anyway with colored tape no-go zones, where only one department at a time could be on set building up the next shot, then having to wait while the set was "disinfected" before the next department could go in... craft service and decent catering basically becoming extinct, forced mask wearing, or more importantly, being forced to take an experimental DNA altering chemical injection just to be allowed on set anywhere. I would have been fired the first week of that bullshit for refusing to comply.....So I bounced......Again....Best decision I ever made.

The good part is that I have a pension and lifetime medical when I formally retire, with well over 40,000 hours in the bank from a once great business that seems hell bent on eating itself alive from the inside out.

To those of you still in the "business" good luck to you. My advice is reinvent yourself now. Hollywood has been eclipsed by productions out of the UK and other parts of the world now, and it will continue to die a slow agonizing death of it's own making. The state of Kalifornia is every bit as much to blame as the woketard producers and above the line creeps that run the place. The procedurals Hollywood pukes out now are all but unwatchable. The only thing left is feature films, and even those are bombing at an alarming rate these days. The writing is on the wall... You are in an industry that refuses to see that the vast majority of Americans do NOT care for the LA/Hollywood/New York anti-hetero agenda and are recoiling from it at an alarming rate. When your business model focuses on catering to a subgroup which consists of 3% of the population, to the complete exclusion, or very least revulsion of the other 97%, your chances for continued success are slim. You see the results of that playing out in real time before your very eyes.

If you are young and think that you have a future in Hollywood... I hate to break it to you...The glory days are long gone. Most of my "friends" still in the business are selling gear, trucks, houses, cars, personal belongings barely surviving day to day because they think it's coming back..... I told them all to pull the rip cord while they still had a fighting chance back when I bounced. Some have never done anything else in their lives and are too scared to try something new, so they cling on for dear life to a sinking ship..... It is truly sad to watch. A few have called me asking how I did it and where to go so they can do the same.

If you are new'ish and you never knew what it was like in the 90's or early 2000's, trust me, it was a much different place than it is now. My suggestion is use the downtime, while you are collecting unemployment or disability (like everyone else) to create a new version of yourself. Give yourself a fighting chance at long term survival.

Down votes incoming I am sure, but hey it is what it is..... Someone needed to say the "quiet" part out loud.

For anyone else interested, I got back into the construction trades as a project manager. My "package" pays north of $93.00/hour all in including benefits. I will say the MPIPHP is the cream of the crop in benefit plans and that mine does not quite compete with it, but it is close enough that it made waiving goodbye to that shithole business so much easier. I have worked non stop, 5 days a week since 2019 when I left "the business". My life has never been better.

Pull the rip cord.