Published on : 30/12/2020 – 21:08Modified : 30/12/2020 – 21:06
–
Los Angeles (AFP)
Hollywood has put most of its filming on hold again, at least until mid-January, the actors’ union said, as Covid-19 cases continue to break records in Los Angeles, which has become one of the main foci of the pandemic in the United States.
“Most productions will remain on hiatus until the second or third week of January, if not later,” the SAG-AFTRA union said in a statement released to its members Tuesday evening.
Days earlier, Los Angeles County health officials urged filmmakers to “consider taking a break from work for a few weeks during this catastrophic increase in Covid cases.”
Los Angeles, the most populous county in the United States with some ten million inhabitants, has become one of the main foci of the coronavirus pandemic in the country and is breaking records for almost daily contaminations, with hospitals overwhelmed by the new cases.
To date, some 750,000 cases have been officially identified in the county, where the disease has killed nearly 10,000.
Restrictive measures put in place in early December in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus were extended indefinitely across southern California on Tuesday, where emergency services are overwhelmed and ambulances sometimes have to run for hours to find a bed to the patient they are carrying.
The SAG-AFTRA union has stepped up initiatives to try to relaunch filming in Hollywood since their total shutdown last March, in particular through an agreement signed in September with the main studios on the health measures to be implemented to protect actors, including rigorous testing.
Despite these precautions, productions struggled to take off again in Los Angeles. In October, their activity rate did not even reach 50% of the usual level during this period, and the surge in contamination has reduced it further in recent weeks.
According to Film LA, the entity responsible for issuing permits for filming in Los Angeles, applications were recently at their lowest level since the resumption of operations in Hollywood this summer.
Other than a few dozen independent films, very few feature films were shot this year in the Los Angeles area, with most of the activity focusing on commercials and music videos.
Conversely, big budget films have relaunched their filming outside the United States, such as Tom Cruise and his new opus “Mission Impossible” in the United Kingdom and Italy, or the television series “Supergirl” and ” Batwoman “in Canada.
One of the elements slowing down the resumption of films in California is the refusal of insurers to take charge of filming incidents linked to the coronavirus.
© 2020 AFP
–
