The Baywatch reboot, which Councilmember Traci Park has made a centerpiece of her reelection campaign, is struggling to film in Venice. After only three days of beach shooting, the production was shut out of its primary location by restrictions from lifeguards and the Department of Beach and Harbors, and is now regrouping while the crew looks for alternative locations. The difficulties have prompted a wave of response from film industry workers describing a broader pattern of obstruction by city agencies, and have drawn a comment from someone identifying themselves as the production’s own Location Manager confirming that the process has been painful and that the crew is scrambling.
The situation is an awkward one for Park, who traveled to the California Coastal Commission earlier this year to support the permits that allowed the production to come to Venice in the first place. She framed it as a win for the neighborhood, touting union jobs, local business activity, and proof that Venice was back on the map. In a recent Instagram post, she walked through Parking Lot 731, which the permits designated as private crew parking for the production, while it was staged with trailers, trucks, costumes, and equipment. She looked around, said “underutilized?” and then delivered a hair-toss and the line “me thinks not.”
The comment was a pointed reference to one of the central arguments in a years-long fight over what should happen at Lot 731. The site is the planned location of the Venice Dell affordable housing project, a mixed-income development on publicly owned land that would provide hundreds of homes for low-income residents and formerly unhoused Angelenos. The project has secured unanimous Coastal Commission approval, assembled nearly $45 million in public funding, and entered into a binding development agreement with its nonprofit development team after close to a decade of environmental review, litigation, and design changes. Housing advocates and state officials have long argued that the lot sits underutilized as surface parking and should be put to use for desperately needed affordable housing. Park has been the project’s most consistent and forceful opponent since taking office, arguing that the lot is essential for coastal access and public parking, proposing alternatives that would effectively restart the approval and financing process from scratch, and pushing to reopen decisions that had already been settled. The city has spent more than a million dollars in public funds on litigation opposing the development, and state housing officials have issued formal warnings that the delays may constitute an effective denial of housing that complies with state law.
Against that backdrop, the decision to clear Lot 731 for private film production use through peak beach season sits uncomfortably alongside Park’s stated rationale for blocking housing there. The permits Park supported removed the lot from public use for months, and the production’s difficulties don’t change that calculus. The lot was taken out of public use regardless of what happened on the beach, and it will not deliver the lasting community benefit that Park invoked when she promoted the project. Supporters of Venice Dell have noted that the housing proposal would restore parking alongside hundreds of affordable homes, while the film production will add congestion in the surrounding blocks and leave behind no permanent community asset.
The details of what went wrong on set are still emerging. An anonymous firsthand account from a crew member, published this week by the Instagram account Crew Stories IG and shared widely in local film industry circles, describes a production squeezed from multiple directions. The show had originally been planning to shoot in Australia, and according to Deadline, Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade personally traveled to Sacramento to lobby for a tax credit to keep it in California. The state awarded the production a $21 million incentive, roughly 40 cents on the dollar, but the budget was never fully adjusted to reflect the realities of shooting in LA. This left the crew working under significant financial pressure even before location problems emerged. New restrictions from lifeguards and Beach and Harbors arrived just days before filming was set to begin at Venice Beach, prohibiting nighttime shooting, picture vehicles, and broad areas of the beach. After completing days two through four, the crew was told it was not welcome back. The production retains access to the headquarters set built on site near the lifeguard station, but the beach itself, the central location for a show called Baywatch, remains off limits.
Someone identifying themselves as the Location Manager for Baywatch responded in the comments, writing that there was “a lot of truth” in the account, that the process had been “painful,” and that the production was “scrambling.” They declined to correct the record publicly, describing the relevant details as privileged, and noted that the budget decisions described in the account had been made “at the studio level prior to my involvement.” The comment drew 628 likes.
The timing of the breakdown drew some sympathy from locals. One Venice resident noted that beach crowds over the past four weeks had been at July levels due to the ongoing heat wave, and that LAPD, Beach and Harbors, and lifeguard staffing are typically minimal this time of year. “Between the unexpected daily population increase to the area and the extra need to babysit a large scale production, I can understand where the choices were made,” they wrote. “I’m not saying it’s right, just understandable.”
Others in the comments were less charitable toward the city’s permitting infrastructure. A writer, director, and executive producer who said he had raised $3.3 million for independent films described persistent resistance from city agencies despite recently passed film-friendly measures, saying that every location outside LA had welcomed his productions with open arms. A filmmaker who identified themselves as a location professional said they had eventually moved productions to other states offering large tax incentives, no permitting fees, and minimal restrictions. Someone who attended a Cultural Heritage Commission hearing on the production raised questions about whether Coastal Development Permit conditions had been violated on the beach lot.
Park’s proposed alternative for Lot 731, a mobility hub she has offered as a substitute for the Venice Dell project, remains entirely conceptual. A February report from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation outlined a process that would begin with a feasibility study, proceed through Coastal Commission permitting, and extend through design, procurement, and construction on a timeline stretching toward 2028, with no secured funding and no defined design. The report functions less as a competing infrastructure proposal than as a description of how long it would take to begin imagining one.
At the WRAC candidate forum in March, Park cited Baywatch as her answer to a question about preserving Venice’s cultural identity. Her opponent Faizah Malik said plainly that Park’s alternative plans for Lot 731 were not feasible and had seen no forward movement. The production’s current status does not make that assessment easier to dispute.