Los Angeles privatized its film permit office in 1995 to cut red tape. What it built instead was a revenue machine for LAPD.
When the Baywatch reboot showed up at Venice Beach this spring, it came loaded with political symbolism, a $21 million state tax credit, and the personal support of Councilmember Traci Park, who walked Lot 731 on Instagram while the production was staged there. As we reported last week, the production’s difficulties were not simply the result of an obstructionist city bureaucracy. The California Coastal Commission’s permit placed strict, publicly noticed conditions on the shoot that the production team appears to have struggled to follow from day one, including operating at the beach lot before the coastal permit was even final.
But the Baywatch situation opens a window onto something larger than one production’s compliance record. The public debate it has sparked shines a spotlight on how film permitting works in LA, and the reality is stranger and more costly than most people realize. It involves a privatized nonprofit born from a corruption scandal, a police department with a dedicated film unit that must approve every permit and whose officers must be hired for every production, and a fee structure so burdensome that indie producers say it is cheaper to fly 100 Americans to Ireland than to shoot on a Fox studio backlot.
A film office born from scandal becomes a police revenue stream
Before 1995, the City and County of Los Angeles each ran their own bureaucratic and redundant film permit offices. Mayor Richard Riordan, who came into office in 1993 on a privatization platform, saw an opportunity to consolidate and outsource. The City Council approved a contract creating the Entertainment Industry Development Corporation (EIDC), a private nonprofit that would coordinate permits for both City and County in a single one-stop shop. Riordan’s assistant deputy mayor for entertainment industry affairs, Cody Cluff, became its first president.
The rationale made sense, at least on the surface. Productions dealing with two separate bureaucracies could now file one application to the EIDC. But the structure the city created had almost no meaningful oversight. The board included nearly 50 members, the entire City Council and County Board of Supervisors plus industry representatives, which meant that no one was actually watching. The EIDC collected public permit fees but operated with no written fiscal policies and minimal documentation requirements.
In 2002, a probe revealed $700,000 in questioned expenditures under Cluff, including $150,000 in personal charges at strip clubs, cigar bars, and sporting events. Cluff eventually pled no contest to embezzling public funds and was sentenced to three years’ probation. District Attorney Steve Cooley put it plainly at the time: “Accountability is indispensable to our system of government. City and county elected officials must be vigilant in overseeing any entity empowered by government to collect and spend public fees.”
As a result of this corruption scandal, the EIDC was restructured. All elected officials were removed from the board, financial controls were tightened, and in 2005, the organization rebranded as FilmLA. This was a quiet pivot designed to move past the scandal without examining too carefully what the scandal revealed about the model itself. The organization’s fundamental structure (a private nonprofit with a monopoly contract on public permitting) has remained intact ever since.
FilmLA today is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit with a 27-member board drawn from the entertainment industry, labor unions, and civic organizations. It describes itself as a one-stop permitting coordinator. It receives zero government funding, with its roughly $12 million annual budget coming from fees charged to the film industry.
And yet it is not, strictly speaking, an industry organization. It holds an exclusive contract with the City and County of Los Angeles and 19 other municipalities to coordinate the permitting process on their behalf. It collects fees, verifies insurance, notifies communities, and releases permits. But FilmLA does not have the actual power to approve permits. That power rests with the city, which has effectively delegated it to the LAPD.
FilmLA takes the fees, then LAPD takes the rest
Every permit application submitted through FilmLA’s MyFilmLA system must be reviewed and approved by the LAPD before it is released. The department runs a dedicated Film Unit out of its Office of Operations, which conducts citywide random audits of filming locations, enforces permit conditions, trains officers in film procedures, and signs off on all Motion Picture Television Work Permits. Without LAPD sign-off, nothing gets permitted.
That is where the money starts to add up in ways that are not fully visible in any public ledger. Productions in LA are required to hire LAPD officers, active duty working off-hours or retired officers organized through the Motion Picture Officers Association, for a wide range of activities. Traffic control, lane closures, street closures, simulated gunfire, vehicle pursuits, foot chases, brandishing weapons, driving shots, even bicycle lane closures all trigger mandatory officer requirements. The rates are set by the department. Retired officers receive $67 to $78 per hour, and active-duty officers working off-duty receive $74 per hour. There is an eight-hour daily minimum and overtime and double-time on top of that.
These fees do no flow through FilmLA, but are paid directly to the officers or through LAPD’s secondary employment system. And because they are dispersed through a decentralized off-duty work program rather than consolidated in a budget line, the total annual revenue LAPD generates from film production has never been publicly reported in any aggregated form. It is, perhaps, the most significant transparency gap in a system full of them.
What is known is that the officer requirement is mandatory, and that it applies identically to a $200 million studio production and a $50,000 independent film. A crew shooting a modest commercial in a residential neighborhood with a lane closure is on the hook for the same officer requirements as a major action sequence. The burden is disproportionate, by design or by indifference.
What it actually costs to shoot in Los Angeles
FilmLA’s base permit application fee is now $931 for up to five locations over seven consecutive days. This represents a 33 percent increase between 2020 and 2024, in the same years that production in Los Angeles collapsed. On top of the application fee, a production filming in the city should expect to pay community notification fees of $232 per location radius, a FilmLA monitor at $44.50 per hour, lane closure administrative fees of $78 each, a fire safety officer at $127 per hour with a four-hour minimum, an LAFD spot-check surcharge of $287, and street closure fees of $312 per location. And of course this is all on top of the officer hires detailed above.
The Milken Institute published a detailed comparison in June 2025 and found that a typical Los Angeles permit costs approximately $3,724. The same permit in New York costs around $1,000. In London, $540. The report’s authors recommended that local governments “reconsider FilmLA’s independent structure” and advocate for government subsidies to reduce production fees, the approach most competing cities already take.
Producer Dustin Harris described a three-day shoot in Griffith Park in 2019 for the independent film Malibu Horror Story. No major lighting, no stunts, a small generator. His permitting costs totaled $10,119 (nearly $3,400 per day) before a single frame was shot. The application fee alone has since risen by more than 35 percent.
How other cities do it
New York City’s approach looks almost incomprehensible from Los Angeles. The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has run film permitting as a government agency since 1966, the first dedicated municipal film office in the country. A permit costs $500 for a 14-day filming period. The NYPD’s Movie and TV Unit, about 22 officers, provides traffic control, monitors staged crime scenes, and oversees prop weapons and stunts. It does all of that free of charge, subsidized by the city budget. Free parking and free access to most exterior locations are included in that same permit.
Chicago runs its Film Office through the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, charges $250 per day per location, and makes police services available at cost. Officers are more expensive for complex shoots, but operating through a government structure with real public accountability. Atlanta’s Office of Film and Entertainment charges $100 in application fees plus $300 per month, operates under the Mayor’s Office, and combines that low-friction permitting with Georgia’s 30 percent base production tax credit. Atlanta police involvement is triggered only by specific activities like street and lane closures, not by a broad mandatory hire requirement across routine filming activities. The result is that Atlanta is now among the most active film production markets in the country.
Burbank, which sits just over the hill from many Los Angeles neighborhoods and operates entirely outside FilmLA’s jurisdiction, charges between $298 and $707 for a permit depending on duration. Student films cost $25. The process runs through the Burbank city government with no nonprofit intermediary and no LAPD approval requirement, because Burbank has its own police department and its own film office and its own chain of command.
The contrast between what it costs and how long it takes to shoot a block in Mar Vista versus shooting the same block in Burbank is not hypothetical. It is a calculation that line producers make every day, and increasingly they are choosing Burbank, or Valencia, or Albuquerque, or Belfast.
After years of declining production and worsening economics, Los Angeles is in the middle of its most serious public reckoning with the permitting system since the EIDC scandal. FilmLA’s own data shows total on-location shoot days in Greater Los Angeles fell to 19,694 in 2025, roughly half of the peak level. Television production collapsed 64.5 percent in four years. Employment in motion picture and sound recording in Los Angeles County fell by approximately 42,000 jobs between 2022 and 2024. The January 2025 wildfires accelerated a crisis that was already visible in those numbers.
Reform is underway, but the hardest parts were left out
The response came from multiple directions at once. The #StayInLA campaign, launched by IATSE Local 706 legislative organizer Cale Thomas and a coalition of industry workers, gathered more than 20,000 signatures and produced a detailed set of permitting reform proposals built from 50 hours of on-the-ground research. Their LAPD-specific recommendations include creating a standing process to revisit and remove outdated location restrictions. Under the current system, LAPD and FilmLA maintain internal filming bans on specific blocks sometimes years after the original reason for the ban has passed, with no automatic review mechanism.
In May 2025, Mayor Karen Bass signed Executive Directive 11, directing city departments to cut red tape around filming and make iconic locations more accessible. A January 2026 progress report on Bass’s directive announced a pilot low-impact permit program and some reduction in mandatory LAPD officer requirements for qualifying productions. The scale of the response remains inadequate.
The Board of Public Works voted in May 2025 4-0 to renew FilmLA’s contract through June 2030, over the objections of CA United, an industry lobbying group that had pushed for a six-month extension to allow time for reform before the contract was locked in. The five-year renewal effectively deferred the structural question until the next contract cycle.
Santa Monica did not wait. It ended its contract with FilmLA in 2025 and established its own Film Santa Monica office under the city’s tourism department, providing a real-world test case for what re-municipalization looks like in practice.
Last month, the Los Angeles City Council passed seven of nine permitting reform proposals introduced by Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, representing the most significant local permitting legislation in years. What did not pass, or was not taken up, includes reform of police and fire department procedures for film productions, and reduced permit fees at city-owned locations. The two items left on the table are precisely the ones that would most directly alter the financial relationship between LAPD and the production community. Also passed was a request for City Controller Kenneth Mejia to audit FilmLA.
The film permit problem is a police budget problem
The mandatory fees that flow through the film permitting system belong in a larger conversation about what LAPD costs this city and what it does with that money. City Controller Kenneth Mejia has repeatedly documented that LAPD consumes roughly 45 to 47 percent of the city’s discretionary funds, the money the city can actually choose how to spend. This leaves libraries, parks, street repair, housing, and social services to compete for what remains. This crisis of budget priorities is ongoing, with LA City Council recently voting to ratify a rogue LAPD hiring expansion, in a city carrying a $1 billion deficit. Over the past two fiscal years, LAPD exceeded its budget by more than $210 million and generated roughly $260 million in liability payouts, with the largest single share of those liability costs coming from the police department itself. When police overspend, City Hall finds the money, while other departments are told there is none.
The film permitting system is a window into how that dynamic operates at the granular level. The city is currently engaged in a genuine debate about which functions actually require armed law enforcement and which do not. In February, City Council voted to make the Unarmed Model of Crisis Response a permanent part of the emergency system, formalizing a program that has diverted more than 17,000 behavioral health calls away from police at roughly a third of the cost of an LAPD response. Notably, even the police union acknowledged in a 2023 proposal that a broad range of calls, including welfare checks, noise complaints, and non-criminal mental health incidents, do not require an armed response.
Mandatory officer hires on film sets belong in that same conversation. Deploying sworn law enforcement to stand by on a commercial shoot because a lane is being closed is the same category of misallocation, at sworn officer rates, with no public accounting of what flows to the department. The city claims it wants to keep film production in Los Angeles, but it has built a permitting system that functions as an undisclosed revenue stream for a department that already consumes nearly half of every discretionary dollar the city controls. Until that changes, every production that stays in this city is subsidizing a police budget that no one in City Hall has found the political will to control. And every production that leaves for Burbank or Belfast is making a rational economic decision to stop doing so.