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Hollywood productions went completely dark within the span of about two days when the coronavirus pandemic hit North America in March. Now, nearly two weeks after being given the go-ahead to resume shooting under new quarantine protocols, most movies and TV shows remain stalled and nearly paralyzed, struggling to figure out how and when to safely return to work.
“All production folks are going 100 miles an hour now to figure out what it means and how we’re going to do it,” one senior network executive said. “Nothing is going to shoot next week. Right now it’s just: How are we going to do it? I don’t think we’ll know that for weeks.” California, the home base of many networks and studios, began granting productions the greenlight to resume this month—but this executive had a much longer timetable in mind for the return. “Fact that we can is great, but…nobody has a definitive date. Maybe July? Maybe August?”
On June 1, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers released its 22-page “white paper” with advice from epidemiologists and other health experts about how to protect casts and crews from the spread of the potentially lethal virus. Then on June 12, Hollywood unions—including the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, the Teamsters, and IATSE—published a 36-page document called “The Safe Way Forward” that further chronicled ways to sequester workers, clean sets, protect performers who must interact closely with others, and still get the job done.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, COO and general counsel for SAG-AFTRA, acknowledged that only some projects are already moving forward. “We have a feature film, an independent feature film, that’s shooting in California right now. We have commercials that are shooting all over the country,” he said.
“We’ve seen production sort of gradually resume, and it’s not going to all happen at once,” Crabtree-Ireland continued. “So it’s a gradual reopening. Some smaller, quicker, more nimble productions will restart quickly. Others may take a little bit longer to get back in.”
Many on the front lines of productions approve of these guidelines—while also finding them difficult to implement for a variety of reasons.
Unanswered Fears
“For the longest time I had 90% questions and 10% answers,” one TV director and executive producer told Vanity Fair. “Every guideline that came out felt a little cursory and thin to me. I felt like something was missing. They weren’t really saying what productions have to do. It all seemed a little spare and wishful thinking. Then I read
‘The Safe Way Forward’ and thought, Okay, that’s what I’ve been expecting for three months. That’s the document we’ve been waiting for. And what it told me is, it’s going to be really, really hard for anyone to shoot. That’s the thought that went through my head: I don’t think anyone understands just how hard it is to restart.”
The key problem? Work on any given shoot is close, fast, and often done with an eye on saving money. Implementing these guidelines will spread out the workers, slow down the process, and balloon the budget, according to several executives, directors, and producers who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity.
The aforementioned director-producer outlined just some of the problems that productions will have to answer individually. “Are we rewriting script to avoid extras? Rewriting to avoid locations? Or are we not? No one has come up with answers on that. We need to have a COVID officer who is hiring all the [new testing, cleaning, and safety] personnel that ‘The Safe Way Forward’ lays out. They lay out a whole new department—really two departments: health [and] safety management and a beefed-up security department. We’re not just hiring those people, but training them.”