Gee...you'd think I just met Moxie and thought she was the bee's knees, what with two links in as many minutes...err...hours. Well, she's got it going on. Actually, she was a candidate for a blog ad; well, until the reality of my current production job ending in three weeks sunk in and I realized that I should squirrel away every penny.

Productions. That brings us to the topic at hand. I was having a discussion with some pals just a few days ago about this very subject. I keep getting emails from union activists trying to pass this or that law to punish the evil Canadians and get our production jobs back. Tom Daschle addressed the issue as well at that Town Hall meeting we had at work a few weeks ago. Everybody's talking nice about doing nice things for us nice hardworking entertainment people, but nobody ever seems to be advancing any actual ideas. Just lots of fuzzy talk about Bring The Jobs Back Home. Keep our people working! Man the barricades!

I'm torn. I don't think we'd have as much work in production were it not for the overseas studios (in the case of animation, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and others). Keeping costs down is an incentive to green lighting more shows. For the fewer shows that do get produced, if costs were higher, the executives would figure out ways to trim the budgets even more, and almost all shows are already being produced by the skin of their teeth.

What would happen if by bringing back the work here the budgets were to rise say 20 or 30 percent? Yes, more animators would have work at that time, but I'm guessing there'd be fewer shows overall. Work in this industry is already unpredictable at best. Nobody gets permanent jobs, unless you're an executive, support staff, HR, legal, or something non-creative and non-technical like that. Would that be good for us? Good for me? I don't know. But I'm suspicious of the-sky-is-falling crowd who keep hectoring me with emails about this or that meeting and fund-raiser to bring the jobs back.

As for those pain in the ass film crews clogging up the streets, it's annoying, but at the end of the day, not such a big deal. A lot of stuff gets shot around here, especially in Highland Park. They've even got some semi-vacant buildings that I think are sort of dedicated to crews. I'm told that a fair amount of Pulp Fiction was shot just down the street, on and off Fig and Monte Vista. I haven't seen it in a long time so I don't remember. I do know that for a commercial neighborhood centered almost entirely around small, independent businesses, the income from film shoots can't be bad. All the taco slingers must be stoked!