By admin 
SIERRA MADRE, Calif. (KABC) — According to recent estimates, filming across the L.A. area is down 50% in less than a decade. One recent experience in Sierra Madre shows there is still work to be done to keep the film industry in Southern California.
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“No place is as expensive as Sierra Madre,” Travis Beck told Eyewitness News. “It’s a personal record for me.”
Beck is an actor, producer and filmmaker, but it’s his job as a location scout that got our attention. He’s the one who figures out where a particular shoot is going to take place, and he recently found the perfect house to film an independent movie in Sierra Madre.
“It just turned out to be, what they call, not film friendly,” Beck said in a recent post to Instagram.
The shoot would have been for 19 days all at a home on private property. Beck says they would have been required to pay for a permit, a police officer to be on site at all times, a firefighter to be on site at all times, a film monitor to be there as well, all totaling $140,000. But because the shoot was longer than 10 days, they also had to get permission from neighbors.
“They each wanted $12,000 for four weeks,” Beck told us. “That’s $48,000 that we needed to pay these four neighbors in order to get a film permit.”
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They wound up shooting in Encino instead.
“All in all $140,000 plus the $48,000 neighbor fee. Pay almost $200,000 for one movie. We ended up going to Encino, we pay $2,000 per permit. We got four permits for a month so 10, 15 grand I think is what we paid in Encino,” he said.
Nearly $200,000 wouldn’t be a problem on a big budget film, but this was an independent movie with a $2 million budget. Dedicating a tenth of the entire budget on a location simply wasn’t feasible.
We reached out to the city of Sierra Madre for comment. They declined an on-camera interview but sent a statement that disputed Beck’s dollar figures, but also said the city was working to streamline the permitting process to make it easier to film in Sierra Madre.
“The production discussed in the video also appears to have involved an unusually long period of filming at a single residential location. Sierra Madre is a small residential community, and our filming regulations are intended to balance our support for the film industry with the reasonable expectation of residents that extended commercial activity will not unduly impact their neighborhoods,” Bruckner’s statement continued. “Separately, for the past several months, the City has been evaluating its film permitting process and exploring alternatives that could make the process more efficient while continuing to protect residential neighborhoods. We expect to bring those recommendations to the City Council for discussion in the coming months.”
Beck says that’s good news if it winds up helping this struggling industry stay in the L.A. area. He also said he didn’t want to single out Sierra Madre saying other municipalities can be difficult as well. But he wanted to highlight three that have gotten it right: Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, which doesn’t require a permit when filming on private property, and Ventura County. He just hopes that other cities follow their lead because right now, it’s often not worth the trouble.
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“If I was a producer,” Beck said, “I would never film in L.A.. Ever.”