Hollywood Work Dried Up. So They're Taking Survival Jobs.

THE VIBE AT FUEGOS LA is sexy Victorian nightclub in Miami, or shabby chic cocaine den inhabited by Dracula as played by Ricky Martin. A dozen drip-covered candles sit atop a worn antique piano, its keys spattered with hardened streams of wax. Pink neon lights hang overhead as reggaetón bangers blast. A rusted old pickup truck parked in front also serves as a grill. There’s not an inch of this extremely vibey South L.A. Argentinian restaurant, from the black bathroom toilets to the station for manifestations, that’s gone untouched by its owners, two of LA’s most sought-after production designers. 

Well, at least that’s what Federico Laboureau and Maximilian Pizzi, the owners of Fuegos LA, used to be. The two once had prolific careers designing sets for the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney.

“We were literally living our American dream,” Laboureau said recently as he served savory handmade empanadas. “We came here to the United States 12 years ago. We started working doing shows and movies. We earned a lot of money. We bought our house. We started remodeling our house. We did the pool. Whatever we were having in our mind, we did it. And then everything started slowing down with the strike.” 

How slow? In a matter of two-and-a-half years, Laboureau said, the couple went from booking about five projects a year paying between $35,000 and $45,000 a week, to booking just $10,000 last year. The Argentinean-born Laboureau and Pizzi used to host lavish, gorgeously designed dinner parties at home. Their annual Christmas Eve parties were spectacular six-course extravaganzas of fine foods and even finer wines all generously provided by the couple. Last year's Christmas Eve party was a potluck.

Even when landing high-profile gigs — Laboureau recently created Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime casita — their debt mounted, bills continued to arrive, and job offers became scarce and had smaller budgets. To get some income rolling in, the couple started hand-making empanadas at home using recipes passed from their moms and grandmothers, and selling them. Eventually, Laboureau and Pizzi took a chunk of their savings and opened Fuegos LA, despite two kind of major red flags: Restaurants are a high-risk gamble even in good economic times and, as Laboureau put it, “We have no fucking idea how to run a restaurant.”

But they have to survive, and drawing from their cultural roots is how they’re doing it. As Laboureau explained, he and his husband were raised to “jump into every pool without knowing if it’s gonna be water.” “We are from countries that are always in crisis,” he explained. “We don’t have any fear to reinvent ourselves.”

Across the entertainment industry, countless creatives are in the same boat, taking jobs bartending, dog walking, or playing fake patients at hospitals, all the while confronting an existential crisis. The landscape is bleak and getting bleaker. Threads from out-of-work entertainment workers asking for advice on jobs pop up on Reddit and other message boards regularly, their tenor growing more defeated as time wears on. Studio executives — the ones who still have jobs, anyway — may be raking in multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses as many studios turn massive profits, but it can feel like everyone else is holding on for dear life.

The hope is that the job engine of Hollywood in Los Angeles is facing a slump — and not an irreversible crash.

The punches have come one after another in recent years. There was the COVID pandemic, which led to nearly a million jobs lost; the 2023 double strike of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA; and the 2025 wildfires. Through that also came the proliferation of AI, production moving out of state to take advantage of cost-saving subsidies offered elsewhere, and major studio mergers threatening to create a monopoly that will undoubtedly make matters worse. The result has been fewer TV shows and films being made, and a stream of layoffs across the industry. It has all depressingly accounted for 41,000 industry jobs lost in just two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last year, FilmLA, the film office for the City and County of Los Angeles, reported a 13.2% decline in production between July and September of 2025 from the previous year. The Writers Guild of America reported a 40% decrease in jobs in the 2023-2024 television season. International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that oversees stagehands, craftspeople, and artisans in film and television production, saw 18,000 jobs disappear from 2022 to 2024. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA went back into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last month, with a key goal of protecting members from losing work to AI. 

Add it all up and what has been a jobs drought the last couple years now stands to become a career-ending wasteland, leaving the creative workforce scrambling to figure out how the hell they’re going to get by. The situation has only worsened because income people used to get from residual checks is also drying up.  These payouts, of course, used to come in green envelopes to actors, directors and writers whenever a show or film they worked on replayed, whether on Comedy Central or a seatback screen on a Delta flight. 

But streaming changed how residuals are paid, often reducing payments drastically. The issue was a large point of contention during the 2023 strike, and while some improvements were successfully negotiated, residual payouts are still well below what they used to be. 

Exacerbating the issue is the purging of titles from streamer libraries, an increasingly common practice by studios to cut costs. Warner Brothers head David Zaslav oversaw the deletion of dozens of titles from HBO Max following its merger with Discovery back in 2022. A year later, Disney CEO Bob Iger followed suit, cutting the cord on more than 100 Disney and Hulu shows. Suddenly, those green envelopes stopped coming for many who’d written a few episodes of a multicam or had a supporting role in a short-lived drama.

Seems like the best way to be employed in Hollywood right now is to be the son of a billionaire who’ll buy you a studio. But among those annoyingly born to non-billionaires, many have been forced to leave Los Angeles, moving back to their hometowns downtrodden by busted hopes. And for those who’ve remained in L.A. and are still waiting for the industry to revive, survival has led them to all sorts of jobs to get by: real estate, teaching, or whatever else seems like it could be a safe port in the flagging American job market. Every dollar made in these survival jobs is an investment in hanging onto their Hollywood dreams, even though they feel further away than ever.

Will Greenberg, actor

Will Greenberg has been an actor for 24 years. He’s done more than 80 episodes of television, 40 of them as a lead on a show. An incredible 12-year run, as he put it, where he didn’t have to do anything else. He starred in the TBS sitcom Wrecked, which lasted three seasons, and NBC’s short-lived Perfect Harmony. 

But cuts during Covid caused the cancellation of Perfect Harmony, and work has been in short supply since the strikes. Greenberg’s most recent gigs were a two-episode arc on the CBS sitcom Ghosts that he shot in January. Meanwhile, his income got hit a second time, after residual checks from his work on Wrecked all but disappeared after the clear-out of the HBO Max library.

“You can't watch it anywhere,” he told me. “It makes you feel like you didn't exist. It's playing in Europe or something. I got a pathetic $5 the other day.”

Five dollar checks dropping in the mailbox every once in a while isn’t enough to support the two kids Greenberg is raising alongside his wife, a working TV writer. “It took my ego a real minute to be like, ‘you just need to do something else,’” said Greenberg. “And it's scary, and it's hard, especially at 45 when you thought you had put in the time and effort and did make it.”

Like Laboureau, Greenberg turned to his upbringing for an income idea: Pool Skool, a swim school for kids and parents that he runs out of his backyard in Silver Lake. Because there aren’t a lot of private swim coaches near him, and slots in swim classes can fill up quickly, Greenberg saw an opportunity to make money doing something he loves (he grew up swimming back home in Houston and took classes during his years at USC) that can also help kids and parents. He launched the business in February of this year and welcomed his first students in March. 

“I'm excited because I can make some money, but, more importantly, I feel like I'm providing something that is really necessary for kids,” Greenberg said. 

Greenberg charges $350 for eight classes or $43 for a single class. He’s teaching at least two classes an hour. In a recent week, he taught 14 classes that netted him almost $700, which he said gave him some hope for stabilizing his financial situation. “It’s got promise! I’m not buying a new house, but maybe I don’t have to leave mine,” he jokes.

But acting still has a strong pull. “I know the possibility is one job away. I'm not going to give up,” Greenberg said.

Tamara Yajia, writer

Tamara Yajia hasn’t worked a WGA job since 2024, when she was hired to develop an adaptation of a Spanish television series. She wrote a pilot, getting paid a script fee of $150,000. “Since then,” the 42-year-old writer said, “there’s been absolutely nothing.” Taking steps back in her career in her 40s has been “humbling and sad.” When she hears that someone she knows did get staffed, she’s “genuinely happy for them,” until a voice in the back of her head says when will I get one. “It sucks.”

Yajia has been relying heavily on savings she put aside in busier years. She got her first job in Hollywood at the beginning of the pandemic, then staffed steadily in writers’ rooms on comedies like Hulu’s This Fool and Apple TV’s Acapulco.

It was a time when the industry was investing in stories from diverse communities. As a Latina writer, she found a stream of opportunities that made the jump into the industry feel like a gold rush. “That, I have definitely seen disappear.” 

Back in 2021, the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report found some encouraging gains for Latinx representation onscreen and behind the camera. The numbers were still pretty bad; Latinx performers were cast in 5.7% of all film roles in 2020. However, it was an increase from the 4.6% of the prior year, and it seemed like the beginning of an upward trajectory. Jump to UCLA’s 2025 Hollywood Diversity Report, which found that of the 104 top-performing English language movies released in 2024, 1% had a Latino lead and about 2% had Latino writers.

With Hollywood seemingly less interested in making shows and films featuring Latinos and people from other underrepresented communities, Yajia said she has found it harder to find work. She said she fears that some showrunners don’t believe people from diverse backgrounds can also write about things unrelated to their own identity, compounding the shortage of jobs overall with fewer projects being made. 

In the last year, Yajia took on a copywriting gig that paid her $5,000 and wrote a memoir – Cry for Me, Argentina: My Life as a Failed Child Star, about growing up as a child performer in Buenos Aires.

“That's the thing with our jobs,” she explained. “You see big amounts, and you hear 150K and you're like, ‘Oh, shut up. You're doing so well.’ But that's not what we're actually getting paid. And there’s expenses we don’t always expect.” In her case, she spent $75,000 on fertility treatments.

Yajia has had to go back to the job she did before entering Hollywood: she’s working as a Spanish interpreter at clinics and doctors’ offices every Monday. “When I was at the peak of my writing career, I almost stopped paying to renew my translator certification,” she said. “I thought I would never go back to this job.“

“I was cocky at the beginning,” she added. “I was seeing the money accumulate. This was going to be the money that was going to help me buy my first home. Now it’s just going towards survival. I'm just watching my savings account dwindle every month.”

The translating job pays $30 an hour and gives her a reason to leave her house, which helps with her mental health, but the work isn’t consistent. That amount helps cover part of her rent or other household expenses, but it’s certainly not enough to live on. She recently started outlining a second book, is developing a TV series (this time unpaid) in the hopes of selling it, and being submitted to staff in a writer’s room. 

“I can't allow myself to give up quite yet. Maybe if I’m halfway through depleting my savings,” said Yajia. “Maybe I'm being naive or too hopeful.”

Joelle Garfinkle, writer

Joelle Garfinkle, a writer and single mom, said her last job in a writers’ room in a Guild-covered show was in 2023.

“We just happen to be in one of the biggest valleys that I personally have seen during my career,” said Garfinkle, who got her start in 2005 as an intern on The CW’s Supernatural. In the years since, she worked several support staff jobs in different writer’s rooms, wrote or co-wrote freelance scripts for various shows, developed a pilot that ended up dying, landed then lost staff jobs because of cuts or cancellations, and worked for a foreign vertical streaming service. 

“You don't go into [this business] unless you have some sort of passion or some sort of drive, so it feels so hard when you're not able to do the thing that gives you that passion, that gives you that drive,” she told me. “The whole thing with Hollywood is it does allow you to dream bigger. That's why it's even more disappointing.”

Garfinkle has always made the best during tough times, and looked out for others scraping by. During the strike, Garfinkle launched the Green Envelope Grocery Aid, a mutual aid fund to help striking WGA and SAG-AFTRA workers in need of financial assistance. 

At the moment, she cobbles together a few part-time jobs, including private and afterschool tutoring and assisting a doctor with everything from accounts payable work to managing an Airbnb property. All this, plus some residuals, brought in about $60,000 last year. In 2022, when she was working more steadily in TV, she made $160,000. Her savings has helped Garfinkle stay afloat, but those savings aren’t being replenished – and the extra hours she’s putting in are taking a toll.

“I feel like I'm working all the time and on a hamster wheel,” she said. “Having the time to write doesn't exist anymore. I really have to carve that time out. And it feels so challenging because nobody's buying anything anyway. I feel, personally, very discouraged.”

Like countless others, Garfinkle has considered a full pivot to teaching or real estate, asking herself what she would want to do if Hollywood didn’t exist. It’s something she thinks about a lot. Ultimately, she keeps going after her Hollywood dreams, for herself, but especially for her son. 

“I try to find the joy in it, or remind myself it's a survival job,” she said. “You just have to keep going back to that hamster wheel analogy. You just kind of keep moving, even if you don't feel like you are making forward movement.”

Sarah Lind, actor

Sarah Lind also has seen the highs and lows of the industry in her decades in the business. The Canadian actor, who is 43, has been working since she was 10, getting her first big gig at 13 on a Canadian kids series called Incredible Story Studio. She spent years taking guest roles, did five seasons of the CBC teen soap Edgemont and two seasons of the Steven Seagal series True Justice.

At 29, she moved to Los Angeles and worked steadily in film in both the U.S. and Canada. Among her credits are the Nicolas Cage thriller The Humanity Bureau, three TV movies for the Hallmark series Martha’s Vineyard Mysteries and the indie horror flick A Wounded Fawn. Most recently she had a small supporting part in the Jennifer Lawrence-Robert Pattinson drama Die My Love.

Her paychecks have run the gamut, from $14,000 for her work in Die My Love to $120,000 for the holiday comedy The Great Christmas Switch. Sometimes it’s just a couple thousand for a small budget indie. “I was by no means killing it or rich, but it was a living,” said Lind. “That's really hard to do now.”

After COVID, the acting jobs dwindled. She went from being a working actress to having to face a harsh reality. Three years ago, a financial planner told her it was time to find a regular job. “He was like, ‘you don't have an option. Look at the numbers. You only have enough money for this many months before you have nothing,” she recalled.

Residual checks used to offer a nice bit of extra cash, but now often come in at under $100. “I think last year I got a few thousand in total in residual checks from a lifetime of work.”

In 2023, Lind took a survival job at Jenette Bras, an L.A.-based intimate apparel shop specializing in bras personally fitted for each customer.

For Lind, the job offers meaning, allowing her to help people who have survived breast cancer, are getting their first bra after top surgery, or shopping after a divorce. Her job at Jenette brings in about $42,000 a year, and she lives on a budget of $3,500 a month. “I should be able to rent a little apartment and make my pot of beans,” said Lind. “I'm not living a fancy life. It’s insane how hard it is to get by.”

She recently started a side hustle hand-lettering T-shirts with random funny slogans she came up with, like “horny to die,” “get tits, idiot!,” and “a fish is all throat.” It started as a creative project she didn’t expect to make any money off of, but when she shared the idea with friends she suddenly got 50 orders for shirts, bringing in $1,500. “I’m making a surprising amount of money putting dumb stuff on T-shirts.”  It’s not quit-your-job money, but it lets her be creative and, as she jokes, keeps her off FeetFinder.

“I don't know how to keep living here,” she said. “I love it here in Los Angeles. I don't want to leave. My whole life is here. But at some point you have to look more closely at what makes the most sense.”

Letty Palma, aspiring writer and producer

If it’s tough out there for Hollywood workers with years, even decades, of experience, what’s the hope for someone trying to get their foot in the door? That’s where 27-year-old Letty Palma finds herself. She got her first job in the industry in 2020 working as a PA on the Albuquerque set of Netflix’s horror movie Intrusion. She eventually moved out of Albuquerque for LA, getting her first set gig in 2022 on a commercial for Meta. Since then she’s been moving between industry jobs and survival gigs to get by.

In 2024, she worked at Cold Stone Creamery, but left after two weeks to take a secretary job in the production office on Apple TV’s Pluribus, for which she made $1,100 a week for nine months. When the Pluribus job ended in 2025, she got hired at a call center that she feared might be running a scam on vulnerable people. That last job was the worst thing she ever had to do, she said. When she left the call center, she got hired to manage a Club Pilates, a job that quickly got overwhelming since she had never managed any business before. From late 2025 into this year, she landed a job as a writers’ PA in a development room, where she worked 60 hours a week at $17 an hour. That job ended in early March. Since then, she’s been making chainmail for her friend’s small jewelry and decorative armor line, The Wise Wyvern. She has an interview for a part-time social media assistant job next month that she’s hoping works out, otherwise “once March’s bills all get paid, if I don’t start making more money, April will be really tough.”

“I've only been making enough to stay [in L.A.] but not to have any financial roots,” Palma said. “I constantly feel like I might have to move back to New Mexico, just because it's a little bit cheaper there. But even then, if I move back there, I don't really know what I would do for money.”

When she can, Palma works on indie projects with friends, writing and producing short films, while still hoping to one day staff a TV writers’ room. For Palma, the saving grace is knowing she’s not alone in her struggle. Pretty much everyone she knows is feeling the squeeze, or even heartbreak. A future that at one time felt possible now seems to be receding. 

“There are some people who are going to make it through, and I hope they're the kind of people that bring others with them,” she said. “And if I'm either of those parties, I'll feel successful, even if it doesn't mean I ever make a lot of money.”